How does Europe define "Clean Hydrogen" ?

The European Union and several of its member states are moving forward to promote clean hydrogen as a new energy carrier for a fossil-free future.  

However, as argued by JJ Bürger in an article for the French utility-centered magazine Usine Nouvelle, the European Union's approach is still too vague, leaving it up to the individual states to define what "clean hydrogen" actually means and how it should be produced. 

The discrepancy among the national approaches hinders the creation of a EU-wide common vision for clean hydrogen technologies, as argued in the article, even though Europe's position on hydrogen could have the potential to set international standards for the emerging market of clean hydrogen.

While the above-mentioned article is written in French, please do not hesitate to reach out through the comments below if you seek further information in English.

Integrating flexibility into the power grid of tomorrow

In order for the Energy Transition to succeed, the energy system of the future needs to embrace flexibility in a way that would have seemed unbelievable just a few decades ago.
Indeed, an increasing share of the electricity production will be provided by intermittent renewable resources. In addition, power consumption may become more and more flexible, due to new use cases such as e-mobility or smart homes.

In this context, it is interesting to note that research projects are increasingly focused on enabling real-life applications of Energy flexibility. For instance, the InterFlex project has recently published its final results.
InterFlex was a 3-year project, running from early 2017 to end of 2019, which investigated the use of local flexibilities to relieve distribution grid constraints.
The project aimed to develop solutions for the integration of distributed energy resources and to prepare the electric system for new uses, including electric mobility.
Six industry-scale demonstrators were set up in 5 participating countries. 

The variety of the approaches investigated by InterFlex reflects the diversity of the European energy systems and particularly of the grid infrastructure. The project’s use cases, tested in its six demonstrators in five countries, have provided their individual input to five innovation streams:

• Local Flexibility Markets
• Demand response & Customer Empowerment
• Smart Functions & Grid Automation
• Cross-Energy-Carrier Synergies
• Multi-Service Storage & Islanding

Further information is available by clicking on the above links, or by browsing through the InterFlex media Library, including videos, project deliverables and scientific publications.