The Great Hydrogen Reset — Is It Germany's Turn? Ep176: Eva Schmid

Transcript

Eva Schmid

As a backup plan for those dark, cold periods, where we need a lot of electricity, it's not a lot of hydrogen you need, but you do need it at some point, and we need to start actually now. / The budgetary debate has been in a way that actually hydrogen has been prioritized. So we had a lot of budget cuts recently, or budget cut debates, and hydrogen was put pretty high on the agenda. / Everybody will learn that you will not get this cheap hydrogen, as has been narrated. And then a whole lot of actors will figure out a different route for decarbonization, because they have learned hydrogen will be expensive.

Michael Liebreich

Hello, I’m Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. Now, regular listeners will know that I have occasionally been ever-so-slightly critical of the hydrogen strategies and forecasts coming out of chancelleries and great consultancies around the world. In fact, I’ve seen so many of these strategies now, with such inflated targets, based on such poor understanding of the physics and economics of hydrogen, that, at the Financial Times Live Hydrogen Summit in June, I called for a reset of the global hydrogen debate.

ML at FT Hydrogen Summit

Here we are today, and you’ve got 56 countries that have got hydrogen strategies. Hydrogen is having another of its moments. And I’m afraid I’m going to be postulating here today that we need to reset. We need to reset.

Today we’re going to be doing a deep dive into Germany’s hydrogen plans. With the EU the most hydrogen-obsessed region of the world, and Germany its largest economy, it’s perhaps no surprise that Germany is the most bullish country in the world on hydrogen. The home of the Energiewende is not just one of the most committed countries in the world to reaching net zero, it is of course a highly industrialized nation with a very energy-intensive economy. As if that were not enough, it is also a country which has seen one third of its energy supply yanked out from under it as a result of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Green hydrogen has become one of the mainstays, not just of efforts to keep the lights on as the country replaces nuclear and coal power with wind and solar, but also of efforts to replace cheap Russian gas in power generation and industry. But can green hydrogen possibly live up to expectations? Germany published the first draft of its national hydrogen strategy in 2020, with a target of 5 GW of electrolyzers operating by 2030. In 2023, however, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this was updated to an even more ambitious 10 GW. A bit of context for those who don’t eat, sleep and breathe energy data, Germany’s average power demand is just over 50GW, so hitting this new hydrogen target would mean increasing the country’s entire national power output by around 20%.. That amount of power and electrolyzers would deliver around 3 million tons of clean hydrogen per year by 2030, roughly double current demand. Beyond 2030, the strategy becomes even more ambitious, with the government estimating demand of 14-18 Mt per year in 2045. It is generally accepted that Germany does not have enough land area to meet those figures domestically, particularly while building enough wind and solar power to meet its renewable power needs directly. So, by 2030, Germany aims to meet 30-50% of hydrogen demand domestically, importing the remaining 50-70%, with this share increasing even further in subsequent years. Enter the national hydrogen import strategy, adopted in 2024, and the associated pipeline strategy. The import strategy expects the bulk of imports will be delivered by ship, initially as ammonia and in future through methane, methanol, liquid H2 and liquid organic hydrogen carriers. LNG import terminals are expected to become “hydrogen-ready”, and Germany’s Chancellor Scholz has made frequent visits to potential exporters in China, Canada and elsewhere. All of this new infrastructure will be expensive. According to BNEF, €30-57bn could be needed by 2030 for shipping imports alone. The pipeline strategy anticipates 1,800 km of hydrogen-ready pipelines by 2028, and then between 7,000 and 8,000 km by 2045. Germany’s strategy sits at the centre of Europe’s hydrogen strategy, launched in July 2020 by the European Commission, which called for a whopping €460 billion to be spent just on producing and distributing hydrogen by 2030 – not even including subsidies to get users to actually adopt the stuff. The EU’s targets were for 20 million tons of clean hydrogen to be used in 2030, half made in Europe, half imported. On current estimates, they will be lucky to get to 2 million tons. The EU targeted 6 GW of electrolysers operating by 2024, but the actual figure will be lucky to be 10% of that. In July this year, the European Court of Auditors echoed my calls for a reset, releasing a scathing review of the EU strategy, with lead author Stef Blok saying it needed “a reality check”. Naturally, the EU Commission disagrees, explaining that funding has been slow to arrive but that many projects are now “hitting the ground”. Others might describe it as hitting the fan. While the EU's plan has increasingly attracted critical scrutiny and even derision, Germany has so far escaped relatively unscathed. But that may be changing. In February, the government scaled back its support for the construction of new “hydrogen-ready” power plants due to budgetary issues. In May, the German transport ministry disbanded its hydrogen unit following corruption scandals. And in July, industry groups came out to criticise the government's import strategy for falling behind on import pipelines that can bring clean hydrogen to Germany at an affordable price. So, does Germany’s hydrogen strategy also need a Great Reset? Might it come apart at the seams, or can it be tweaked over time to stay ahead of the emerging understanding about hydrogen’s physics and economics? My guest today is someone who works at the heart of Germany’s hydrogen policy-making machine: Eva Schmid is Director of Hydrogen and Synthetic Energy Carriers at DENA, the German Energy Agency, an arm's length think tank that works with the German government to deliver its energy strategy. As you’ll see she has a clear-eyed sense of what hydrogen can and can’t be expected to do, and a focus on using it to protect the resilience of the German economy. Please welcome Eva Schmid to Cleaning Up.

So, Eva, thank you so much for joining us here on Cleaning Up today.

Thanks for inviting me.

So let's start where we always start, which is you explaining who you are and what you do in your own words, but the very short version. We will have plenty of time to go into detail.

All right, I'm Eva Schmid. I'm Director of Hydrogen and Synthetic Energy Carriers at the German Energy Agency. I have a PhD in energy system modelling and a Master of Science in econometrics and operations research, and I've spent quite some time in academia, but then I decided to leave academia because I was more interested in putting the energy transition into practice, actually. And so I focused first on power grid expansion and getting the whole electrification started. And then I moved on to the hydrogen debate, basically. And for a bit more than two years, I'm at DENA.

Okay, and so you've got a department at DENA, and we'll get into what DENA does. But that's the German Energy Agency, in German, the Deutsche Energie-Agentur, is that right?

Exactly.

And you've got a group of, I think I remember, it's about 30 people. How do you divide them up? What do they do, exactly?

