Germany has to catch up with green hydrogen

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Hydrogen hybrid power plant in Prenzlau

Photo: Bernd Settnik / dpa

Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier has declared the goal of Germany becoming "number one in the world" in hydrogen technologies.

This could be difficult indeed.

According to the "Handelsblatt", 20 countries have now decided on their own hydrogen strategy or will adopt one in the coming months.

Some states are well ahead of Germany, the newspaper reports, citing a study by Ludwig-Bölkow-Systemtechnik GmbH on behalf of the World Energy Council.

Japan, for example, presented its own hydrogen strategy at the end of 2017.

The government and companies have set themselves ambitious goals there and are now implementing them closely.

Technologically, Japan is taking a leading role in the hydrogen issue.

France, South Korea, Australia, Norway and the Netherlands also decided on their strategies months or years before Germany.

Russia also wants to build an industry for the production of hydrogen by 2024 and export some of the substance to the EU through its Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

So-called green hydrogen, which is produced using green electricity, is a central component of the energy transition.

It can be burned in gas boilers, thus reducing CO2 emissions from the heating sector.

It can also be burned in gas-fired power plants in times of electricity shortages - which will become increasingly important in the future.

When all nuclear and coal-fired power plants are shut down, an estimated 35 terawatt hours of energy will have to be kept in storage facilities in order to keep the German electricity supply stable.

Power-to-gas systems can make an important contribution to this.

And they have a major advantage over pumped and battery storage systems: They are connected to the roughly 500,000 kilometer long German gas network, in which a total of around 350 terawatt hours of energy can already be stored.

The possibilities of so-called power-to-gas have not yet been exhausted.

Companies can also operate hydrogen filling stations with the substance or sell the substance to industry.

It is also ideally suited for the production of basic chemical substances.

From the point of view of many researchers, such solutions, called Power-to-X, are the prerequisite for the Federal Republic of Germany to be able to reduce its CO2 emissions by more than 80 percent.

H2 technology was developed in Germany a good ten years ago, but was then long neglected by the federal government.

"We Germans are always world champions when it comes to developing innovative solutions," said Michael Sterner from the East Bavarian Technical University of Regensburg, who once co-invented the concept, told SPIEGEL last spring.

"But then all too often we leave it to other nations to make technologies ready for the mass market and earn billions with it."

That was the case with solar energy, and it threatens to repeat itself with battery storage systems - and now also with Power-to-X.

In June, the Ministry of Economics presented a national hydrogen strategy for Germany.

According to the study by Ludwig-Bölkow-Systemtechnik GmbH, however, this is far less detailed than, for example, the Japanese.

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