Christoph Steiner

24_7 ZEN, a 36-month-long project officially began on February 2023, and received a total grant of approximately €5.5 million euros from the European Commission within Horizon Europe under the Clean Hydrogen Partnership (CORDIS).

The "GreenHub" project is one of a total of eight large-scale flagship projects of the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse). Together with 16 research partners, the consortium led by OST is pursuing a clear goal: the development of systemic and innovative approaches for the production, conversion and storage of renewable energy into environmentally friendly liquid fuels using raw materials supplied, for example, by waste incineration plants.

The HEPP (High Efficiency Power-to-Gas Pilot) project will be carried out from 2017 to 2020 and realized through funding from research and industry. The research results will flow into the European Union's Horizon 2020 research framework program in the Pentagon project, which involves a total of ten institutions from academic research and industry from five European countries.

At the HEPP plant (High Efficiency Power-to-Methane Pilot), the IET Institute of Energy Technology is conducting research and development in the field of power-to-gas, power-to-X. In 2017, the power-to-gas team started this project with a lot of pioneering spirit. Today, almost four years after the first concept idea, the pioneering spirit is still present at our HEPP plant, only the pioneering romanticism has been partly caught up by everyday life.

Ebs Energie is expanding one of their hydropower plant to produce hydrogen in the summer time, when the electricity prices are low. The IET, together with HSLU supports them in this task by bringing expertise and conducting research on the project.

A large proportion of the rural population in Ethiopia suffers from energy poverty. For those affected, biomass (primarily firewood) is the only available source of energy. The overexploitation of Ethiopia's forests can only be stopped if the population has access to suitable fuel alternatives. Locally produced solar fuels using Power-to-X (P2X) could be precisely this alternative in the future. The establishment of a competence centre for solar fuels and P2X technology at the Adama Science and Technology University (ASTU) in Ethiopia is being planned and implemented to exploit this potential in the future.

The HIGGS project aims to show that the safe injection of hydrogen into the EU high pressure transmission natural gas grid is a sustainable, long-term solution to decarbonise the energy system. HIGGS is going to identify remaining weaknesses regarding H2-Readiness and develop a pathway for a stepwise integration of hydrogen in the EU gas network.