Yeah, we are part of a larger team that's called Future of Energy supply, and our task is to take care of all things related to hydrogen as energy supply. And I have a group, or our group is divided into three teams. One is focusing on value chains and technologies, one is focusing on markets and regulations, and one is focusing on dialog and systems integration of hydrogen.

Okay, now my audience is very diverse, and you have to assume that they're all very, very smart, but they're not experts on... well, they're not experts necessarily on the German energy system or on hydrogen — although I've been trying to educate them, as you can imagine. But they're not particularly experts on the institutional arrangements. So what is DENA? How does it fit in? What does it do? Perhaps we should take a step back and do a little section on what is DENA?

So DENA is an in-house company of the German state, and it implements a range of in-house projects, mainly for the ministries that are responsible for implementing the energy transition, foremost the German Ministry for Economics and Climate Action. And the projects have different character, and they can be sorted into four different groups. There's projects that have a more advising character, where we advise the ministry on what would be a good way to move forward in certain topics related to the energy transition. Then we are taking the role of a sorter, that means we have a lot of participatory processes with stakeholders from industry and also from science and civil society and everybody else who's having a role in the energy transition, and we figure out basically what these different groups would advise to the policy process. The policy process is part of what the ministry does, so the decision making. And then, once there is a policy, we aid the implementation as a manager. So we have consultation processes, for example, there's hotlines that we operate, all sorts of very practical things. And also we communicate what the energy transition is about.

Okay, so it is convening, it is consulting, advising, monitoring, implementing, but not giving out lots of money. So, you're not one of the big spending parts of the ministry, and you don't write regulations. Is that right?

Exactly. So we don't do either of that. Also no tenders or funding calls. There's other organisations that do that. We also don't run the hydrogen bank.

Okay, but you do every so often write a strategy. So you not always, but every so often, you are asked to actually author, not the regulations, not the not the laws, but a strategy. Is that right?

We advise the ministry when they are writing a strategy.

Okay, so the ministry would hold the pen, but you would convene everybody and then do some analysis and feed into that process.

It depends very much on the project, but yeah, that's the role we take.

Okay, so where I'm going with this is I think it's very important to f get that clarity. Because, you know, we're going to talk about the German hydrogen strategy, which you're going to point out now that you didn't write, but you did have all sorts of input into it.

Right, so the hydrogen strategy is actually different documents. So there is a hydrogen strategy from 2020, then there's an update from 2023 which is usually referred to as the hydrogen strategy now. And also there's, very freshly released, the import strategy, which was a measure of the update of the hydrogen strategy.

And let me ask, is your mandate, so you've got your group of 30 people divided into these teams. Is your mandate, whatever it takes to make the hydrogen strategy happen? Or are you allowed to sort of critique it and say, 'well, actually, this it's probably not going to happen, and we should maybe change it a bit.'

Obviously, as an advisor, that's our role, because otherwise we would be bad advisors. We would only say, 'yeah, that's enshrined, and now it's going to take place,' or something like that. I think everybody's doing this hydrogen transition, or the energy transition, and in particular, also the hydrogen-market ramp up for the first time. So there's a lot of learning involved, and there's a lot of expectations to be sorted, and there's a lot of technology to be developed. And the policy cycle is a cycle, as it already suggests, so there should be some learning, otherwise it doesn't make sense to cycle. And I think we are facilitators of that learning for the ministry.

Okay, so that kind of locates this conversation in a very interesting place, because, you know, it's certainly not news to you that I've been very critical of this hydrogen... You can call it the hydrogen strategies. But the whole hydrogen hype and the push for hydrogen at the EU level. I'm much less knowledgeable at the German level, but certainly at the EU level, it seems pretty clear that if you look at what was supposed to be delivered by 2030 and probably even by 2050, I'm going to guess that something like 10% of it might actually happen. So there must be a very interesting conversation behind the scenes about how one reacts to a strategy that says X when only sort of 10% of X is likely to happen.

So I mean, the purpose of a strategy is to show a sense of direction. So you want to communicate where you should be heading, where your target is, basically what your vision of the future is. And through that main function of the strategy, I would say that the picture it delivers is the most important feature. And then once you start to operationalize it, you also need timeframes and dates and numbers and so on. And here, obviously, since everything is uncertain, I would put less weight on them. So I think the sense of direction is more important than the actual numbers, and it makes sense to update them as you learn.

We'll come back to that. I guess that's true if the direction is broadly feasible, if the strategy is broadly a feasible direction, then that exercise is useful. But in this case, if you've essentially got two big directions to deliver net zero, one is heavily dependent on hydrogen, and one would require us to do a whole lot more around - I don't know if I can call it - your first love from a policy perspective, electrification. So at some point your feedback might need to be, 'well, we're headed off in that direction. It's not happening. We need to get back to doing that direction.'

But for producing green hydrogen, you need electricity, so I don't see the separation as clearly as you just pointed it out.

On the generation side, but certainly not when it comes to distribution or the sorts of technologies that you would use in industry. They will be very different. But can I suggest, rather than going down that immediate dichotomy, can we just do a quick review of the German hydrogen strategy? As I said, I'm more familiar with the European targets and so on. Could you give us a thumbnail of the 2023 hydrogen strategy, the most up to date one, what does it say? And then you've coloured in some pieces around that to do with imports, as I understand. But can you give us a thumbnail of, if we say 2023 strategy, what does it say is going to happen?

It does not say what will happen. It says what should happen from the perspective of the German government, and it essentially defines four fields of action, and an overarching target. The four fields of action are: ensuring the availability of sufficient hydrogen, so supply oriented fields of action. The second one is developing a hydrogen infrastructure, so transporting hydrogen from place A to place B. The third one is implementing hydrogen applications, so the use side. And then fourth is creating good framework conditions for accomplishing all of that. And the overarching one is to create an international technology leadership in the field of hydrogen. And this update gives very explicit measures for the short term, the immediate term and the long term, and the overarching purpose for the hydrogen import strategies in the context of climate mitigation. So in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we need that hydrogen. And also it's not only for Germany, but it also has a very international perspective. So an overarching aim is to ramp up the international hydrogen market, because climate mitigation is ultimately a global problem.

There's some metrics that you can share with us in terms of how many gigawatts of electrolyzers or million tons of hydrogen... because the EU, very famously, has got its targets of 10 million tons of domestic production by 2030, 10 million of imports, 40 gigawatts of domestic electrolyzers and 40 gigawatts of international electrolysis of which it wants to import the product. So that's the EU. Are there equivalent figures for Germany?

