Energy Transition and Sector Coupling: The Impact of Renewable Hydrogen on Energy Infrastructures and Business Models

Climate change is one of, if not the major global challenge of the 21st century. The impacts of climate change have the potential to alter life on Earth fundamentally. Climate change mitigation through renewable energies offers great and sustainable economic potential. Sector coupling technologies provide opportunities to defossilise the industrial or transportation sectors by transferring greenhouse gas emission-free renewable energy from sources like wind and solar power plants. Renewable hydrogen from power-to-gas is a key element of this process. This dissertation addresses the questions of the changes in the energy system, the energy infrastructures and the business models associated with the application of renewable hydrogen. The challenge is to set the adequate regulatory framework and market conditions for developing the necessary infrastructure and business models of renewable hydrogen to enable the potential contribution to the defossilisation of the energy system and sustainable development.
This dissertation investigates the changes in the energy system focusing on the necessary hydrogen infrastructure and business models. The analyses of the hydrogen infrastructure use approaches from optimisation. Candidates for a hydrogen transport network are identified using the Steiner tree algorithm. The investigation of greenhouse gas-neutral development pathways in the gas distribution grids uses the shortest path approach of the model network analysis. Techno-economic aspects of renewable hydrogen in decentral energy systems are modelled with the linear optimisation framework OEMOF.solph and cover infrastructure aspects of power-to-gas. The business models of renewable hydrogen are assessed with a combination of a qualitative evaluation and a quantitative discounted-cashflow approach. The impact of regulatory changes is investigated through a sensitivity analysis. The regulatory measures to promote and develop the necessary infrastructure and business models are subsequently discussed.
The results show that renewable hydrogen is crucial for the defossilisation of the industrial, long-distance transportation and heavy-duty transportation sectors by providing a greenhouse gas-neutral and flexible energy carrier to sectors that are otherwise hard to decarbonise. Due to the scarcity of renewable hydrogen, the infrastructure and the necessary business models should primarily focus on these sectors. However, the necessary infrastructure and the profitability of business models are currently not achievable. The analysis of the adjusted regulatory framework and market conditions indicates that measures beyond direct support of renewable hydrogen are necessary. In this context, priority measures to achieve sustainable and renewable development are the carbon dioxide price, integrated planning of the energy infrastructures and improved coordination of the framework conditions across the markets of the different energy carriers. The optimal design of these measures and coordination between the sectors opens opportunities for further research.