Caroline is Chief Technology Officer (“CTO”) at Ceres, a leading developer of high efficiency fuel cell and green hydrogen technology. She started her career as a lecturer in Engineering at Cambridge and then moved to McLaren Racing, where she pioneered the simulation of human-machine interaction leading the development of the first F1 simulator. Later she was a founding member of McLaren Applied Technologies, set up to exploit McLaren F1 expertise to new markets and became its CTO. She was also CTO of Babylon Health and a Non-Executive Director of Ceres for three years before joining as its CTO in 2021. Caroline is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and holds a PhD in Applied Mechanics from Cambridge. She received a CBE for services to Engineering in 2020.

Title: Hydrogen Decarbonises the Parts Other Technologies Cannot Reach

Abstract: Recent global volatility has only served to highlight the urgency for energy security around the world, with governments under increasing pressure to decarbonise their economies and hydrogen now widely acknowledged as an essential part of the route to net zero, at the very least for hard-to-decarbonise industrial sectors that account for around a third of our energy system.

Pressure on conventional fuels has brought a more dramatic response from policy makers. In Europe, RePower EU has provided strong financial incentives to move away from the reliance on fossil fuels and support the deployment of green hydrogen. In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act saw a record $369 billion earmarked for energy and climate change policy. Others are likely to follow suit across China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and even India now setting ambitious plans to be a net exporter of green steel and ammonia.

The criticism you can level at hydrogen and electrolyser technologies – is that they have been around a long time but have never really scaled. It remains the biggest challenge. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates we may need as much as 3,585GW of electrolysis by 2050, from a cumulative installed base of around 1GW globally today.

Ceres is right at the heart of this energy transition and its 600-strong team is busy expediting the delivery of its solid oxide technology – which provides a highly efficient, low-cost and sustainable route to produce green hydrogen – to global partners to support their transition to a cleaner and more sustainable future.