Why hydrogen is the right-time-right-place electricity delivery option

Hydrogen electrolysers will increasingly be connected directly to wind turbines and solar PV, says Professor Ad van Wijk.

Van Wijk is professor of Future Energy Systems at the Technical University of Delft, where hydrogen is a major research focus.

And he says that while most people regard hydrogen as key for decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as industry and heavy transport - which it is - it also represents the cheapest storage and transmission option for energy produced from renewables at good resource sites remote from demand centres.

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“If you can produce electricity very cheaply, then bringing that at the right time to the right place is by converting it to hydrogen, even if you have to convert the hydrogen back to electricity.”

To emphasise his case, he points out that transporting hydrogen in a pipeline is 10-times cheaper than electricity transported by cable: and it gets even cheaper when storage costs are taken into account.

This is important for meeting future hydrogen demand in Europe, with the good resource sites for solar primarily in southern Europe and for wind primarily in the North and Baltic seas, but also that space for renewables is ultimately limited with higher ground costs, which will necessitate imports of hydrogen – for example from Algeria, which could be done using the existing gas pipelines.

Potential storage options such as the salt caverns in Morocco also are available in that region to ensure a ‘baseload’ supply of hydrogen into Europe.

Such imports are foreseen in the REPowerEu plan – and its targets are “realistic if one changes to volts-directed policies,” concludes van Wijk.

Watch the full interview for more hydrogen insights.