Germany’s green transition is a disaster. Twenty years ago, Germany had 23 nuclear power plants that generated 30% of the country’s electricity cleanly, cheaply, and reliably. These plants have all been shut by the government as part of a commitment to clean energy. What could be cleaner? Germany has switched to a mix of wind and solar, plus a significant shift to coal power. Wind and solar use a lot of land compared to nuclear, and they break down leaving fields of debris. There is now a lack of electricity to power homes and industries, and what power there is, is unreliable, due to the many dark windless days in Germany.

The lack of reliable electricity is crippling German industry now that Russian gas has been cut off. In this environment, why would the Germans order special trains and boats that burn, hydrogen that’s made from electricity and natural gas? My understanding of the reason is that, Germany sometimes has too much wind power and nothing to do with it. They plan to store this excess by making hydrogen that they can use to power their trains and boats. The cost is high, and the efficiency is poor, but the electricity is free.

Hydrogen is not as compact a fuel as gasoline, nor is it as cheap as electricity, but it’s cleaner than gas, and in some ways it’s better than battery-stored electricity. While hydrogen takes a lot of storage space relative to gasoline, high pressure helps, and the storage is cheaper than with batteries. Also, hydrogen fuel is transferred faster than electric fuels. Trains and ships are chosen for hydrogen because they are good at carrying bulky items. The transition to hydrogen is relatively straightforward with trains, since many are already powered by electricity. Hydrogen fuel cells can make the electricity on board (in theory), while avoiding the need for expensive overhead wires. The idea sort-of makes sense.

The first German train to use hydrogen powered them with fuel cells that generated electricity. It began service in October 2022, but the fuel cells proved unreliable. Service ended one year later, October 2023, replaced by polluting diesel (see here). The Hannover line plans to replace these with battery-powered trains over the next few years. There are also plans for a hydrogen-powered ferry, but it is not clear why the ferry should prove more reliable than the train, or cheaper.

In the US, the Biden administration has paid, so far, $30 million for a hydrogen ferry in San Francisco. It’s two years behind schedule and over cost, taking only 75 passengers and no cars at 15 knots, 17mph. In the US, and likely in Germany, most of the hydrogen will be made from natural gas. A better solution, I think would be to power the ferris and trains by natural gas and to store the excess electricity in land-based batteries or as land-based hydrogen for land-based fuel cells.

Germany is committed to electric trains, though, and hydrogen provides a route to power these trains with excess electricity. German customers take the train, in part, because they like them, and in part because German politicians have banned short-hop planes on competing routes, and subsidized electric trains. Yet another option to balance times of excess solar and wind power would be to subsidize electric cars, or at least allow theirs owners to trade electricity: to buy electricity when it’s cheap and resell it to the grid when demand and prices are high.

Robert Buxbaum, June 8, 2024