There are figures, I think the most important one is the 10 gigawatt target for installed capacity of electrolyzers in Germany.

By which year?

By 2030

By 203, okay. Within that, does it say how many tons of hydrogen that should produce? Because, you know, 10 gigawatts working 24/7 is going to produce a different amount from 10 gigawatts that's working at 30% capacity factor between solar and wind.

There's not precisely, because I think it's difficult to give that, what you're saying. So the way the target was framed was in installed capacity.

Okay, but I guess I'm going to push on that a bit, because it seems like a funny strategy, which doesn't say how much of the stuff you know... gives a very specific target for the production capacity, but not the output or the amount that's going to be used in the economy.

But if you take it from a technology scale-up perspective, it actually makes sense, because you can measure that, you can define the permitting procedures you need for that in the planning process, you can work much better with this.

Well, you can for the electrolyzer plants, but you can't for the generating capacity. Because in one scenario, you need much more energy generation to produce the hydrogen to drive those electrolyzers than in another. So you may have a very specific plan around the electrolyzers, but you neither know how much power you need, nor how much generating capacity you need, nor do you know how much hydrogen you're going to have for the economy.

That's perfectly correct. I think what you can see there is the hydrogen strategy as a process output of the debate. And in this context, I would say that particularly the technology development is very evident here. So you want to scale-up the production, you want to scale-up the installed capacity in the first place. You want to have this technology leadership, because you also need the electrolyzers in other places of the world, and that's how you can trigger that. And I completely agree with you. I think it was kind of a bit shifted, the debate. There's a lot of mentioning of system friendly electrolyzers in the strategy. And the task now is to figure out what that actually is. And we have a lively debate at the moment about which system we're actually looking at for it to be friendly, because the authors of the strategy implicitly meant system friendly for the electricity system. And if you place in northern Germany a lot of gigawatts of electrolyzers, that creates a lot of challenge for the electricity system. So that's not particularly system friendly from a security perspective for the grid. Also, you could say from the water perspective, from the water system, you would probably place the electrolyzer somewhere where there's more abundant water supplied than not. Or from the industry side, system friendly would then be at the place of demand, because then you would need less grid. So that's the vagueness the term 'system friendly' gives rise to in this debate now, and I don't think we have reached in Germany, the ripeness of the debate to the degree that is necessary to implement it.

And what's interesting is that sort of ambiguity may be necessary from a political perspective, but it's very unhelpful if you're actually trying to work out what has to happen next. It might be nice in a strategy document, but if you're trying to implement, that sort of ambiguity is hard, right?

Right, but that's a different process. So we have the grid planning process, and they have to solve that problem now, and they're actually doing it. So they proposed specific capacity and location and so on. And it's being debated at the moment, and this is now the task of the regulator to figure out and also to to accept, basically, the scenario framework, because it's not only about where the electrolyzers will be. So there's a whole lot of assumptions that you need to make in order to actually step forward with the planning process. As you know, and this is one of, basically, 100s of decisions that you need to make for planning.

And you know, I can't be too critical of the idea that you set a direction, and then you start filling in, you start colouring in the different elements over time, as you get more information and more stakeholders get involved, and so on. Now, the figures that I have seen for 2030, it's somewhere around the sort of two to three... I think it's 3.4 million tons of hydrogen, clean hydrogen that is intended under this strategy to be used in Germany. And then going on, by 2050, to something like 14 to 18 million tons. Does that sound familiar to you?

I'm operating in terawatt hours. So for me, it's 95 to 130 terawatt hours. I suppose we're aligned, but I don't know. I can't do it by heart.

I can do it, because basically 50 kilowatt hours turns into one kilo. And so one can sort of divide it through. But you know I certainly know that the EU target is for 20 million tons by 2030, so if Germany's was three and a half... order of magnitude, that's going to be about right by 2030. And I know that the figures go up very dramatically from that. Is there a budget? Are there budgetary numbers in the strategy for how much Germany is going to spend on all of this?

There's no explicit number given to it. The budgetary debate has been in a way that actually hydrogen has been prioritised, so we had a lot of budget cuts recently, or budget cut debate, and hydrogen was put pretty high on the agenda to be kept as an industrial policy target with Klimaschutz Verträge. So the

Those are the Contracts for Difference, correct?

Exactly. There is a budget allocated to this, and it has actually been kept, and we're waiting for the decision of the first round. And it's €4 billion, I think. Up to €1 billion per application, and €4 billion in total for the first round that's up for the Klimaschutz Verträge. And we expect that a lot of electrification projects will probably be accepted, but we don't know yet exactly what the outcome is.

So the full €4 billion, is that just for the hydrogen? That's the sort of pump-priming to get hydrogen by 2030? Or is that across electrification and pump priming and hydrogen?

That's across everything, you asked me for numbers, and that was one of the more specific numbers I can give you from the recent debate, because they're just out, and they're definitely a larger chunk of the total decarbonization budget. And also we expect that hydrogen, or at least some hydrogen projects. And there's also a second round of the contracts for difference, and we suppose that some hydrogen projects will be funded there, but since it's an option, we'll let the market speak.

Okay, but then that would suggest that for those hydrogen plans, there's somewhere between sort of zero and €4 billion available. Are there any other pots of money to get to those targets? Particularly, I'm thinking of the 2030, there are some targets for 2028 as well, I understand. But if we look at 2030 is that the sort of order of magnitude needed? Or are there any other , really big pots of money available?

There is money available for funding hydrogen projects, but they haven't been out yet. The tender, what is it called, those documents that describe how to apply for funding?

Yeah, the tender documents. The request for proposals.

Exactly that. So everybody's still waiting for it, so there's still budget there. Then we haven't even spoken about the core grid, yet. So I would say that the biggest pot of money allocated to the hydrogen market ramp-up at the moment is the core grid. So the amortisation account that has been installed as an innovative type of instrument, actually quite a lot of money is allocated for that.

Is that the pipeline, when you say the core grid? Is that basically the gas pipeline upgrade to get it ready for hydrogen?

Exactly, because it has been identified that in order to solve that famous chicken-egg problem, the state needs to take more responsibility for putting a transport grid into practice. And the main challenge was that if you start a new type of infrastructure and you have few users, they pay a lot of tariffs, and then it's prohibitively expensive. So the state steps in, and with this amortisation account and over time, shifts basically. Over time it changes the height of the tariff that you need to pay as a customer.

