Does Europe need a hydrogen network?

[Fabian Neumann]

Dear openmodders,

Does Europe need a hydrogen network? Not necessarily, but it could be more cost-effective, especially when electricity grid expansion stalls and gas pipelines can be repurposed.

We describe this in our new open-access study "The Potential Role of a Hydrogen Network in Europe," which was just published in Joule.

This publication is our group's showpiece for open, high-resolution, all-sector, integrated energy infrastructure planning with PyPSA-Eur. It has been in the making for a long time and builds on some of the open data collected by this community. For instance, it features gas network data from the SciGRID_gas project [1], as well as data on industrial sites from the Hotmaps project [2].

We are also very grateful to the Danish Energy Agency for providing up-to-date technology data [3] and the EU's JRC for making the JRC-IDEES energy statistics database [4] available.

Link to the study: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2542-4351(23)00266-0

Link to interactive dashboard: https://h2-network.streamlit.app

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.06.016

If you have any feedback, are curious, or simply want to exchange thoughts on this topic, feel free to reach out to me.

Best wishes,

Fabian

(also on behalf of co-authors Tom Brown, Elisabeth Zeyen and Marta Victoria)

[1] https://www.gas.scigrid.de/
[2] https://gitlab.com/hotmaps/industrial_sites/industrial_sites_Industrial_Database
[3] https://ens.dk/en/our-services/projections-and-models/technology-data
[4] https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/182725

--
Dr.-Ing.
Fabian Neumann (he/him)
Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of Digital Transformation in Energy Systems
Institute of Energy Technology
Technische Universität Berlin

Group website: https://www.tu.berlin/ensys
Personal website: https://neumann.fyi

Einsteinufer 25 (TA 8)
10587 Berlin