Hy-Hybrid Energy Wins a Scotland Award After Bus Failures

Hy-Hybrid Energy has won a Scotland Prestige Award 2026 for hydrogen and fuel-cell work it calls commercially viable. The Glasgow firm, led by founder and chief executive Dr Naveed Akhtar, announced the title in October.

The same year, Aberdeen City Council ditched the world’s first hydrogen double-decker bus fleet and put the vehicles up for sale.

Hy-Hybrid Energy Takes a Scotland Prestige Award

The company said the award covers its services in hydrogen technologies, fuel-cell development and the wider shift to cleaner power. Akhtar collected a trophy in a ceremony photograph released with the announcement. On 11 October the firm posted the news from its own account.

We are pleased to announce that Hy-Hybrid Energy has received the #Scotland #Prestige #Award 2026 in recognition of our work in the hydrogen and fuel cell sector.

The Prestige Awards celebrate businesses that demonstrate excellence, innovation and outstanding service within… pic.twitter.com/U7YI2ECjc8

— Hy-Hybrid Energy (@hyhybridenergy) October 11, 2026

Prestige Awards is a commercial programme run from prestigeawards.co.uk, not a government energy prize and not a peer-reviewed science medal. Its published rules say nominations are completely free of charge, that winning itself carries no fee, and that trophies, plaques, certificates, magazine features and adverts are optional extras offered after judging. Self-nominations are allowed. Other 2026 Scotland titles from the same stable have gone to firms far from energy, including a window installer named company of the year in its trade.

That does not make Akhtar’s technical record a fiction. It does mean the word prestige here is a marketing title, granted on a published checklist of service, quality, innovation, branding, ethics and consistency, then available for a winner to promote. Hy-Hybrid used that language in full.

We are delighted to receive this recognition from the Scotland Prestige Awards. It reflects our long-standing commitment to advancing hydrogen and clean-energy technologies and helping organisations turn innovative ideas into technically sound and commercially viable projects.

Dr Naveed Akhtar, Founder and CEO, Hy-Hybrid Energy, company award statement

Commercially viable is the phrase that collides with Scotland’s 2026 operating record. The firm is an advisory and systems shop, not the owner of Aberdeen’s buses. The collision is still the country’s, because the award is framed as a Scottish honour for hydrogen work while the plants and vehicles that were meant to prove a home market keep failing in public.

A Clarkston Consultancy With a Long Fuel-Cell CV

Hy-Hybrid Energy Limited was set up in 2018 and is registered in Clarkston, on Glasgow’s south side. The company describes itself as a clean-energy specialist in hydrogen, fuel cells, electrolysers, storage, microgrids and sustainable aviation. Its own site lists a 400 MW green hydrogen production development among project experience, along with microtubular solid oxide cells for mobility, fuel-cell and battery buses in Hungary, hydrogen drones, off-grid systems, and hybrid fuel-cell gas-turbine work for aircraft.

Those credits sit on a founder CV that is longer than the company. Akhtar is a UK chartered engineer. He has worked on four of the six main fuel-cell families and has held technical posts at known names in the trade before he opened the Glasgow firm.

AKHTAR’S FUEL-CELL POSTS

• AFC Energy: He served as chief scientist at the UK alkaline fuel-cell company.
• kraftwerk TUBES: He was vice president of technology at the German solid oxide firm.
• Oracle Power: He was chief of technology for hydrogen at the UK-listed developer.
• NEOM: The company says he worked on green hydrogen and e-fuel work at the Saudi giga-project.
• GOLDI Mobility: In 2019 Hy-Hybrid signed with the Hungarian maker on zero-emission buses and hydrogen drones.
• IHAC: In 2020 he founded the International Hydrogen Aviation Conference, which he still chairs.

The about page also records 11 patents in fuel cell technology and more than 30 journal papers. He has said he has worked across the hydrogen and fuel-cell sectors for more than 25 years and has seen both the potential and the trouble of bringing the kit to market. The firm’s pitch is that mix of engineering and commercial due diligence, sold to developers, investors and project owners rather than as a utility that runs buses.

£13.9 Million for a Fleet Now Being Sold

Aberdeen spent years presenting itself as a hub for hydrogen buses. Aberdeen City Council, answering a freedom of information request, said the 25 vehicles in the city were bought in two tranches and that the purchase cost was about £13.9 million. That is £556,000 a bus. The fleet left service in September 2024 after trouble with fuelling sites at Kittybrewster and Cove. In February 2026 the council dropped the project and chose electric buses instead. The BP joint venture that was meant to feed the city’s hydrogen plans was put into reverse.

Later sale terms put 23 of the buses with First Bus at £30,000 each, 5.4 per cent of that original average buy price, with the operator planning to convert them to battery power. Other bids reported in the market test included a pound a vehicle and offers to take the buses for nothing. Hydrogen for the fleet had also become expensive to run, with council figures putting it far above diesel and many times the cost of electricity.

The buses are not Hy-Hybrid’s contract. They are the public proof point Scotland already had, and they failed on fuelling kit, cost and a market that moved to batteries. Two larger production bets went the same way in outline.

SCOTLAND’S 2026 HYDROGEN LEDGER

Storegga’s Speyside plant was aimed at distilleries and had Scottish Government backing in earlier rounds, then died on water use, visual impact and traffic. ScottishPower’s Whitelee scheme had planning and engineering work behind it and still stopped short of a final investment decision. The UK Climate Change Committee has already said there is no role for hydrogen in home heating, which leaves H100 looking like a trial without a follow-on market. Hyseas, the hydrogen ferry design for Orkney, never left the drawing board in Scotland; Norwegian partners took similar work forward.