So let's come back to the pipeline network question, because before we get onto chicken and egg, at the moment, I guess I'm still a bit hung up on egg and egg. In other words, okay, so you've got some numbers for how many electrolyzers to build, less clarity over how much hydrogen that's going to produce, but I do think it's in the sort of 2-3 million tons per year by 2030 range. But where is this going to be used? What are the use cases that are in the strategy? Because presumably, and in fact, you've already said, the goal is decarbonization. It's not for any other real reason. I mean, industrial policy and exports and international leadership is good, but fundamentally it's about decarbonization. So where is it going to be used?

So the import strategy actually has, in the second sentence, that a resilient supply with sufficient quantities of hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives is in Germany's strategic interest. So definitely that resilience goal is next to the decarbonization goal.

So sorry to interrupt, but the import strategy comes after the hydrogen strategy, hydrogen strategy 2020, updated in 2023, which is what we've been talking about. And now there's another import strategy which you've been working on, correct?

It's part of the hydrogen strategy, or part of the update of the hydrogen strategy, because it explicitly said that there will be an import strategy as a separate document. So I think you can consider it as one.

Okay, thank you.

It came later. I just wanted to outline that this resilience target is very prominent here next to the climate mitigation target, which is very prominent as well. But you asked me about the demand, and I mentioned the import strategy, because it came a year later and it has this nice chapter about demand, and it's very clear what the government actually thinks at the moment where hydrogen will be used. So the order that's mentioned is the steel industry; then basic chemicals and petrochemical industry; then international shipping, so as a fuel; and also for aviation as a fuel, so the derivatives of hydrogen; and some some heavy goods transport; and then also for power station that deliver intermediate and peak loads; and some CHP (Combined Heat and Power) installations; and all other uses of hydrogen are either not mentioned or for heat generation and process heat. It's outlined that it's not clear at the moment,what the role of hydrogen will be in the future.

So that's focusing on, in my terms, the top of the ladder. So that is the industrial uses, and then, in a way, the resilience, which would be things like long-duration storage. But presumably also in the context of German industry, it's keeping it operating...so climate action is happening, but you still need to keep industry working and the lights on, and so hydrogen's roll is all around that, rather than private cars, busses, heating, those sorts of which you're saying are downplayed.

So I think the way you constructed the ladder is the inevitability of the technology, right?

Of the solution, yes, yes.

So from a solutions perspective, basically. So one thing that I would like to note is that one task is to actually formulate policy that gives incentives to the market to deliver an outcome that is sort of similar to that. And I think at the moment, there's some willingness-to-pay analysis right. And if you look at those graphs, you see refineries on the very top, for example. And that stems then from a quota that's in place. So I thought about your ladder basically as a good orientation, or it should be from a technology perspective, a good orientation for policymakers and the way they implement policy, right?

Well, yes and no, because the problem with... listen, I'd be delighted if the ladder has helped to align some incentives so that there is a refinery quota and it's driving the hydrogen to the top of the ladder. Great. The problem is, if you have, let's say, a wind farm in northern Germany, or a solar farm in southern Germany, the last thing you should do if you believe there's a climate crisis is actually use that electricity to make hydrogen for a refinery. What you should do is take that electricity, push coal off the grid, charge an electric vehicle or power a heat pump. Absolutely the last thing you would do is... Those things will be somewhere between three and nine times as effective at reducing emissions as doing anything in a refinery.

I think that for different policy problems, you should use different policy means, and that problem you refer to should be solved by the electricity market in order to give the price signals that are actually delivering that outcome. Because if the prices are very low, it means we have a lot of oversupply of electricity, and then it would be okay to produce hydrogen, also, from your argument,

Well, yes and no. No, because if you've put an incentive in place for a refinery to buy hydrogen, because it needs to meet a target, whether it's the EU renewable fuels, you know RFNBO (renewable fuels of non-biological origin) requirement or maybe some German equivalent. If you've done that, you will drive up the price of hydrogen and instead of that electricity being dumped on somebody who just wants to buy an electric car or somebody who wants to switch to a heat pump, you've out priced them through the intervention.

But hydrogen you can store, so you can disentangle that. So you can produce hydrogen while there's an oversupply of electricity, store it and then deliver it to the refinery.

Well, except you can't, right, because it's not economic. And we need to get back to the economics. The problem with that is that if you've got surplus electricity... and you can do an extreme example, let's say 1/3 of a wind farm's electricity is being wasted. But if that wind farm is only working 40% of the time, 1/3 of 40%, that's 12% of the time. You can't run an electrolyzer 12% of the time and make hydrogen at anything vaguely competitive. The cost of that hydrogen will be outrageous. It'll be outrageous even if you're running it 24/7, which we need to get back to. So this whole idea of 'system friendly,' meaning you'll use these little scraps of electricity and that will be used to make cheap hydrogen... That is simply not going to happen.

I know that there's engineers working on more system-based solutions. So when you integrate heat and electricity and hydrogen and conceive it as one complex basically, then there's more economic ways of producing hydrogen. I think everything you say is factually, completely right. I would say that if you agree that from the point of view of your ladder at some point we do need that hydrogen, then we also need to get there. And it's like in modelling, it's always called penny-switching behaviour, right? So all those economic and engineering models out there, the model suddenly switches and has that technology readily available. But that's not how things work. So if we want to develop a new generation of electrolyzers, we need 10 years for that. And then also we need certain years in order to get permits, in order to show that it actually works in operation, and so on. So we're easily speaking about 10-20 years of development time for really big scale up. So I think the phase we're in now, and this is also coming back to what you said in the beginning when we spoke about the hydrogen strategy: It's showing where we want to go, and it says we need quite a lot of hydrogen. And I don't think it makes sense at the moment to really pinpoint specific numbers. The world is going to develop differently anyway. So I think the magnitude is what's important at the moment, and the magnitude globally is like, we need a lot more electrolyzers, and we need a lot more hydrogen generation, and that's what we are working on at the moment. And we're far from where we should be, or where we need to be in order to deliver even the top of your ladder in 20 years time, right? So I'm a bit more relaxed, I would say, about the whole thing, because I see it really as a process. And the process of this whole hydrogen strategy involves so many stakeholders. So an engineer's brain works much faster, right, than this whole societal policy process where things are being steered in a certain direction?

