Andreas Seebach has been converting his home to hydrogen technology for three years.
The Irschenhauser is certain: "We can really achieve the energy transition in Germany."
Irschenhausen – There is a sculpture of a dancer in the garden.
Between some perennials you can see a sign: "I am a natural garden" can be read on it.
On the balcony there is a basket with fragrant quinces.
A garland of yellow lightbulbs hangs from the ceiling.
Next door, on the green hill, a small herd of large sheep with bells around their necks are grazing – an Upper Bavarian idyll.
We are in an Irschenhauser architect's house, which on the one hand was very special and built in the 1960s with Bauhaus echoes.
On the other hand, it should be the future.
Man converts the house to water stick technology - he also wants to use electricity from the PV system in winter
The building no longer belongs to the architect, whose many children grew up in tiny rooms that look like little train carriages, off a corridor that leads away from the living room.
Andreas Seebach bought the property in 2018.
Up until then, he had designed biogas plants and was one of the few who not only used them to generate electricity, but also fed the resulting biomethane into the gas network.
Now he is in the process of equipping and converting his house with various storage systems so that the electricity supplied by the PV system installed on the flat roof can cover part of the energy requirement not only on summer nights but also in winter.
One of these storage systems works with hydrogen.
The formula that Seebach says several times this afternoon applies here: "Power to gas to power." That's exactly the problem in the energy transition: It's not enough to somehow get green electricity somewhere.
Electricity must be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
That means you need intelligent ways to temporarily store it.
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The living room of the architect's house from the 1960s, which has become a model house in terms of energy efficiency.
© Andrea Kästle
At the beginning of our visit, we talk about the weather, about the beautiful but much too warm autumn, with temperatures that are much too high, which are a sign of climate change.
"You can still enjoy it," advises Andreas Seebach, squinting against the light, putting on his sunglasses and starting to explain his house.
The industrial engineer, who has a doctorate, talks for two hours. He likes to go into detail, which is probably due to his job.
Then we follow him down to the basement, let us show him the brand new building technology, which takes up much less space than we thought.
"Yes, that's actually all very clear," says Seebach and nods.
Irschenhauser convinced: "Can really create the energy transition in Germany"
Where the oil tank used to be in this house, which is built into the hillside and surrounded by rampant greenery, there are now other pieces of equipment: a heating circuit distributor, the high-temperature fuel cell, the gas condensing boiler, the heat pump, the hot water tank, the fresh water station, the Heating rod with control, the controller, the electrolyser, the fuel cell, the battery storage.
All devices that are smaller than their names suggest.
Only the electrolyser is the size of a catering refrigerator.
You can read the latest news from Icking here.
"We can really achieve the energy turnaround in Germany," Seebach is convinced, and at that moment you can see the enthusiasm that drives him to get through the 60-hour week he has on average to let.
Shortly before, on the balcony, when the sheep's bells rang next door while he was recording details of his intelligent energy storage under the PV roof, he had hinted: "It's all a big topic." It really is.
Andreas Seebach's house is the first in Germany that is older and therefore only partially energetically renovated and in which the combination of battery and hydrogen storage is tested in the "real laboratory".
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"Hydrogen helps us to close the winter gap in power generation": In the picture on the left, the access to the machine room of the house.
The solar power and hydrogen-based energy supply is controlled digitally.
© Andrea Kästle
Seebach does not aim to become completely independent of the public power grid in his home.
100 percent self-sufficiency is not his goal, as it is too expensive to achieve.
What he wants is "only to use the electricity produced on site via the PV system completely on site".
He doesn't want to feed any of this into the grid – because on sunny days in summer there will always be enough electricity in the grid anyway and superfluous energy will be grounded – and thus “thrown away”.
In order to also have energy at night, the house has a battery storage that can hold 14 kilowatt hours;
also via a heat pump, which also stores electricity by using solar power to heat a 750-liter stratified water storage tank during the day.
This then provides 60 kilowatt hours of thermal energy – for heating at night.
Also available: a charging station for the e-car, and, as already mentioned, the storage options for hydrogen in gas cylinders, initially 24 in number, which conserve a remarkable 840 kilowatt hours of energy.
This should be enough to power this house for a few weeks during the winter.
This requires the electrolyser, the refrigerator-sized device in the basement that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Irschenhausen: Mann has been converting the house for three years - that's why he's constantly getting visitors
Seebach has been converting his home for three years.
That's why he always gets visitors.
Together with colleagues, he founded the hydrogen initiative Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg H2Süd - an association that wants to develop hydrogen-based solutions for the energy transition.
The Icking-Isartal energy cooperative was only recently launched in the building.
It is intended to promote the fitting of private roofs with PV systems in the region.
(By the way: everything from the region is now also available in our regular Wolfratshausen-Geretsried newsletter.)
To this end, she would like to equip strips with open-space PV systems along railway lines and motorways, negotiate shares in wind turbines and create intelligent storage options.
An electrolyser plus a hydrogen storage facility would then be placed next to a larger open-space system.
Seebach thinks it could well be that the Isar valley will become a kind of model region when it comes to climate protection and energy efficiency.
It would be ideal if the existing gas network was simply converted to hydrogen at some point.
"Around the year 2040," says Andreas Seebach, "it could happen." In the meantime, it would already be possible to use 20 percent of the infrastructure with hydrogen without major conversion measures.
(By Andrea Kästle)
You can find even more current news from the region around Wolfratshausen at Merkur.de/Wolfratshausen.