Perspective change workshop - 'Making sector integration concrete: Innovation Potential of Power-to-Gas?'

22 April 2020

Organised by: Germanwatch

On 22-23 April 2020, Germanwatch held an interactive ‘perspective change’ workshop for German stakeholders on the topic of Power-to-Gas.

The purpose of the workshop was to give room to discussions on this technology allow participants to exchange perspectives, identify issues with a high area of agreement, points which need further discussions, open questions and recommendations to politics. Input was aggregated in the form of mindmaps. Translations into English of the mindmaps are available below, as well as a full report in German of the workshop’s results.

This workshop focussed on Power-to-Gas technology (P2G). Under the title “Making sector integration concrete: Innovation Potential of Power-to-Gas?”, Germanwatch discussed with around 50 participants how we can embed the innovative technology into the energy system in a meaningful way in order to promote sector integration. Germanwatch also wanted to know from the participants whether the connected-cellular approach to power-to-gas provides good answers to the energy system questions.

The central results of the workshop included:

The majority of participants agreed that climate neutrality can only be achieved with the help of power-to-gas.
The majority of participants were convinced that the central prerequisites for this are the accelerated expansion of renewable energies and the exploitation of as yet untapped efficiency potential.
The use of green hydrogen in industry and for the decarbonisation of air and sea transport was supported by most participants.
The decentralised use of power-to-gas, on the other hand, was still fraught with many open questions.
There was broad support for a progressive expansion of the transmission networks even with greater integration of power-to-gas technology.
Many of the participants shared the view that the next step should be to sharpen the common vision and the requirements for the new regulatory framework and market design to allow a meaningful integration of power-to-gas into the system.

An overview of the discussion and its results can be found in our results documentation, which can be downloaded on this page (in German).

Due to the changed conditions caused by Covid-19, the workshop, which was originally planned as a face-to-face event, took place online via Zoom. On the first day of the workshop, the participants got to know the different actors and their respective perspectives and jointly identified the central issues regarding the role and use of power-to-gas in the integrated energy system. On the 2nd day of the workshop, solutions and answers to the questions identified the day before were worked out together and the next necessary steps were put forward.

This workshop took place as part of the broader RGI / Germanwatch project, ‘Shaping the Grid Debate’, which seeks to advance the debate between different civil society actors and the broader public on the topic of renewable energy and the electricity grid. To read more, click on the relevant links below.