Yeah, I guess. Look, I'm not going to argue we don't need electrolyzers. I'm an advisor to an electrolyzer company, who make very efficient electrolyzers. And, you know, I do believe that we will need electrolyzers, lots of them, at some relevant point. The problem I'm having is that I'm not sure that that point is anytime soon, because we have so much work to do using electricity directly to decarbonize coal off the grid, heat pumps and electric transport. And meanwhile, in most countries, you would say a rational clean hydrogen strategy would be to do all of that with your green electricity, do some R&D and some development on electrolyzers, for sure. But meanwhile, do blue hydrogen. And by the way, I mean, do it right, but do blue hydrogen for the top of the ladder? Because those are industrial users who are already using hydrogen. They already have natural gas pipes to their plants, to their refineries, to their fertiliser plants and rather than diverting green electricity to them a huge cost in terms of making the hydrogen, huge cost in terms of the pipelines. Why not just have them do blue hydrogen today?

Blue hydrogen is a completely different technology than green hydrogen in terms of engineering. So my point is that we should start deploying electrolyzers and slowly grow them, because the magnitude we are at now is in the dimension of megawatts, and we want to go to gigawatt scale. And in order to achieve that, we need to go through trial and error. We need to put those projects on the ground, we need to make mistakes, find problems. There's a lot of problems related to getting the water and getting the electricity, so the electricity system is not endangered and all. So there's a lot of learning we need to do here. And if you're going the blue hydrogen route, you don't learn anything for that green hydrogen route. So I think you could do this, but it's a completely different trajectory, basically, and it won't give you any competitive advantage in green hydrogen in, say, 20 years. And since a defined aim always of the German hydrogen strategy has been to develop green hydrogen as an international technology leader — as I mentioned earlier, it's one of the main policy targets — it makes a lot of sense, actually, to go through that learning process.

I think that, you know, the point about becoming internationally competitive is a really interesting one. Because without that, if you were just saying, 'at some point we need green hydrogen,' I would say there's no hurry because we have so many important things to do with green electricity. And it's not like at any time in the next, one and a half decades, probably 15, even 20 years, we are not going to have enough green electricity in Europe to do coal removal, heat pumps and electric transport. And until we've done those, there is really no point from a climate perspective to use green electricity for hydrogen. Now you could say, well, we can't just step away from it completely and let somebody else have the international benefits. But there's a key assumption here, which is that at some point green hydrogen becomes competitive. And I think that that is probably wrong.

So competitive in what terms?

It would have to be competitive with blue hydrogen or competitive with grey hydrogen, because if it's not, then it's going to require subsidies and support forever, even at the top of the ladder. Unless green hydrogen is cheaper than the other ways of doing it, why would anybody do it?

So if you want to go down... I mean, what you're doing at the moment is you're going down the climate route. So you're saying, if you want to do climate mitigation, go for electrification. And we don't need that hydrogen at the moment. It's just like putting stones in the way of electric electrification, right? So what I would answer to that is that actually hydrogen is for resilience, really. Then in the end, because you do electricity or green electricity. So renewable electricity, mostly based on solar and wind, for decarbonizing electricity demand, you electrify everything you can electrify. And then, the way you just spoke, it sounded to me a bit more like the problem of when you do everything on average. Because we are in Germany already on many days in a very high renewable grid range. So we hit 80% renewables regularly. In other parts of Europe, that's even more frequent and more high, and then there's other days where it's really low. So it's a very time-dynamic problem, and I would not agree that we only need hydrogen in 10 or 20 years. So depending on how fast... So actually, for getting rid of coal and coal as a security of supply function, I would say we need hydrogen earlier, and it's not going to produce a lot of electricity, but as a backup plant for those dark, cold periods where we need a lot of electricity. It's not a lot of hydrogen you need, but you do need it at some point. And we need to start actually now. Like to have hydrogen storage, in large terms, we need to start planning now.

And I agree with that, by the way. So if I look at the hydrogen ladder as the inevitability function. But there's also this analysis that I've done: if you take one terawatt hour of green electricity, what can you do with it that enables most emission reductions? And the answer is, the only hydrogen things that you would do, one is actually steel, because when you do green steel, you're removing coking coal, which is particularly bad. So steel kind of vaguely comes into the picture. But the other thing that is in the picture, exactly as you said, is the long duration, the provision of resilience. Because there, although hydrogen is kind of in and of itself, obviously going from hydrogen to electricity, is kind of dumb. I'm doing air quotes for those listening on a podcast. But if it enables a lot more wind and solar, then of course, it's very effective. And so I may be reframing what you're saying, which is that you do it for resilience, not necessarily for direct decarbonization. Is that fair?

Yeah I think I would go with that reframing.

We'll be back after this short break to continue our conversation with Eva Schmid.

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Let me come back to the costs, because we had this figure of €4 billion euros, or up to €4 billion. And then there's some other things for the pipelines. But I'm looking at...

Yeah the €4 billion is for electrification and hydrogen, just to not confuse that.

Right, so I said up to €4 billion. And I want to look at the question of the cost of hydrogen, because very provocatively, I said it's not going to be competitive. So let me explain why I think that. So all of the hydrogen strategies around the world, 56 of them and lots of corporate hydrogen strategies as well, they all were predicated on the cost of green hydrogen coming down to somewhere around $1, or €1 and so on. The problem is that the projects that are actually working their way through the system, and very few of them have reached a final investment decision, but the projects that have gone through the system, the costs are more like €6-15. So you know, $8-18, whatever it is, dollars. And of course, it's very easy to say, 'Look what happened to the price of solar. Look what happened to the price of batteries.' But the challenge with those high figures, let's call it €6, is that only a small amount of it is actually the electrolyzer. This is based on data out of TNO in Holland recently, 40% of it is the cost of electricity, which is not going to plummet. And then you've got another 40% or so, which is the cost of heavy engineering. So you're talking pumps and heat exchangers and pipes and flanges and tanks and civil engineering and electricity substations. And only 11% was the cost of the electrolyzer, which is what everybody in Europe thinks is going to be so valuable, and the equivalent of batteries and solar for China, at least, the EU is going to try and have cheap electrolyzers. I can see how you can halve the cost of hydrogen down from €6-13.You can halve it. You are not going to drive that down in any time in the next two or three decades, to €1 per kilo, not going to get close.

I do agree with this analysis. So the narrative that hydrogen would be so cheap has always just looked at production costs in an origin country, right? And then under the most optimistic scenario... We haven't spoken about transport.

