History repeating?

What is taken for granted today was once considered controversial. New technologies often meet with resistance before they start to shape our everyday lives. It is a similar situation with green hydrogen. Yet its domestic production offers enormous opportunities. A commentary by Inga Landgrebe.

If you follow the public debates surrounding everything to do with hydrogen, it is not long before you come across all sorts of scepticism. This is nothing unusual in Germany; light bulbs (and later their abolition) have already been associated with doomsday scenarios. Electromobility was ridiculed or – when too many people made the switch – became a political battle cry, as it was said to jeopardise Germany as a business location. Even though the combustion engine replacing the horse-drawn carriage was once thought to herald the inevitable downfall of the West. Hmm. It all depends how you look at it. And let’s not even start on the heat pump.

All this doom-and-gloom attitude can now be felt again when it comes to green hydrogen. It is said to be the champagne of energy, there is hardly any capacity in Germany, a hype, the chicken-and-egg problem has to be solved first, and in any case, hydrogen is going to be too expensive for ever and never available. If it had to happen, hydrogen would have to be imported. What’s more, it wouldn’t work without fossil-produced hydrogen, but if that’s the way it has to be, it would also be very climate-friend ly with CCS – i.e. capturing and storing CO2. It’s perfectly understandable that companies that earn money from fossil fuels want to continue to do so. In this debate, however, they do not concern themselves with climate protection or the sustainable transformation of the economy, i.e. the actual purpose of why we are discussing hydrogen in the first place.

Material: Hydrogen

Hydrogen produced with renewable energy is enormously important for the further development of our energy system in Germany and Europe for a variety of reasons. Firstly, green hydrogen is a climate-friendly substitute for coal, oil and gas: it offers an opportunity to decarbonise industries that are difficult to electrify. Sectors such as the steel and chemical industries as well as heavy goods vehicles, shipping and air transport could significantly reduce their CO2 emissions by using hydrogen. Hydrogen can be utilised as an energy carrier and used to generate electricity.

Secondly, green hydrogen has the ability to absorb and store electricity from renewable energies that would otherwise be lost. Hydrogen can therefore help to integrate renewables into the energy system and increase the grid’s flexibility. This makes the energy system more resilient and better able to react to fluctuations.

Producing hydrogen from domestic renewable energy sources helps to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and improve security of supply. So if we want to make the energy system future-proof and climate-neutral, this is our starting point and green hydrogen produced in a way that benefits the system has to be a key pillar.

Who is served by what?

But what does it actually mean to produce hydrogen in a “system-beneficial” way? Hydrogen production must relieve the load on the grids and draw from renewable electricity, especially when generation plants have to be switched off because the electricity grids are full.

The generation of electricity from wind and sun does depend on the weather. The planned expansion of renewable energies will double the installed wind output to 115 GW by 2030, while solar output will actually quadruple to 215 GW. That means we need to promote any means that will help to integrate renewables into our overall energy system, with interim energy storage and supply to consumers. Electrolysis – i.e. production of hydrogen from electricity and water – is an excellent collector of energy, as it makes the energy in the form of hydrogen usable independently and enables it to be distributed via road or rail transport and pipelines.

It is also beneficial to the system if as many sectors as possible benefit from the hydrogen so produced and therefore require less fossil energy. For example, by feeding the waste heat from the electrolyser into a heating network. It is important for electrolysers to be used in regions with a lot of renewable electricity and that they start up at times when this green electricity is available and cheap. This also makes green hydrogen affordable.

And let us not forget: only green hydrogen has a sustainable climate protection effect and actually reduces CO2 emissions. Legislation is needed to promote system-beneficial electrolysis in the short term. There is enormous potential for improving the economic viability of system-orientated production of green hydrogen. Generation, production and supply are brought together in regional hydrogen clusters, keeping the price stable and the supply reliable. Domestic production is also stimulated long before projects in potential production countries outside Europe even start.

Even if some quantities need to be imported in the long term, the aim should be to fully utilise production in Germany. This is necessary from an energy industry perspective in order to create a flexible power supply and integrate renewables into the system. It makes sound economic sense and is necessary in terms of security policy so that we never again find ourselves dependent on autocratic regimes; regimes that could turn off the “hydrogen tap” on a whim and thus put us in exceptional situations similar to the ones that occurred after the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

All that glitters is not green

We also need to be aware of the realities of hydrogen imports. The idea that sun and wind are available free of charge in the deserts of African countries, that hydrogen production takes place in unpopulated areas and that the population benefits greatly is naive, to say the least. In addition, many of the potential sources of exports currently under discussion are themselves heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Efforts to date have not been aimed at promoting local energy transitions, but have been assessed according to the maxim of where Germany can obtain cheap hydrogen. This alone should not be the guiding principle if the aim is to build a global hydrogen economy that also promotes a socio-ecological social and economic transformation in the producing countries. Studies (e.g. by the Wuppertal Institute) also show that production costs for hydrogen from Germany can become competitive in the medium and long term.

What is needed now? A legal framework that incentivises the system-friendly operation of electrolysers and at the same time enables sufficient operating efficiency. And less scepticism – so that in ten years’ time we won’t be writing about how Germany missed the hydrogen ramp-up.