As head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, David Crane has a tough job: turning about $25 billion for not-yet-commercially-viable technologies into infrastructure that can power a U.S. clean energy revolution.

(…) “I’d say the single greatest failure I would have at this job is if in 20 years we looked at the hydrogen hubs we helped incent with our grants, and they all looked like Summer Olympics sites…they’re all ghost towns,” Crane, the former CEO of U.S. utility NRG Energy, told Canary Media during this week’s Breakthrough Energy summit in Seattle. ​“The key to success is that these things will be thriving 10 to 20 years from now.”

Crane, who was appointed DOE’s Under Secretary for Infrastructure earlier this year, was referring to the $8 billion for ​“clean hydrogen hubs” now being pursued by hydrogen project developers, investors and politicians across the country. Those grants, meant to fund six to 10 sites capable of producing hydrogen without carbon emissions via a variety of technologies, are just the largest of a set of multibillion-dollar investments Congress directed the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations to administer in last year’s infrastructure law.

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