And Eva, the numbers I've just given you, €6-13, maybe halving. That's just production. That doesn't cover transport, that doesn't cover storage, that doesn't cover distribution, and it doesn't cover any of the extra costs at the user side. So it is massively out of the money. Hydrogen is massively more expensive than any other feasible way of achieving the same thing.

So the current development of offtake agreements is the most precious category that's out there. So everybody who's trying to find offtake reflects exactly what you're saying.

Here's why I come back to the €4 billion, the up to €4 billion because the way I do the maths is supposing that clean hydrogen was €1 per kilo more expensive than gray hydrogen for a particular use. And so if you take a demand for a million tons of hydrogen, that turns into a €1 billion problem per year. But if you need 15 years off take before you can build a plant, a €1 cost problem turns into a €15 billion missing money problem. But that's only for €1. If you've got a €3 problem per kilo, which I can't imagine how we can have less than that, then you've got €45 billion euros of missing money to make 1 million tons of hydrogen. And you know, the German hydrogen strategy needs 3 million tons. So that's €135 billion. And you've got up to €4 billion. How can you square this? How can anybody square this?

And so the €4 billion, as I said, with this particular number, they are bidding on the most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. So I think I would like to reframe the challenge in a way that it's about the willingness to pay. Because, an offtaker will only agree or sign hydrogen offtake if the willingness to pay functions with the offered price. And I find it well, it's not very analytically crazy. It's a direct result from giving a quota that the willingness to pay from the refineries is so high at the moment, because the way that policy has been formulated, with quotas in red to for the mobility sector just forces them to get that hydrogen right. Or electricity, actually, so they could use electricity or hydrogen, and then your willingness to pay gets much higher. And I mean, it strongly depends on the product. So because with green steel, you have then a green premium, and then it depends on the end product, where it's put in, and it depends on the order of or the share of that green premium in the end product. So, these incentives are being distributed, and I think I would find it interesting to rephrase your ladder in a willingness to pay way. So what you're saying is completely right, but the question is, who's going to pay for and who's going to do the investment? How do you organise a policy and regulation framework that people believe each other? Because currently, nobody's willing to sign very long offtake contracts, while investments in production and distribution or transport will only take place if they find long-term offtake agreements. And we're just discussing a circle here, you know.

But that's when I come back to my egg and egg problem. I don't think it's a question of the costs not going down because people don't sign the contract, and the people don't sign the contract because the costs are so high. The problem is, in order to drive down the costs... Well, if we don't believe you can drive down the costs, then it's simply a question of where is the missing money supposed to come from? So you're right, of course, if you do have a quota, then the price can go, I don't want to say infinitely high, but it can go incredibly high. So then you say, well, that solves the problem, except that it kind of doesn't, because it will drive up the cost of a flight if it's aviation fuel, it will drive up the cost of road transport, freight fuels, and it has two consequences. It has a huge inflationary consequence on the economy, and it has a political consequence. And we're sitting here, we're recording this two days after the elections in Thuringia, and I'm not sure where the other election in Germany was, but you know, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can't suck hundreds of billions of euros out of a European or a German economy without consequences. And I think that that's where this is going. It is literally hundreds of billions that needs to be found. And it can be found through a quota. It can be found through a hydrogen bank. It could be found through any mechanism you want, but it is an economic drag, and I think it's a political problem.

So the quota that I refer to is formulated in a way that you could either deliver it with electricity. You actually get even more credit for it than with hydrogen or with hydrogen. And if you formulate it in that way, the market can decide whether to use electricity or hydrogen, and then if electricity is more efficient, it will go into electricity, and we won't have that problem that you showed, or it solves itself in a way, because hydrogen will prove to be more expensive. I would say at the moment, the market will realise that these expectations were not right. So we are learning, and everybody will learn that you will not get this cheap hydrogen, as has been narrated. And then a whole lot of actors will figure out a different route for decarbonization, because they have learned hydrogen will be expensive, right? So I think we are actually in this phase where a lot of actors are realising this. And then with all those energy system models, I think they also need to really check their numbers whether they have reflected all the costs. And then second, when you say this has strong consequences. I mean, if it is that expensive, it should be reflected in the end price, and then we need to debate basically, what we're willing to pay. So this idea that we get decarbonization for free is not, it's not going to happen, right? So we can get it as cost effective as possible, and that's where hydrogen will not play a role that's as inflated as it has been before. And I think the German hydrogen strategy, if you look at the three updates, so to say, you can also see the learning here. And that's why I mentioned in the beginning that in the import strategy, the demand cases or use cases that are shown, really reflect your hydrogen ladder in terms of unavoidability. And then I guess there will be a price to pay for the green molecules.

And that's incredibly pragmatic. And in preparation for this, I was just really looking forward to it, because I see you as this incredibly pragmatic figure, pragmatic voice within, I don't want to say, a sea of madness and delusion. But I mean, there's elements of that, because, you've got these strategies which talk about numbers of millions of tons, which would cost hundreds of billions of euros, and you've got this very pragmatic view. I guess my question is: is it not bizarre to be sitting where you're sitting, working on an import strategy or a pipeline strategy that has to be based on some understanding of the volume of hydrogen that will be used. But the volume that's been calculated is completely untethered from a realistic view of what it's going to cost.

So I would not describe it as drastic as you did, because I think for example, what they call the langfristszenarien...

The long-term scenarios, yeah.

They are calculated by researchers in Germany, and those numbers are often used for policy orientation. Their assumptions, they don't diverge that dramatically from what your worldview is, I would say.

I think they do. Because if they're talking about 14 million tons of clean hydrogen in the German economy by 2045, those sorts of numbers, which is I think what they say. I think they're going to be out by, certainly by five. If you're already working on a pipeline plan based on those numbers, the government is going to start entering into contracts and underwriting investments. It's very challenging, surely?

