# An Overview of Hydrogen's Application for Energy Purposes in Lithuania
## 7 Discussion  
This overview shows that there are still serious challenges regarding green hydrogen's performance and cost; in order to make green hydrogen truly competitive, considerable improvements are still required. Based on the above considerations, it can be concluded that the comparatively low competitiveness of green hydrogen is currently one of the major challenges preventing from widespread implementation of hydrogen technologies. That includes expensive materials and components leading to high CAPEX and OPEX depending mainly on electricity costs. But significantly improved competitiveness no longer seems unrealistic in the medium-term future, which fully justifies the growing interest and policy support for these technologies worldwide.  
Smooth transition to zero-emission economy in Europe will require more efforts than it is given now. According to renewable energy implementation statistics, the share of renewable energy in the EU's final energy consumption was 21.8% and new binding targets require doubling this share to 42.5% by 2030. However, the European Commission reports that the current pace is too slow, at least in the wind energy sector, where the EU is expected to build 20 GW of new wind farms a year on average over 2023-2027, whereas, in order to meet the targets it should be building over 30 GW a year. The solar PV industry is booming, with the speed of installations increasing recently, but also faces the challenges of unstable regulatory conditions, issues with transmission system and bottlenecks in the procurement of equipment. The speed of energy systems' transformation is also influenced by geopolitical forces.  
Renewable energy deployment has been successfully progressing during the last few years in Lithuania (878 MW of solar PV and 684 MW of wind power capacities added since 2020 [65]). This shows great potential for the implementation of national targets and EU obligations by 2030. Grey hydrogen is currently widely used by several of the largest industrial companies, and in this overview we illustrate that the industrial sector will absorb the majority of the green hydrogen demand, which will be produced locally and will fully replace natural gas in the longer timeframe. An upgrade of the well-developed natural gas network, by adapting it to accept and transport hydrogen, will bring additional opportunities for reducing climate change's impact throughout the various sectors of the economy currently using natural gas. Lithuania also has an outstanding opportunity to become a green hydrogen-exporting country when cheap electricity from local renewable energy sources (onshore, offshore wind and solar PV) will significantly exceed the national electricity demand. This will bring benefits from partnerships with green hydrogen importers in the EU to help to deploy enabling infrastructure.  
D.P., writing--original draft preparation and resources; M.M. and E.P., writing--review and editing and S.M., visualization. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research received no external funding.  
Not applicable.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.