The Aviation Conference That Outlasted the Buses

If there is a Scottish hydrogen story that has run for seven years without being towed to a depot, it is Akhtar’s aviation forum, not a production plant. IHAC was set up in February 2020 as a dedicated place to talk about hydrogen in flight. The seventh edition was held online on 3 September 2026.

THE IHAC CALENDAR

1. February 2020: Akhtar founds the International Hydrogen Aviation Conference as a dedicated hydrogen-aviation forum.
2. 3 September 2020: The first edition runs online after the planned Glasgow hotel hosting is dropped.
3. 2022: The conference is held in Glasgow.
4. 2023: The conference is held in Edinburgh.
5. 2024 and 2025: The series returns online.
6. 3 September 2026: The seventh edition runs on Zoom, with Rachel Gardner-Poole, director of Aviascia, giving the keynote.

The 2026 page records twenty presentations on hydrogen in aviation. Earlier speaker lists for the same series have included Airbus hydrogen-systems staff, the Air Transport Action Group and airport operators. That is a specialist room, not a mass-market product launch, and it is the product Hy-Hybrid actually controls.

Scotland still has a live aviation thread that sits closer to this work than to the Aberdeen buses. A US firm, ZeroAvia, has plans for a hydrogen centre and plant near Glasgow Airport. Loganair, the regional airline, has said it wants hydrogen aircraft once they are certified. Those bets can fail too. They have not yet been sold for 5.4 per cent of the sticker price.

What Hy-Hybrid Energy Sells to Project Owners

The firm’s own description of its trade is independent technical, strategic and commercial services: technology choice, feasibility, due diligence and project shaping. In May 2026 it announced a cooperation deal with Ningbo VET Energy Technology of China on fuel-cell stacks, membrane assemblies, bipolar plates and PEM electrolysers aimed at Europe and the UK. In June it announced a separate tie-up with Hyvoda Hydrogen on cost and certification. It has also published a white paper arguing for fuel cells as primary power in data centres.

That is the business model that still gets paid when a 70 MW plant is refused and a bus fleet is converted to batteries. Someone has to tell an investor whether an electrolyser, a stack or an aviation tank is a real machine or a slide. Hy-Hybrid sells that reading. It also sells a conference that keeps Airbus-grade names in the same Zoom as a Clarkston consultancy.

The risk in that model is obvious and does not need a slogan. Advisory shops can look busy while the country they are based in fails to run a single high-profile hydrogen vehicle. The award then becomes a badge for activity, not for a kilowatt-hour sold in Scotland. Akhtar’s answer, in the same statement, is that the work is international and that the job is to pick the right kit for each client rather than to operate a municipal fleet.

No Cheap Way Yet to Move the Fuel

Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University published research in January 2026 that puts a harder number under that gap. A team led by Dr David Dekker reviewed 777,000 patents and 1.3 million citations across 182 years of hydrogen technology and found that distribution infrastructure is developing at half the pace of production, storage and fuel cells.

Distribution will become the dominant cost in any hydrogen system. Even as we get better at producing and using hydrogen, getting it where it is needed stays expensive.

Dr David Dekker, Research Fellow, Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University, Sustainable Futures study

Professor Dimitris Christopoulos, who co-wrote the paper, said a hydrogen economy cannot exist without the kit to move the fuel, and that this is the missing piece. Aberdeen learned that in a depot. Kittybrewster and Cove could not keep 25 buses in fuel, so the vehicles sat idle and then went to a battery conversion. Speyside never got to test whether distilleries would pay. Whitelee stopped on the route to market.

Hy-Hybrid’s trophy does not change those facts. It records that a small Glasgow firm with a long fuel-cell CV, a seven-year aviation conference and a book of overseas advisory work has been named a winner by a free-to-enter commercial awards brand. The buses are still being sold. The conference already ran, on Zoom, on 3 September.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Hy-Hybrid Energy Limited incorporated?

Companies House records show Hy-Hybrid Energy Limited was incorporated on 25 January 2018 as a private limited company, number SC586814, with a registered office at 33 Beechwood Avenue, Clarkston, Glasgow. Its SIC code is 71122, engineering-related scientific and technical consulting, which matches an advisory firm rather than a plant operator.

Do winners have to pay the Scotland Prestige Awards?

The organiser says there is no fee to be named a winner and no requirement to buy a trophy, advert or certificate. After judging, winners may buy optional promotional products, including trophies, plaques, magazine features and advertising, and the organiser states those purchases have no effect on the result. Winners who buy nothing keep the title.

Which fuel-cell types does Naveed Akhtar work with?

The company says he has hands-on work on four of the six major types: proton-exchange membrane (PEMFC), alkaline (AFC), direct methanol (DMFC) and solid oxide (SOFC). The remaining common families, including phosphoric acid and molten carbonate, are not listed as part of that set.

What is Akhtar’s academic training?

He holds a B.Eng. in mechanical engineering, an M.Sc. in renewable energy from Germany, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Birmingham, with a thesis on single-chamber micro-tubular solid oxide fuel cells. The company says he was mentored by the late Professor T. Nejat Veziroğlu, founding president of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy, and that in Pakistan he ran a metal-hydride storage project from 2001 to 2004 and set up a hydrogen lab at NED University in Karachi.