For Robert Habeck (Greens) it could be a home game, this Monday morning in the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce at the energy conference of the “North German real laboratory”. A complete supply of the north with renewable energies from the middle of the coming decade is outlined in this large “showcase project” initiated by the federal government and the basics are already being promoted in concrete terms.
This is Habeck’s world, that’s where he comes from, the former long-standing Minister of the Environment of Schleswig-Holstein, who has been Federal Minister of Economics and Energy since the end of 2021. But the appearance in the Chamber of Commerce is not a home game, despite the repeated applause that the 300 visitors in the auditorium give it.
A full supply of renewable energies is still far away, far too far for the threat of a massive energy crisis triggered in February by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. There are no more home games and there are less and less reliable rules in general. “We’re in a phase where you have to constantly question yourself,” says Habeck.
As part of the daily improvisation, the minister also explains the deficits in the gas levy this morning. This surcharge from the consumer community is intended to protect gas suppliers from going under if they lack the liquidity to replace Russian gas in view of the sharp rise in natural gas prices. But the concept is not mature, and the minister knows that.
“There is a problem with free riders that was not sufficiently recognized at the beginning,” says Habeck about those companies that could use the funds from a gas levy without actually needing it. “We will exclude such free riders when revising the concept, we are working on that.”
Overall, Habeck expects gas prices to relax. At the beginning of September, 85 percent of German natural gas storage facilities were filled with natural gas, far more than was expected weeks ago: “We will no longer buy natural gas at any price, so the markets will calm down. In any case, we will provide those utility companies that depend on it with the necessary liquidity. That is why there will be no chain reaction on the energy market like the one that followed the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers at the beginning of the global financial market crisis.”
Against this backdrop, the prospect of a full supply of renewable energies seems almost heavenly. In the three coastal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, 53 partners of the North German Reallabor are currently working on completely restructuring the energy supply, including all the important energy suppliers in the north, industrial companies, universities, research institutes and public administrations.
Industry is investing more than 300 million euros in the 22 so-called “demonstrators”, primarily electrolysers for the production of “green” hydrogen using wind and solar power. But pipelines and a number of technological interfaces between the individual markets for electricity, heat and fuel are also being set up in the “real world laboratory”.
Habeck’s ministry is funding the network project, which is scheduled to last five years until 2026, with 52 million euros. “The hydrogen strategy that is on paper in Germany and in many other countries around the world is being implemented here,” says Hamburg’s Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD), who recently campaigned for new hydrogen networks in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile Has. “What we are doing here is exemplary for what we need globally for climate protection.”
Germany would probably have needed networks that represent a realistic overall scenario for an energy transition many years earlier. Because a project like the North German Reallabor also shows the massive deficits that have to be remedied for a stronger supply of renewable energies, in the storage of energy, in digitization or the interfaces between the energy markets.
Habeck, however, cannot be blamed for this omission. Rather Union and SPD, who have delayed a faster transformation of the energy system in the previous federal governments for years.
The north is much more advanced than the south of Germany when it comes to expanding renewable energies. This is mainly due to the high yield from wind power on land and off the coast. Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania can already provide for themselves mathematically.
Both countries want to significantly expand renewable energies as part of the overall German energy transition policy. In the scenario of the North German real laboratory, Hamburg, as the largest German industrial city and at the same time the largest seaport in the country, will in future be supplied mainly with green electricity from the neighboring federal states. There should also be imported “green” hydrogen from countries such as Denmark, Iceland, Canada, but also from Saudi Arabia and Australia.
A new competition on the German coasts is already emerging in the hydrogen projects: “Rostock will become the largest German port for the import and processing of green hydrogen. Take it sporty, Mr. Tschentscher,” said State Secretary Ines Jesse (SPD) at the real laboratory conference on Hamburg’s first mayor.
With major projects for electrolysis and a new pipeline system, the Hanseatic city also sees itself as the most important German hydrogen port in the future. Minister of Economics Habeck, in turn, registers how a new market is forming: “The ramp-up of the hydrogen economy has now become a business model for a number of companies and municipalities. I expect that we will see the first tanker with green hydrogen in Hamburg this year.”
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