CEE Bankwatch’s May 2026 report, Hydrogen buses in Poland: Where did it all go wrong?, is useful because it moves the hydrogen bus debate out of the brochure and into the depot. It is not another model of what hydrogen might cost in 2035. It is a record of what happened when cities bought buses, signed contracts, waited for fuel, paid invoices, dealt with failed tenders, and tried to run public transport with a fuel system that had not caught up with the promise. By April 2026, Poland had 153 hydrogen buses registered, 140 in service across 12 cities, and another 107 contracted. That is enough deployment to stop pretending this is only about pilots.

That matters because Poland is not a trivial case. It is a serious European transit market, a serious bus manufacturing country, and a coal-heavy economy trying to move. In 1990, coal provided about 98% of Poland’s electricity generation. By 2023, that had fallen to about 60.5%, while renewables had risen to about 27% of electricity production. That is still far too coal-heavy for a climate-stable grid, but it is also a large shift in a country with deep coal dependence, industrial inertia, mining politics, and a legacy power system built around lignite and hard coal.

That context makes the hydrogen bus detour more interesting. Poland chose hydrogen buses while battery-electric buses were scaling across Europe, charging infrastructure was spreading, and electricity was getting cleaner. The question is not whether Poland should decarbonize buses. The question is why scarce public money and municipal attention were directed toward a fuel-cell pathway that added cost, infrastructure risk, supply-chain risk, and weaker climate accounting when a direct electrification pathway was already available.

The answer starts with policy design. Poland’s hydrogen strategy treated public transport as a low-hanging fruit for creating a national hydrogen economy. The strategy set targets of 100 to 250 hydrogen buses by 2025 and 800 to 1,000 by 2030. It also set targets for fuelling stations and low-emission hydrogen production capacity. On paper, this created a tidy industrial story. Buses would create demand. Demand would justify refuelling stations. Refuelling stations would justify hydrogen production. Hydrogen production would help create a national industry. The problem is that buses are not an industrial-policy prop. They are public service machines. They exist to move people reliably, affordably, and with low emissions...

...The public funding numbers are not small. Bankwatch reports more than €120.7 million in non-repayable grants and just under €6.08 million in loans for hydrogen buses and refuelling stations, financing 163 buses and 2 stations directly. That is about €117.7 million in direct bus grants for 163 buses, or roughly €722,000 per bus in non-repayable subsidy before the smaller loan component is added. When a technology needs that level of capital support and then still generates fuel-price relief requests, the problem is not a lack of ambition. The problem is that the economic case has not landed.

I wrote about this problem in January 2025, when Poland’s hydrogen bus plans were already running into high hydrogen prices. At the time, 21 Polish municipalities had asked the national government for help with hydrogen operating costs. The mayors of Chełm and Wałbrzych wrote to the Minister for Climate and Environment seeking a support program to cover the price gap between hydrogen and traditional fuels. They estimated €35 million to €70 million would be required from 2025 to 2027 for several hundred buses, with annual costs rising to €46.7 million to €116.6 million afterward...