Latvia's Hydrogen Ecosystem: Key Barriers and Practical Steps Forward After the Green Hydra Seminar
On 23 April 2026, Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders convened at the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry for a structured working seminar under the Green Hydra Interreg Europe project — this time with a direct mandate: translate Chapter 3 of the national Sustainable Energy Technology Development Plan until 2035 into practical next steps for green hydrogen production and ecosystem development. Building on the conclusions from the September 2025 seminar and Ministry of Economics' new net-zero industry plan, the session brought together entrepreneurs, policymakers, and investors to name real priorities, challenge assumptions, and define what the next EU financing period needs to deliver.
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5/5/20267 min read
A Working Session, Not a Showcase
On 23 April 2026, the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LTRK) hosted a stakeholder seminar titled "The Hydrogen Ecosystem in Latvia: Opportunities, Barriers and Support Solutions" — the second in a series organised under the Interreg Europe Green Hydra project, in direct collaboration with the Ministry of Economics.
The format was deliberate. This was not a conference with keynote speakers and passive audiences. The afternoon — running from 14:00 to 17:00 at LTRK's premises on Kr. Valdemāra iela — was structured around open discussion, a strategic barrier game in groups, and a focused session on financing frameworks for the next EU programming period. Networking followed. The session was opened by Linda Lappuķe, Director of the EU Projects Division at LTRK, and the policy context was set by Edijs Šaicāns, Deputy State Secretary at the Ministry of Economics, presenting Latvia's freshly adopted Sustainable Energy Technology Development Plan until 2035.
The agenda placed that plan — specifically its Chapter 3, covering the use of climate-neutral technologies in Latvian industry and the development of green hydrogen production and its ecosystem — at the centre of the conversation. The explicit mandate: define the practical next steps for the coming 10 to 15 years, identify the most promising hydrogen application areas, name the current barriers clearly, and map what the next EU financial perspective's support mechanisms need to look like in order to attract private investment at scale.
The Foundation: What September 2025 Established
The April 2026 seminar did not start from scratch. It built directly on the Ministry of Economics' conclusions from the September 2025 seminar — the first structured barrier-mapping exercise in this series, attended by 38 participants from across Latvian industry, policy, academia, and the energy community.
That session was organised as a strategic barrier game, aligned specifically with the national plan. Participants ranked nine identified barriers to hydrogen ecosystem development across two dimensions: significance for the ecosystem's growth, and complexity of resolution. The results produced a clear and honest picture.
Insufficient demand emerged as the most significant barrier — consistently across all participant groups. The chemical and metallurgical sectors were identified as holding the strongest near-term potential for hydrogen consumption, but competition from direct electrification is growing fast. The core problem: without deliberate, policy-backed demand creation in the early phase, there is no business case for infrastructure investment, no signal for investors, and no incentive for project developers to commit. Participants called for defining the actual hydrogen volumes Latvia's strategic targets require, and then creating conditions — through regulation, public procurement, and targeted support — under which that demand can take shape.
High costs and limited access to capital formed the second major cluster. Green hydrogen remains more expensive than fossil alternatives under current market conditions. The brief period of cost parity during the recent energy crisis demonstrated the gap can close — but it has not closed structurally. Most Latvian hydrogen projects are not bankable without public backing. Long-tenure financing is scarce. The perceived geopolitical risk attached to Latvia as an investment destination further compresses the pool of willing institutional investors. Participants described the current environment plainly: expensive short-term money, no long money.
Fragmented strategic coordination and regulatory absence ranked third — and participants were direct about the consequences. Latvia has no dedicated national coordinating body with the mandate and capital to simultaneously build supply-side and demand-side conditions. On the regulatory side, environmental impact assessment frameworks are not calibrated for hydrogen-specific processes, safety standards are borrowed from compressed natural gas regulation that does not map cleanly onto hydrogen's technical profile, and certification pathways remain undeveloped. The practical result: Latvia's transmission and distribution tariffs are less competitive than those in Lithuania and Estonia, and early-stage hydrogen investment is already beginning to gravitate toward neighbouring markets.
One finding from September 2025 worth carrying forward: renewable energy supply and the availability of project developers were rated as lower barriers than commonly assumed. This is a meaningful corrective to narratives that treat Latvia's renewable resource base or ecosystem immaturity as the primary constraints. They are not — and the April 2026 session worked from that understanding.
The April 2026 Discussion: Perspectives, Subsidies and the 10–15 Year Horizon
The open discussion segment of the April seminar, moderated by Toms Galiņš of ChangeWanted, focused on two interconnected questions: what does credible hydrogen development look like over a 10 to 15 year horizon in Latvia, and what role do subsidies play in making that development real rather than theoretical?
These are not comfortable questions. The honest answer to the first is that the pathway is visible — offshore wind feeding electrolysis, production clusters at free ports, hydrogen valleys anchored at Riga, Ventspils, and Liepāja, integration into the Northern Baltic Hydrogen Corridor — but the sequencing of interventions is not yet locked in, and sequencing errors are costly. The honest answer to the second is that subsidies are necessary in the early phase, but the design of those mechanisms matters as much as their existence. Poorly structured subsidies generate project pipelines that cannot convert into final investment decisions. Well-structured ones — like the European Hydrogen Bank's auction mechanisms, including the "Auction as a Service" model that allows member states to use national budget resources to support projects just beyond the EU subsidy threshold — can activate private capital rather than simply replace it.
