From Optimistic Models To Empty Pipelines: The Intellectual History Of Germany’s Hydrogen Backbone - CleanTechnica

The article from CleanTechnica critically examines Germany’s hydrogen backbone project, emphasizing that its challenges stem not from technical issues alone but from a decade of overly optimistic intellectual assumptions embedded in studies and models. These analyses consistently underestimated the complexities and costs associated with producing, storing, distributing, and using hydrogen as a general energy carrier. Unlike hydrogen’s established industrial uses, extending it broadly into energy systems involved stacking optimistic assumptions—such as low electrolyzer costs, cheap electricity inputs, and minimal infrastructure expenses—that ignored significant energy losses and capital requirements at each stage. This led to distorted projections that portrayed large-scale hydrogen use as both feasible and necessary, despite the harsh realities of energy conversion inefficiencies and infrastructure demands. The article highlights how this optimistic consensus became entrenched within Germany’s energy policy ecosystem through a process described as gruppendenken, where research institutions, industry, and policymakers circulated similar premises without sufficient critical review. As a result, hydrogen’s role in the energy transition was treated as inevitable rather than a hypothesis to