Germany’s 6 GW hydrogen headline shrinks sharply once the reservations and planned network are unpacked.
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
Germany’s hydrogen industry finally has a demand number it can put in a headline: nearly 6 GW of paid reservations on the country’s emerging hydrogen core network. FNB Gas presented the reservations and customers’ willingness to pay as a strong indication that the hydrogen economy is gathering momentum. Six gigawatts certainly sounds like momentum. It sounds considerably less impressive once the number is unpacked.
The headline combines roughly 2.7 GW of hydrogen entry reservations with about 2.3 GW of exit reservations, plus roughly 0.5–0.6 GW of inter-cluster transport capacity. Entry and exit are perfectly sensible categories for a pipeline operator, but adding them together does not measure hydrogen demand. Hydrogen injected into the network at one location and withdrawn at another can appear once as entry capacity and again as exit capacity.
