For Fuel Cells and Hydrogen, technological advances that are yet to be realised, will play a crucial role in determining the success of these technologies in the marketplace. It is difficult to generalise in a way that covers every application, but Roads2HyCom has tended to find that the commonly held expert perceptions of technology challenges still hold true regarding reducing costs, improving durability, enhancing energy storage and developing the infrastructure.

These challenges need to be constantly re-appraised in terms of likely advances in Competitive Benchmarks. It is never safe to assume that incumbent technologies will stagnate; indeed the treat of a revolutionary new technology can have the opposite effect – for example, developments from the incumbent technology like Electric or plug-in Hybrid vehicles, and power generation devices that use sophisticated “bottoming cycles” to recover extra energy from their exhaust. Research strategy therefore needs to deliver outputs that can remain one step ahead of the competition.

Roads2HyCom has synthesised a set of strategic research recommendations, drawing on the themes of the HFP Implementation Plan, and based on data and analysis collected in the various parts of the project. The synthesis uses mostly information from WP1 (State of the Art, technology landscape, learning from demonstrations) and WP4 (technology pathways, gaps, opportunities and synergies), but also considers the infrastructural and socio-economic issues (WP2 and WP3) that relate to technological need.

Key steps in the process were:

• Creation of a list of Topic Areas, based on the project’s generic Technology Tree and project expert input
• Population of that list of Topic Areas with short topic summaries, collations of time-linked Milestones from existing worldwide strategy papers, collations of published numerical Technical targets from similar sources, and suggested Recommendations (in terms of development of those Milestones and Targets) developed by the Roads2HyCom team
• Organisation of a peer review workshop of project members and invited external experts, to develop this document
• Development of a two dimensional prioritisation process (technical need, societal importance), based on the recommendations and the outputs of the Gaps, Opportunities and Synergies analysis (WP4)
• Validation and refinement of this Prioritisation at a second workshop and by peer review within the project

	Reports:
			Roads2HyCom R2H6017PU Review of Hydrogen Community R&D Agendas.pdf - 1.2MB
			Roads2HyCom R2H6031PU – Review of Fuel Cell Vehicle Demonstration Activities.pdf - 1.2MB
			Roads2HyCom R2H6033PU – Review of Stationary Fuel Cell Demonstration Activities.pdf - 0.6MB
			Roads2HyCom R2H6036PU - Socio-Economic Conditions for FC&H2 Development.pdf - 0.4MB
			Roads2HyCom R2H6034PU - R&D Topics & Milestones for FC&H2 Technologies.pdf - 0.2MB
			Roads2HyCom R2H6035PU - Recommendations for FC&H2 Research Agenda.pdf - 0.9MB