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There is no economic or practical logic to pursuing hydrogen except this - you subsidise and build out infrastructure and establish a hydrogen dependency and then admit that yes green hydrogen is far too expensive and impractical but now we've spent all this money and all these companies are going to go bankrupt and people will lose their jobs but wait, we can steam reform methane to produce hydrogen for a third of the price and I'm sure we'll get carbon capture to work eventually. It's the drug dealer business model. Either that or the whole thing is just a scam and those behind it know it's never going to be viable but can make plenty of money whilst everyone else works that out.

Great stuff. you'll need to revisit in a year or so to see if your points had an effect

heavy industry will leave Germany no matter what, which from a climate perspective is a good thing - shipping iron ore and hydrogen around the world only to produce steel is nonsense and all these inefficiencies are only holding back the cleaning up

This was a great debate on hydrogen and goes a long way to put in perspective what role it plays in energy transition.

Here in Ireland, the plan is for hydrogen to be used as the long term storage backup. This will probably not work. So what can Ireland do for baseload or long term backup? We have no mountains so pumped storage isnt an option. I cannot see how Ireland can achieve a green transition...

It won't be little scraps of wind energy leftover. Statkraft and UK national plans are for exporting huge surpluses from offshore North Sea (especially here in Shetland) in a hydrogen backbone pipeline. Constrained generation exists in the market. it's a huge issue here

The most important podcasts in a long time, thanks for the deep dive and having Eva Schmid explain in detail why Hydrogen seem to be a serious detour letting Europe fall behind the rest of the world in the green transition. This podcast and Liebreichs “Annual lecture 2024 - Global Energy Transition Trends and Hydrogen” on the same topic, should be mandatory for all politicians in EU and national states.

She's where I was last year, before you woke me up. I'm sure she'll think hard about all this before she falls asleep. I do wonder why you talked about using blue hydrogen instead of plasma electrolysis. With the utilization of HiiROC's technology, the emission of carbon is no longer necessary for hydrogen production.

This interview highlights the problem of having a state employee tasked with implementing a state industrial policy with public money 💰 The only interest any of the players is their continued virtue signalling while sucking off other peoples wages with zero risk to their own well being. This whole project is going to end badly

Misattribution is/are the default problems for Engineering, because it's basically the reiterative Disproof Methodology made manifest in re-evolution circularity of metastability, ..with safety factors to cover probabilistic variables. Engineers have no escape if they fool themselves with the old banking/insurance blame/excuse shifting of, "god did/said it" and/or "the devil made me do it". Unity-connection duality in /of the flash-fractal Multiverse is self-defining Actuality of log-antilog Condensates.

Eva did a respectable job of trying to make the whole German hydrogen #hopium epidemic sound like it has some basis in reason. But of course as expected, Michael showed that there is very little basis in reason there- it's mostly hot gas and wishes. The "resilience" argument (i.e. H2 for long term energy storage) is but one of MANY options to decarbonize the last perhaps 5% of electricity use, and for certain it isn't the only one nor is it the one that makes the most economic sense. Any seasonal use of hydrogen makes electrolyzer utilization even poorer and makes the hydrogen that much more expensive. Furthermore, Germany is still talking seriously about hydrogen being used to make so-called e-fuels, which fundamentally are going to be much more expensive than fuels made from biomass which at least has SOME chemical potential energy in it, versus CO2 or nitrogen which have NONE. And as a Canadian who is also very experienced making and using hydrogen and syngas, just don't get me started about the INSANE notion of making ammonia from onshore wind in eastern Canada to burn in power plants in Germany- that is nothing other than a predatory delay strategy. And "repurposing" LNG terminals for hydrogen? Give me a f*cking break- that is just a total engineering non-starter.

Octopus can’t even get a bill right in 6 month’s

Nicely paid job while she has it and if you ignore the economics developing the hydrogen supply industry is a problem which can be solved. Relying on imported hydrogen isn't a ny more reliable than relying on imported 'natural' gas. p.s. hasn't Germany got a lot of pumped storage hydro whivh could do the same job?

How stupid has humanity become? As a significant store of energy, any type of Hydrogen is nonsense.

At about 3:30 you state that if Germany met their target they would be "adding about 20% to the country's generation output". Is that correct? The goal of using hydrogen is to replace current forms of generation, isn't it? The only caveat to that is the extra electricity needed for EVs. Is that your understanding? But that doesn't do much to get to net zero, does it?

