Now that’s what you call luck. Right around the editorial deadline of our sister magazine HZwei, the German government debated, passed and presented its strategy to support the hydrogen and fuel cell industry.
Five federal ministries were involved in drafting the strategy. Their compromise agreement sets a 2030 target of “only” 5 gigawatts in installed electrolyzer capacity, not 10, as the German science minister Anja Karliczek strongly proposed.
The Automotive Business Barometer has found that a clear majority of executives working in the auto industry wish automakers and politicians in Germany would support more of the technologies deployed in electric vehicles. Over 80 percent of those who took part in the survey criticized the current focus of politics and industry on all-electric transportation.
On Aug. 1, 2017, Peter Röttgen became the new CEO of Germany’s Federal Renewable Energy Federation, or BEE for short. He replaced Harald Uphoff, who served as interim CEO after Hermann Falk left BEE in 2016. Röttgen had previously served as deputy head at the State Office of Mining, Energy and Geology in the German state of Lower Saxony and later as manager of the Energy Storage Innovation Center at E.ON until the company decided to split operations.
Intersolar Europe is inching closer to becoming an energy storage platform. It was the fourth time that Munich’s trade show on solar energy ran in parallel to the ees Europe – with 254 exhibitors on 17,500 m2 Europe’s most popular trade fair about batteries and energy storage, according to its organizers. Starting next year, the show will have two new pillars, Power2Drive for electric transportation and charging infrastructures and EM Power for smart energy production.
The German Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association, DWV, is committed to helping achieve equal treatment of renewable electricity-based fuel sources to that of biofuels under the law. In a recently published paper, it argues in typical German bureaucratese that hydrogen offered more advantages and fewer drawbacks than biogenic fuels and should at least be treated in the same way.
“The paperwork has been finalized.” With this statement, NOW chair Klaus Bonhoff announced that NIP 2.0 was about to be ready for implementation. During e4ships’ final conference in Hamburg on Sept. 7, 2016, he also told H2-international that the remake of the National Innovation Program Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology would still be made available … Read more
The political statements are now being trotted out on an almost weekly basis. This should come as no surprise, since more power-to-gas projects are now starting than ever before. We repeatedly hear things like “PtG technology has the potential to lead the energy transition to success.” Such statements were to be heard most recently, for example, at the commissioning of the facility in Ibbenbüren and in Mainz, and also at the initialization of the project in Solothurn, Switzerland.
In May 2015, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) presented the long-awaited funding instrument for the market launch of fuel cell heating devices. As announced by Minister of Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel, the market launch is to be supported via the so-called Energy Efficiency Incentive Program. The program is part of the National Action Plan on Energy Efficiency (NAPE), which was passed by the German federal government at the end of 2014. With other projects, it aims to contribute to a big improvement in the level of effectiveness in the construction sector. The package of measures has an annual funding volume