EU lead for policy assistance think tank RAP Jan Rosenow talks with me about decarbonizing building heat.
Recently I sat down virtually with energy policy expert Jan Rosenow of RAP on my podcast “Redefining Energy — Tech” to discuss how residential and commercial building heat solutions. In the theme of providing transcripts of presentations I’m giving in various places for people who prefer the written word, this is the lightly edited transcript of the first half of our conversation.Hello and welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard.
From the discussion in the US or in Europe. But the way how we work is similar. And how are we putting food on the table, how you put it? Well, we have a number of different funding sources. One is philanthropy. So we write a work program that we would like to accomplish and then try to find funders who are willing to support that. So that’s kind of one important income stream. We do a lot of work also with government. So we have a number of direct government contracts.
But in the run up to that, there’s a lot of back and forth, different proposals, different alternatives being discussed, external parties coming in, making suggestions. It’s a really complex undertaking. Once you have it, then you have a framework for 27 countries, and usually that framework is in place for several years, and then the next framework is built based on that.
I’d say it’s now you can see that we’ve kind of reached the peak of that hype, and it’s hitting reality a little more and bit by bit, I think we’re getting a little more clarity where there are actually useful applications of green hydrogen and possibly even blue hydrogen. But yeah, I think this, there are these waves of hypes and why, you know, the question is sort of why is that? I guess, why do we see, why are policymakers, the public, our community, right.
So we don’t want the policymakers to focus all their efforts on using hydrogen in cars or for heating. We want that hydrogen. So there’s kind of this. This is now happening. We’re seeing that sectors that really need it are getting, or think they need it, getting quite concerned about the distraction that we’re seeing in the debate around hydrogen, where it’s being supposedly used in pretty much all applications, which it clearly won’t be.
I mean, 10 million is a round number, but who came up with the analysis behind it? And it turns out that it’s based on an industry figure. It’s based on what the industry that wants to be part of the hydrogen economy is suggesting what Europe should be doing, and that was adopted as a commission’s target. When you kind of backtrack where you find it and it’s still there, we still have that target, but we are now seeing that there’s a huge gap.
I think the question is, I think the fundamentals of is it scalable and can it be scaled with significant cost reductions? Right.
So we have to find a way to decarbonize. What could this look like? There are really not that many options. Sometimes it appears that they are like all these different technologies. We don’t know what we should be doing. I think it’s a limited set of options that we really have that are realistic. I mean, one option is to burn biomass or biogas. We’re seeing that in some places where this is happening, especially in Scandinavian countries.
And we’re seeing that again in Scandinavia, in Denmark, but also in Finland, where thermal storage connected to district heating is now being used to essentially use cheap solar in the summer and heat up. Maybe it’s an underground water storage, and then using it in the winter by using a heat pump, putting it back into district heating. Much cheaper than battery electric storage. Very simple technology. So I like district heating because of its versatility.
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