After years of enticing us with the promise of clean power, the hydrogen fuel cell has hopped from the drawing board to reality and finally is ready to enter our lives. If Henri Winand has his way, it could also put a British company at the front of the world’s hottest technology race.

His company Intelligent Energy is six years old and was born from the chemistry and engineering departments of Loughborough University. In its short life, it has expanded, made acquisitions and become an important fuel cell supplier to some hefty players. Boeing and Peugeot Citroën have been customers for a while and Suzuki has just joined the list. These are customers that have been converted to a philosophy that Mr Winand is quick to repeat - that, these days, “the green is in the green”.

“Be in absolutely no doubt,” he says of the AIM-listed company that he has run for a little more than a year, “we are going to become a very, very big business. The fuel cell debate is not about some niche technology any more; it’s about the security and diversity of energy supply. When we look at our customers and the people involved in the infrastructure of all this, there are some powerful forces at play.”

Mr Winand’s confidence in this ambition is built around his own perception of the fuel cell industry. It is, he believes, at precisely the point now where mobile phones were in the late 1980s: the market wavered with some choices but soon decided to build an infrastructure that in turn took mobile phones to saturation levels with consumers. For cellphone masts and booster stations, Mr Winand argues, we should now think hydrogen filling stations.

Much should be read into his own progression to the top of Intelligent Energy. Belgian-born, with degrees from Warwick and Imperial and a PhD from Cambridge, Mr Winand, 40, spent much of his career working for the power systems division of Rolls-Royce.

He made the jump from “traditional” power to the cutting-edge domain of fuel cells when he saw that the concept of hydrogen powering cars, homes and electronics had moved from being “just a technology to something actually commercial”.

Many more traditional power systems engineers will, he predicts, soon follow the same path over to fuel cells, hugely enhancing “alternative” energy’s march to the mainstream.