Then maybe we go back to what I said in the very beginning. I see this as an orientation that we need much more than today. I think I've done so much energy system modelling that I know that you can tweak models very strongly or very easily, in the sense that the results differ very much. So for me, a magnitude of five in total. So if it's a part of the solution, then it's five times higher, that for me, is not a very big number, even though, if it might be. It depends on how large the numbers are in the first place, right? But with models, you can change the efficiency, for example, you can tweak them incredibly. You get so much cheaper results and so on and so forth. So what are energy system models? They just show you how a future could develop under your range of assumptions. And they're super insecure in the sense we don't know much about 2045, we can change and shape a lot. So it just gives you orientation, and that's what it is. So when you said we need all those numbers for planning, I think you need to have a bit of a deeper look at the planning process. And the planning process is a rolling process, so every two years, the framework conditions are looked at again, and they can actually be changed. And there's also independent reviewers, and there's the regulator that looks at this, and so on. So you can have a two-year learning cycle, basically. And if you look at the past 15 years of scenario development, also in Europe, and also for the electricity system, for example, I think the system that developed is quite functional, and I find there's reason to believe that this learning that I referred to earlier can be reflected in this policy process and also in this core grid. The way the planning process for the core grid is now organised, there's actually incentives for the TSOs (transmission system operators) to plan in a realistic way, because it also includes... so they need to pay fines if they don't deliver what they said they would deliver, and so on and so forth.

I'm just, I'm sort of wincing because like I say, I think it's a very pragmatic and admirable perspective. But you know, if you've got a cost for the net gas network, which is €30 per megawatt hour to transport hydrogen. And if you're out by a factor of five, that becomes €150 per megawatt hour. And by the way, that's a megawatt hour of hydrogen, you know. And so there's some other factors that you'd need to multiply it by. So the difference between, in a sense, Michael's — I'm going to call it, you know more, I don't even want to call it bearish — I call it my realistic scenario, and the scenarios that are espoused. And you know, when you say there's peer review. There's peer review that has got us here. It's got to this point. I mean, this is the peer review at the EU level, where the European Court of Auditors said that the figures at the EU had no robust basis at all. And was the Court of Auditors last month called for a reset at the European level. And so when you say things like, the TSOs have to sign off the gas distribution network. They are desperate to maintain the — I don't know, I don't want to — should I call it the fiction that this is all going to happen, because otherwise they have to start dismantling their gas network. And so you've got you talk about scenarios. You have two scenarios for 2045, one is 7,000 kilometres of gas, of high pressure gas networks, and one is 8,000 kilometres. What if the right number is 500 kilometres or 1,000 kilometres? And you can say,, in two years time, every two years, we think about it. But if during those two years, you've pulled the trigger on investments underwritten by the state that are based on a 7,000 or 8,000 kilometre network — 1,800 kilometres is supposed to be in place by 2030 — what on earth is it going to carry?

So I think you need to disentangle a little bit here. So the one question that I asked myself when listening to you was, 'what is right?' So how do you know what is right to plan, and what are your criteria for assessing what is right? So in a more stepping back way, the problem you have here is how to actually plan, regulate and build infrastructure in a very dynamic environment, because we are on-the-fly designing the markets, for example, for electricity. We're developing the technology and so on and so forth, but you still are forced to implement and build infrastructure with huge lead times and very long lifetimes. So it's not a very nice problem to solve, right? Because either way you turn, it's something that you need to decide under uncertainty. So that's why I said 'what is right?' So we don't really know what is right and what to do now in this situation. And primarily what to do as a state or a regulator who's responsible. And I think the role of the regulator here is to actually take some risk, because it's a risk that the market won't take, and then you need to make some smart decisions. And you also need to make some decisions in the first place, right? Because there's this idea of an overdimensioned grid, this is exactly what you're saying right now. What is an under-dimensioned grid? So what are the risks and costs associated with building too little versus building too high? So you need to look at this. And then there's also this idea that you need to build something after all, right? Because the way you put it… so the way it's built in Germany, or the way it's organised, is not that the state is now guaranteeing all these projects. It sounded a little bit like this, right? So what's happening now is that the TSOs give the regulator an idea of what kind of grid they want to build, and then, on a project by project basis, the regulator is looking at this and every two years it's saying, 'Oh, we don't need that, or we do need that line.' So for all the lines that are now being checked by the regulator, basically every two years they can revise their decision. So here's a learning element that I said. Now you say you don't find it credible as a process, but from my point of view, you're kind of undermining your own argument when you say that it actually works with the Court of Auditors, because that's also an element of the state system, and that did work, so...

Well not really because the European Commission turned around and said that they have nothing to answer and that the European Court of Auditors are simply wrong. And by the way, the only problem is that we're not spending enough on hydrogen. That was kind of what they said. And I suppose, no, I don't say that the process isn't credible in that there isn't a machine there. The question is whether the machine can react to learning in the way that you suggested. In other words, if in another two or three years, it becomes absolutely clear that Germany and Europe is going to achieve 10% of the hydrogen strategies that were laid out in 2020 or even 2023, how much will have been wasted? How much money will have been spent and is there any process whereby a really big reset might happen?

So the way the support for the core grid is organised, is it's paying a difference on the tariffs. So until there's now tariffs being paid, there is no money flow, right? So, because you were worried about state budgets disappearing into investments that are not worthwhile at the moment, there is no investment because it's basically saying, if there's tariffs in the future, we will pay a difference for that. And so I think it's organised in a very smart way, because it gives incentives, or it gives a security to the grid operators that they can have competitive... or not even competitive... that they can have tariffs in the future that somebody's willing to pay, because it's an inter-temporal time allocation problem, who will pay what part of the tariff?

But if they build and then the volumes are insufficient, there is an underwriter. The state has, or is planning to underwrite that, correct? Even in the absence of any hydrogen, if the TSO is billed, then they will get paid, no?

It's formulated for the tariffs. So they support tariffs. So only if there's a transaction, there's actually a payment.

Then it simply won't get built. Which is, in my book, probably the right decision.

That's why policy formulation is so interesting and also so important, because it gives the incentives for the market to do things right. So at the moment, everybody's saying that we can move along. So we will see. But what I find most important about this other one, because you were kind of frying me about the numbers, right? So what are we going to do? I think it's better to have some numbers that give a clear mission with a clear target, and then learn and have regular updates of that cycle, because otherwise, we're just waiting for the right numbers to be calculated. But things are changing, so...

You know, I've said that I'm in favour of the hydrogen bank approach. Because, in a way, what you then say is, here's the budget to experiment with this stuff and see if we can get some of it done. And you have a fixed amount of money, it doesn't go crazy, and you see if you can get it done. And what we're learning is that actually we can't. And I know that, just finally on imports, Germany is pursuing that approach with H2 Global. So you're not administering it, as you said, but the idea is that there is a pot of money to be used to bring in either hydrogen or a derivative from overseas. What's the status of that?