Visiting my home town Konstanz on the Swiss border I learned that the municipal utility, along with regional power distribution, plans to implement adding H2 to the natural gas flow and revamp this entire delivery system for H2 - and mainly for heating and cooking! So much for the hydrogen ladder... Also, on a hydrogen panel at a 2022 conference NREL's David Ginley had a long list of hard to solve tech issues for electrolyzers and fuel cells, most importantly degradation and poor life time (10k hours where +100k hs would be needed.)

Eva IS pragmatic, but not pragmatic enough. Her substantial intellect should not be wasted on the hydrogen dead-end. Feels like a huge sunk-cost fallacy going on.

Hydrogen for resilience only makes sense when you have no mountains. Pumped storage is already cheaper and scaleable in Scotland, Norway, France and Germany. Therefore we don't need hydrogen and surrounding countries could cover the Dutch. So this is attempting to solve a solved problem for many times the price. D'oh!

I'm sorry, but not knowing your yield of hydrogen from an electrolyser is naive and demonstrates a disconnect between regulatory innocence and industrial practicality. So, if you know 10GW of power in, you know the cost, but if you don't know the yield, you don't know the cost per ton - which is the price. Therefore, you cannot know the NPV and IRR of a project if you cannot estimate the revenue. Absolutely woolly thinking. No wonder its not happening!

I think Germany/EU left behind US/CHINA pretty much everything because of wasting energy which they dont have on something basically dont make sense. Most H2 hypeees basically bases their strategy on a hope that someone will find a breakthrough soon enough before everything collapse.

A headline from RenewEconomy just today: "Australian green hydrogen project scrapped due to transport costs, pumped hydro on hold" The H2 plant would've gone next to a wind farm for renewable power, but Atco, the company responsible, decided that trucking the H2 to where it could be introduced to the gas network would be too expensive to make it a viable project, even with a 28.3 million govt grant.

I'm an Octopus customer and like their business model. Greg should be advising Milliband. The future looks bright with guys like Greg in charge of energy companies!

Thank you to Eva Schmid from DENA for joining us on Cleaning Up. Find out more about DENA's work on all aspects of the German energy transition at www.dena.de/en

The core point of this whole talk… right here🎉

WHERE IS THE LINK TO THE VIDEO DEBUNKING HYROGEN??

Big fan of Rosie

He killed a million people

Fantastic interview… I do hope he’s on Ed Milliband’s speed dial.

Octopus have managed to gameify energy with Octopoints and are a genuine market mover in energy, having positive impacts on grid balancing by offering consumers very little incentive. The market as a whole is hungry for change and a positive feedback loop of lower prices leading to load shifting leading to a smoother demand curve and less expensive peaker energy will benefit both the wind champions in the North and the nimbys in the South, despite their pylon denial 😉 TBH, if they don't want pylons in the South, Scotland will happily suck all that excess cheap electricity into heat pumps, EVs and batteries whilst the South can pay a premium for gas turbine electricity.

Too bad Baroness Worthington misses the real point Bruce is making, as she keeps suggesting that eating less meat is an alternative to cultivated meat. She keeps returning to that idea. Thinking people will stop eating meat is a fundamental misunderstanding of human biology. Equally, believing that we need animals to produce that meat underestimates the advancements in technology.

Regrettably the UK isn't receptive to new ideas. I suggest he talks to the Japanese or Norwegian government. Octopus should relocate to Ireland. The UK doesn't have any interest in this guy. He isn't a member of the Royal Family! Mind you if he could persuade some wise guy in the City they could make a quick buck, he could buy the National Grid. And Ed Milliband isn't interested in going green by 2030 as he won't be the Minister in a couple of years.

Subsidised company saying that their product is cheaper is the funniest / stoopidest thing i'v ever heard...

Will the new proposed GB energy go the same way as Bulb in the future? Not heard Ed enthuse about hedging….

The price of electricity will only go down when the gas company is forced out of business by being unable to sell there gas due to no demand from customers who have gone green. A company Coe of gas was asked, if sunlight and wind is free energy, why do you keep rising prices every year. His answer was as follows. Well, the less gas we sell to you, our investors won’t get there bonuses, and I won’t get my nice fat pay check of thousands a month. Enough said. By the way Gas is set to rise in Autumn and then again this winter. Go Figure.

Nice to see Greg on the podcast again. Octopus is a great company, but cracks are showing given the huge uptick in customers. Their legendary customer services team seem to be more based in India, answering emails at 3am and just giving scripted replies. If you've got a difficult issue, they can't help you. Hopefully they can get this under control because nothing wrecks a business like poor CS. Love Octopus - Greg, please don't do an Elon and go bonkers. We need you to push the transition to renewable energy until it is a reality.