The September 2025 conclusions flagged this directly: stimulus needs to come from strong public and private capital incentives, regulatory reform, and infrastructure development acting together — not sequentially. The April seminar was, in part, a test of whether that joint-action framing had taken hold across the stakeholder community.
The Strategic Barrier Game: Where Resources Need to Go
The centrepiece of the April session was a repeat of the strategic barrier game format — groups working through the same nine-barrier framework established in September 2025, but now with 12 months of additional policy development, project activity, and market intelligence informing their judgements.
The national plan's Chapter 3 provided the structural reference point. That chapter sets concrete targets: annual hydrogen production of at least 175,100 tonnes, green ammonia production of 17,650 tonnes per year, a minimum of 800 new jobs by 2030, and export products — whether methanol or synthetic fuels — derived from the production surplus. These are not aspirational ranges. They are the numbers against which Latvia's hydrogen policy will be measured when the Ministry of Economics delivers its first implementation report to the Cabinet of Ministers by 1 June 2026.
The barrier game in April pushed participants to move from naming obstacles to prioritising interventions. The nine original barriers — insufficient demand, high costs, limited capital access, fragmented coordination, absent regulation, underdeveloped infrastructure, low public risk tolerance, shortage of developers, and skills gaps — were stress-tested against this more concrete backdrop. The output was a sharper set of investment and policy priorities, directly actionable within the next EU financing period.
Financing the Next Phase: What the EU Programming Period Needs to Deliver
The final substantive block of the seminar — the Ministry of Economics presentation on the next EU financial perspective — brought the discussion back to the practical constraints that shape everything else.
Latvia's national plan acknowledges clearly that a detailed financing plan for each action direction cannot yet be fully specified. What it does establish is the expectation that EU funds and national co-financing will be the primary implementation vehicle, alongside horizontal EU programmes and climate finance instruments. The European Hydrogen Bank's auction mechanisms, the Innovation Fund, and IPCEI (Important Projects of Common European Interest) participation all figure as potential levers.
What Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders need the next programming period to deliver, based on the seminar discussion, comes down to a few concrete things: accessible early-stage capital for pilot projects that is not contingent on a project already being at commercial scale; financing instruments with tenures matched to hydrogen project timelines rather than standard loan structures; and support mechanisms that work for the Latvian market size — not only for the large-scale operations the existing EU instruments were designed around.
The point about market size is not a complaint. It is a structural reality. The European Hydrogen Bank's current auction mechanisms are designed for volume. Latvia's initial projects — a 5 MW electrolysis installation near Riga Airport, the Jelgava hydrogen production and refuelling infrastructure under the H2Value project, the first hydrogen valley frameworks — operate at a scale where national-level bridging instruments are essential to make EU-level mechanisms accessible.
Nine Directions That Came Out of the September 2025 Baseline — Still Valid in April 2026
The September 2025 seminar closed with nine priority directions that the April 2026 session reaffirmed and refined:
Secure startup capital for first pilot projects — the implementation phase is the most underfunded, and the most consequential.
Streamline the regulatory environment — including tariff reform to restore Latvia's competitiveness relative to Estonia and Lithuania.
Build a coordinated national structure — government, municipalities, industry, and science need a shared mechanism, not parallel tracks.
Leverage EU co-financing for technology development, while simultaneously directing resources toward education and workforce pipelines.
Invest in public understanding of hydrogen's role and safety profile — low public risk tolerance is a real siting constraint.
Define production volume targets that give investors and developers actionable signals rather than directional aspirations.
Create jobs through training aligned with hydrogen value chain roles — not generic STEM programmes.
Develop regional hydrogen valley networks anchored at free ports, integrating production, storage, transport, and end-use.
Treat renewable energy supply and developer availability as manageable, not primary, constraints — and stop designing policy around the wrong bottlenecks.
What This Seminar Series Is Actually Building
Taken together, the September 2025 and April 2026 sessions represent something more useful than stakeholder consultation. They represent a structured, evidence-based process of translating a national policy document — the Sustainable Energy Technology Development Plan until 2035 — into a shared understanding of what needs to happen first, who needs to do it, and what the financing architecture needs to support.
Latvia's hydrogen ecosystem is genuinely early stage. Commercial production does not yet exist at scale. Domestic demand, outside the Riga trolleybus pilot, remains limited. The regulatory framework is incomplete. And yet: the country is third in the EU for renewable energy implementation, major projects are in development at Liepāja, Ventspils, and Jelgava, the Northern Baltic Hydrogen Corridor assigns Latvia a real infrastructure role, and the national plan now gives that activity a binding policy framework with measurable targets.
The Green Hydra seminar series is part of how that potential becomes a programme. And the April 2026 session moved that programme one step closer to being real.
Source: LinkedIn post