So the first round has been closed on the buying side, but not on the selling side. So we're waiting for results. I don't have any more news about that, and we have really nothing to do with H2 Global. That's a completely different organisation.

On that, I guess I'm really fascinated to see at what price it clears, if it's a well structured auction. Because, there are these inflated numbers of 20 was it? Yeah, 10 million tons of hydrogen to be imported by 2030 from Namibia, Canada, Chile, etc. I don't think any of that's going to happen, I've got to be honest.

So if some of us knew what the future is going to be, we could be a very... So it's completely unclear, right? So we don't know, I would say we don't know, in the sense that this is what some people want. And you're telling everybody, pretty much, that this is not going to turn out because of the economics, right?

Right. It's because we know that a kilo of hydrogen, imported as liquid hydrogen, is going to cost something like €10 or 12, so it's going to be completely uneconomic, not even close to economic, in any use-case in the economy. So could you through a hydrogen bank, could you achieve some of that? Or the same with even ammonia, which of course is easier to transport, but appallingly inefficient end to end. So you get 20% end to end efficiency, and therefore also incredibly eye-wateringly expensive within the economy if you try and go that route. Can some of it happen? If you throw money at it, can some of it happen? Yes, but can it happen on the scale that is in these strategies by a factor of 10? It's inconceivable. At some point it just feels to me like there has to be a real, you know, you've described a very sort of iterative process of learning and adjusting and learning a bit more adjusting, and stakeholders and so on. I just think at some point it's just throw up your hands and start again time.

So when I said we don't know what's going to happen, I was referring to the definition that the future is uncertain. And then sometimes things happen that you did not expect to happen. For example, two years ago, when we started to have the energy crisis in Germany and Europe, and it was something that we could have known that would happen. It wasn't that unexpected, but still, a lot of people were surprised by it. And then also, the willingness to pay for energy, for example, changed significantly. So when I said we don't know what's going to happen, I tried to refer to the fact that we don't really know which future we will find ourselves in. And then, to a certain extent, we can steer it to a certain extent, we can see where things are going. I think that's mainly what you're describing, because we can see where technology trends are going, and we can have expectations and so on and so forth, and then we can also influence the development by means of policy formulation, for example. And I would say what you're criticising at the moment is a vision that you find the assumptions are not valid for. And I do agree with a lot of aspects of that, and I think some aspects of it will simply not materialise because nobody's willing to write a contract or sign a contract on this. But I do think that a kind of scaled-up, more focused version will take place if we actually mean climate mitigation seriously, and if we want a resilient climate future, which is what we should want. And then the willingness to pay changes right. And here, the role of the derivatives, for example, also changes. And if it's for supporting or for developing German European industry, then there's also other policy goals and motives that increase the willingness to pay in some for those derivatives, for example.

Now look, I agree with a more focused and a more resilience based vision. So for instance, even if ammonia-based power generation is incredibly expensive, if it's only required 2% of the year, you don't care that much. If it's 25% of the year, you care a lot. And so a more focused scenario is probably realistic, and in fact, it's needed because we do have dirty hydrogen in the system, in petrochemicals and in fertilisers and so on. I guess I cannot help thinking that what's happening is that in Germany, there's been this huge shock, the loss of cheap Russian gas, and that people are grasping at hydrogen as though it'll be some kind of a replacement, and that it's geo-strategically important to lead the industry, because it's going to be the way of the world, the way of the future, the kind of McKinsey Hydrogen Council, 600 million tons a year, 20% of all energy going into hydrogen. And therefore it's important to lead. And I guess I worry very, very much that that is distracting from the real business of decarbonization.

I think that every time you mention hydrogen, we should mention that we need electricity to produce green hydrogen in the first place, and then I don't think it distracts that much. So I know what you mean, and I do see that in the debate. But my personal take is that it doesn't have to be that way, and it shouldn't be that way, because if the electricity market delivers any of its... if it holds its work basically, then it should also deliver an outcome that's not going to be in that direction.I'm pretty relaxed about it, in a way, because I don't see that any of this, materialises, and I don't see the danger of this kind of... I mean, you put it in a way that the electrolyzers are taking away the electricity, right?

Well, in a world of constrained space, constrained supply chains, constrained talent, constrained investor attention. Yeah, of course they do. But then

But then if there's other actors that need the electricity more, more that they have a higher willingness to pay, they should get the contracts.

But they don't have a high willingness to pay in a world where hydrogen is being emphasised and over-subsidized. I mean, so look sadly, sadly, tragically, because I really enjoy this, we're out of time. And let's say I'm filled with respect, for your pragmatism and your calmness and your willingness to go through this process of successive learning stages. I, of course, see things a little differently. That's not a surprise, but I am enormously filled with respect for you.

Thanks. I think at some point resilience as a motive for hydrogen will become a more dominant factor in the debate, because I think it's much more going to be about disentangling hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives, and that it's ultimately industry that will be decarbonized. And I think you mentioned the current state of political debate in Germany and also in Europe. Having a resilient industry in Germany and Europe is very high on the priority. And I think here we have a more on point debate to be started, how hydrogen can help with that.

And I guess I totally agree that the resilience point is going to increase in salience. My big worry is that whilst I agree with that in terms of electricity resilience, so hydrogen storage in salt caverns or ammonia or methyl, whatever it is, yes. My big worry is seeing hydrogen as a way of making German industry resilient, when I worry that it makes German industry uncompetitive, the opposite of resilient. And I guess that's where we will need to sort of disagree and leave it well,

It's a global challenge. So for everybody who is doing decarbonization, that's the same challenge. So we will have a global take on that.

Agreed, agreed, unless, of course, they go electric. But let's leave it there.

All right.

Thank you very, very much, Eva, really a pleasure.

Thank you.

So that was Eva Schmid, Director of Hydrogen and Synthetic Energy Carriers at the Deutsche Energie-Agentur, DENA.as always, we'll put links in the show notes to resources that we mentioned during our conversation. So that's Germany's 2020 hydrogen strategy and its 2023 update, as well as its national import strategy for hydrogen and its pipeline strategy. As well as, of course, links to the EU hydrogen strategy, the European Court of Auditors scathing report on that strategy and the European Commission's response. As always, many thanks to the growing team behind the scenes here at Cleaning Up. And make sure you join us at the same time next week for another episode.

The Great Hydrogen Reset — Is It Germany's Turn? Ep176: Eva Schmid

Michael Liebreich

Eva Schmid

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