The German government has also set itself the target of producing 65 percent of its energy requirements from green electricity by 2030, and one way of achieving this could be via Power-to-X (PtX). In a PtX plant, electricity produced in abundance in particularly favourable wind or solar conditions is converted for other uses. This includes the transformation of electricity into heat (Power-to-Heat, PtH), gas (Power-to-Gas, PtG), chemical products (Power-to-Chemicals, PtC) or fuels (Power-to-Fuel, PtF). In recent years, the Ministry of Economics, Innovation, Digitisation and Energy of North Rhine-Westphalia (MWIDE) has funded a project of the Virtual Institute “Electricity to Gas and Heat” in order to further explore the possibilities of the various technologies. In this virtual institute, seven research institutions from NRW (including Fraunhofer UMSICHT, Ruhr University Bochum RUB and Forschungszentrum Jülich) are working on behalf of the state government to further develop these flexibility measures, taking into account the energy market, grid stability and the constantly growing overall system. First results from the years 2015 to 2017 have now been published.
Innovation Origins 6th Jan 2019 read more »
