The Brief – Waking up from hydrogen daydreams

Waking up from hydrogen daydreams
By Nikolaus J. Kurmayer | @NKurmayer

Europe’s time spent sleepwalking to the tune of hydrogen lobbyists – draining funds and political capital for far too long – appears to be coming to an end.

This week, I attended a business leadership conference hosted by the German Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. Attendees, all serious businesspeople, were asked which technology is the key net-zero technology. The number one answer? Hydrogen.

Europe’s fascination with hydrogen has become more like an addiction and a costly one, too.

The European Commission estimates that to produce, transport and consume 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen domestically, investment worth up to €471 billion will be necessary.

For the odourless gas to be climate-friendly, it must be produced through electrolysis using renewable electricity. To avoid electrolysers taking up all the green power in the grid and boosting demand for coal power, two-thirds of the €471 billion will have to be invested into additional renewables.

To meet the second half of the EU’s hydrogen targets – 10 million tonnes of imports – will require another estimated €500 billion.

That amounts to a €1 trillion dream to get the hydrogen economy from non-existent to infancy into 2030, and the spending certainly wouldn’t end there.

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With almost half of Europeans lacking digital skills, there is an urgent need to boost digital literacy if the European Health Data Space (EHDS), set to be launched in 2025, is to be a success.

Non-profit and civil society groups will have a ‘one-stop shop’ to allow them to operate in EU countries where they are not registered, under a new proposal tabled by the European Commission on Tuesday.

Ukrainian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to restore a requirement that officials declare their assets, a measure sought by the International Monetary Fund, but included a loophole critics say dampens its effect.

Twenty-eight people died, thousands of animals burned, properties and businesses destroyed, and 935,000 acres of land incinerated – this is the provisional toll of the unprecedented wildfires that have ravaged Greece in recent weeks. But it didn’t have to be this way.

A presidential election in the Maldives on Saturday could be decisive in determining whether China or India win a competition for influence over the tiny Indian Ocean island chain.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang said on Wednesday it is important to avoid a “new Cold War” when dealing with conflicts between countries as world leaders gathered in Indonesia amid sharpening geopolitical rivalries across the Indo-Pacific region.
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Views are the author’s

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Benjamin Fox]