Category Archives: Energy Generation

The building of a Hydrogen Ecosystem in Europe

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The global challenge of climate change is coming rapidly to the points where it is forcing governments, businesses and knowledge organisations all over the world to mobilise behind carbon-reducing innovations, e.g. large-scale renewable energy implementation and electrification.

When it comes to innovation and leading the energy transition, Europe is showing clear leadership and in one specific and important technology, a global leader in electrolysis technology required to produce green hydrogen. The challenge today is to convert that leading position into a sustaining best of class one, that leads the world in electrolyzer expertise, production and research.

Today, Europe has a promising start, but it has significant challenges to break down the silo’s of knowledge and expertise and seize this opportunity to learn how to collaborate and build a thriving, robust and collaborative ecosystem around the building of a world-leading position in the electrolyzer market space.

At this time though, despite a promising outlook for the use of the eölectrolyzer for hydrogen, water electrolysis technology is not sufficiently mature to fit that purpose. It still is at a limited scale and is not yet at the point of the expectations building up around it. An enormous challenge lies ahead in upscaling currently available technologies to GW-scale factories required to drive forward the energy transition. Continue reading →

Are innovation spillovers about to accelerate the course of the energy transformation?

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Achieving clean energy technology innovations will be vital if we want to meet the goals of net-zero emissions in the next fifty years.

Innovation is central to the energy transition through new technology solutions.

Innovation can accelerate and achieve rapid reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases to anything near the net-zero goals set in the Paris Agreement of 2015 to hold the global average temperature to below 2oC of pre-industrial levels.

We need significant development and diffuse new technology solutions to displace existing energy assets to move towards a global economy based on clean energy.

As we look at any clean energy scenarios, it is highly reliant on moving concepts, through prototyping into a commercial demonstration. Presently many of the clean energy solutions rely on technologies that are present only in a prototype or early smaller demonstration-scale and will not come to a commercial scale without significant new R&D efforts.

There are also numerous concepts indicating promising technology solutions that have not been, as yet, commercially deployed in any mass-market way. Some scenarios looking out over the next thirty or more years are suggesting these critical technologies can make up to 75% of solving any cumulative CO2 emissions. Continue reading →