shape #20
Green hydrogen on the way As an energy carrier and viable solution to store energy, hydrogen has a promising future and the potential to play a deciding role in our planet’s overdue transition to clean energy. Hydrogen is the element with the highest energy density. Today's very competitive cost of electricity produced from solar or wind power, for example, is a major success factor for sustainable hydrogen production. However, hydrogen is only sustainable if it is so called ‘green hydrogen’, produced from clean renewable energy. In the past, most hydrogen production involved fossil fuels, generating extensive volumes of greenhouse gas emissions.
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Hydrogen electrolysis
Today, most hydrogen available on the market is grey hydrogen. But with a shift to widely available, cheap renewable energy, the picture is changing, and hydrogen is looking at a bright future. “Hydrogen is today almost entirely produced from natural gas and coal,” states a 2019 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). As discussed in the last edition of SHAPE, hydrogen can also be used to effectively store energy produced from wind power, by generating hydrogen during peak wind hours with low demand from the grid, therefore acting as a buffer, and even supporting the transition from fossil gas by converting gas pipeline infrastructure into a hydrogen network.
