At a press con­fer­ence Peter Alt­maier, Fed­er­al Min­is­ter for Eco­nom­ic Affairs and Ener­gy, announced that Westküste100 is to be one of the first real-world lab­o­ra­to­ries of the ener­gy tran­si­tion in Ger­many. This gives the consortium’s nine part­ners the chance step by step to cre­ate an indus­tri­al-scale region­al hydro­gen econ­o­my and make an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to meet­ing cli­mate pro­tec­tion tar­gets.

Heide/Berlin, 18 July 2019 — It was good news from Berlin today for the cross-sec­tor part­ner­ship com­pris­ing EDF Deutsch­land, Hol­cim Deutsch­land, Open Grid Europe, Ørst­ed, Raf­finer­ie Hei­de, Heide’s munic­i­pal util­i­ty com­pa­ny and thyssenk­rupp Indus­tri­al Solu­tions — togeth­er with the Hei­de Region Devel­op­ment Agency and the FH West­küste Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences: the Westküste100 project will be one of the eco­nom­ics ministry’s few “real-world lab­o­ra­to­ries of the ener­gy tran­si­tion” and, through its ini­tia­tives, it will help accel­er­ate the trans­fer of tech­nol­o­gy and inno­va­tion from research to prac­tice. Westküste100 thus becomes one of a series of projects to receive fund­ing under the ENTREE100 ini­tia­tive. Oth­ers include CAMPUS100, QUARREE100 und KEROSyN100.

The project received spe­cial sup­port from the Schleswig-Hol­stein state gov­ern­ment. In the deci­sion-mak­ing phase, state pre­mier Daniel Gün­ther and mem­bers of his cab­i­net repeat­ed­ly point­ed out the inno­v­a­tive­ness of this project in Germany’s most norther­ly state as well as its huge ben­e­fits for Germany’s tran­si­tion to renew­able ener­gies. “With the planned real-world lab­o­ra­to­ry, unused elec­tric­i­ty from wind ener­gy will be con­vert­ed into green hydro­gen and utilised. The west coast is the opti­mum site for this inno­v­a­tive facil­i­ty.  As an ener­gy tran­si­tion cham­pi­on, Schleswig-Hol­stein can ben­e­fit par­tic­u­lar­ly from the real-world lab­o­ra­to­ry,” stat­ed Daniel Gün­ther.

At the heart of the project work is the joint vision of a com­pre­hen­sive cross-sec­tor part­ner­ship – from the gen­er­a­tion of green elec­tric­i­ty to the pro­duc­tion of syn­thet­ic hydro­car­bons, includ­ing the util­i­sa­tion of heat.

The part­ners aim to make an active con­tri­bu­tion to the tran­si­tion to renew­ables and dri­ve decar­bon­i­sa­tion for­ward. In the com­ing weeks the con­sor­tium will pre­pare a project descrip­tion based on the pro­pos­al out­line to pave the way for work to begin at the start of 2020.

“With this result we’ve moved a big step clos­er to our goal to make fly­ing, build­ing and heat­ing more sus­tain­able in the future,” said Jür­gen Wollschläger, project coor­di­na­tor and man­ag­ing direc­tor of Raf­finer­ie Hei­de. “The Westküste100 part­ners are delight­ed with all the insti­tu­tions and asso­ci­a­tions that gave their back­ing to our real-world lab­o­ra­to­ry project and will con­tin­ue to back it in future.”

Back­ground: The Westküste100 real-world lab­o­ra­to­ry project

The West­küste 100 research and devel­op­ment project aims to pro­duce green hydro­gen from off­shore wind ener­gy and utilise the waste heat gen­er­at­ed in the process. The green hydro­gen will then be used to pro­duce cli­mate-friend­ly avi­a­tion fuels and also fed into gas grids. Unavoid­able CO₂ from a region­al cement plant in Schleswig-Hol­stein will be used in the fuel man­u­fac­tur­ing process.

Con­tact for queries: Christoph Lapczy­na | PLÜCOM

Tel. +49 40 790 21 89 90, cl@pluecom.de