How can Octopus supply clean each? Are their customers happy with super expensive intermittent power? I don't think so.

excellent as always and good to see that the number of views (and comments, albeit some really terrible takes) are increasing. This is the number one podcast to listen to if you want to really understand future energy systems and everything associated with it. Loved Greg's story about the electric blankets and I was also thinking the same as Michael when Greg mentioned the 150m that management decided to give to customers without real prior consent of the Board, though I do assume they were kept abreast of things, at least the big shareholders that have veto rights on budget / business plan kind of decisions.

I'd love an electric blanket but even though I'm a disabled pensioners with severe lung problems and have been with Octopus 🐙 for quite some time, sadly despite qualifying for a free electric blanket I still have to huddle under blankets at temperature of less than 9 degrees as my circumstances don't fit inside their answer boxes. I've privately bought half a dozen electric blanket s which never last before breaking down. Great idea Greg but the system is not working for me.

Now if you weren’t so stupid you would have kept all your existing power generation capacity and added in the renewables…the cost of electricity would have been kept low. 🙄 too late. But you are doubling down into economic decline 🤦‍♂️ now your electricity pricing has a sky high to pay all the new monopolies

It's not so much that regional pricing saves money, it's HOW locational pricing is implemented. Fracturing the market through regional pricing destroys the price signal to address the key issues. I know that's something Greg doesn't want from his episode 32 interview. Reform of TNUOS/DUOS is required to charge both generation and demand the cost of the system they use. Of course, that's not feasible so you need to simplify and use correlations. Simply put the cost of the system is correlated to the distance between the generation and load. That changes depending on dynamic factors like demand response, embedded generation, and storage. As such it's preferable that TNUOS/DUOS have a "fractal" policy structure so that domestic users who have battery storage, vehicle to grid, solar/wind, etc. get to partake in the system. Regional pricing won't deliver that, it will only fracture the market and weaken price signals for the key issues that need to be targeted with technical solutions - transmission/distribution capacity, storage, reactive power, etc.

Brilliant Best bit Haha you said if we could ripple out the business... Yep Ripple another great clean energy business model dev company

Blimey, all those extra customers! That’s a lot of Greggs Coffee given away!

What is most curious to me is the quantity of comments from anti-renewables trolls on this episode. I guess this must be YT’s algorthym recommending Octopus to people who like to be really annoyed about energy. Great episode BTW. I hadn’t heard about the free electric blankets. Cynicism is easy, but I believe his actions are genuine. Michael - I wonder, was the 96% hypothetical of a decarbonised grid based on a particular possible pathway we’re on, or just a discussion number? I agree, that achieving anything like that would be amazing, and by the time we get there, other possibilities will likely present themselves for the last few %. Would love to see Drax disappear aswell though which is included in the low carbon generation as far as I understand it.

Enjoyed the interview - where did that 3.5 years go since I listened to GJ’s last interview! Not sure how OE is “fully hedged” though, when at the same time it also takes ~“lots of risk”? Perhaps more accurately it fully understands its risks so eg when it offers an unhedged price cap it can quantify worst case losses and size them to minimise bankruptcy risk. The former derivatives trader in me bristles at the inaccurate use of “hedged”, a word seen regularly at the scene of financial irregularities and worse!

We are on the intelligent octopus Go Tariff and I use it to charge my 27 kwh battery as well as my Kia E Niro. We also have a 3.6 kwh solar array and just recently Octopus installed our heatpump which is brilliant. We almost never buy energy at the higher rate as what we charge our batteries at night on cheap rate is sufficient for all our needs. We’re lucky enough to be able to afford this technology but I really believe it’s time the government legislated that all new build have both solar and a minimum of a 10kwh battery. I think that octopus just like Tesla has really shaken up the lethargic energy market and I wouldn’t go to any other energy company enemies if it saved me a few pounds as they are so customer oriented.

I hope Octopus will bury the frauds that are SSE, EoN, Engie

FYI autocues are not particularly expensive, and might make your life somewhat easier if you're regularly reading off sheets of paper.

I think Octopus Energy have open the door to a new way to treat customers and embrace the benefits of technology, the three magic buttons, use technology to improve efficiency, strive for the best customer service., and make a sustainable profit for the company. However the elephant in the room is standing charge at above 60 pence per day, on electricity which has nothing to do with global energy prices but only uk’s internal inflation rates.

What an incredible CEO Greg Jackson is.❤ Octopus are looking after its customers incredibly well and the listen too. Please o Please listen to this - Just wish Octopus would approve the GivEnergy EV charger, the techie’s have been sitting on their hands for over twelve months! Come on Greg give am a boot up the Ar⭐️⭐️

Literally taking 50 years for the world to finally catch up to his important ideas!