Letter from Hamburg: Germany’s hydrogen rethink

Government promotes greater flexibility in policy and regulation as it concedes mistakes were made in initial stages of industry’s development

The clean hydrogen sector has passed its “peak of inflated expectations” and entered its “trough of disillusionment”. Next comes the industry’s period of “enlightenment”, followed eventually by its “plateau of productivity”, according to one speaker at the Hydrogen Technology World Expo in Hamburg, Germany in October.  The terminology here may sound familiar—it is from Gartner’s Hype Cycle, a methodology used to try to illustrate the journey of new technologies from inception to deployment at scale. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, CEO of industry association Hydrogen Europe, used a simpler analysis: The sector has “bottomed out”, he told the conference. The industry’s progress to its next stage of evo