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When technology gurus Robert Schlögl and Michael Weinhold
discussed the future of energy, some of their concepts sounded
like science fiction. But they will likely soon become reality, as
Living Energy ­reporter Marc Engelhardt found out.
Text: Marc Engelhardt Photos: Urban Zintel
8 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 9
Illustration: Collaboration between Quayola and Abstract Birds
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“Innovation is all in the system – it’s
necessary to exchange views with
­colleagues of all disciplines in order
to find truly new solutions.”
Michael Weinhold
“Coordinating the joint initiative is an
incredible job, because colleagues
give me insights and new perspectives
from other disciplines that otherwise
I’d never have known about.”
Robert Schlögl
10 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 11
Energy Scenario 2050
Energy Scenario 2050
T
he future holds many secrets,
but the fact that finding new
ways of producing, storing, and
distributing energy will be key for
global development isn’t one of them.
In fact, listening to Robert Schlögl,
a renowned professor of chemistry
and the Director of the Max Planck
Institute for Chemical Energy Con­
version, and Michael Weinhold, a
seasoned electrical engineer and
Chief Technology Officer of Siemens
Energy, you get the feeling that the
future lies bare to those who can
read it.
Robert Schlögl
Background
Robert Schlögl heads the Fritz Haber Institute and is founding director of
the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. He also coordinates the Future Energy Systems Initiative (see box text page 21), which is
jointly run by Germany’s academies of science.
Take energy sources in 2050. “With
renewables, we will see wind
­power and photovoltaics being
constructed on a massive scale in
the upcoming decades, with wind
power being the most cost-effective
option,” says Weinhold. “The cost of
generating wind power has already
plummeted considerably due to tech­
nical innovation, as in direct-drive
generators and special blades de­
signed to use even low wind speeds
for power generation.” More efficiency
and thus higher economic margins
for wind power producers will further
boost the sector, ­Weinhold expects:
“For 2050, we e
­ xpect a levelized cost
of less than 3 euro cents per kilowatthour of onshore electricity generat­
ed.” But that doesn’t mean that more
traditional forms of energy produc­
tion will cease to exist. “Don’t forget
that for some production processes,
like steel manufacturing, you need
energy in the form of heat,” says
Schlögl. “In an industrialized country
like Germany, that accounts for a
significant share of the total energy
use. And this sector is critical, be­
cause without it, you don’t have any
manufacturing capacity in the mod­
ern sense.”
Education
Coal Is Not Going Away
Schlögl studied chemistry in Munich and, after postdoctoral stays in
So even in the 2050s, there will be
room for high-efficiency combined
cycle gas turbine, or CCGT, power
plants. “Gas turbines being installed
today have efficiency ratios of over
60 percent and very low CO2 emissions,
and these ratios will be further en­
hanced,” Weinhold states. “These tur­
bines are designed for flexible and
partial load use, which will be more
and more important in the future –
also in connection with the use of hy­
drogen, which will play an important
role because of its virtually endless
storage capabilities.” Even “clean” coal,
purified of exhaust gases and CO2, will
continue to play an important role in
power generation, according to Schlögl.
“Modern soft coal power plants are al­
ready equipped to run with more flex­
ible firing temperatures and the like.”
Exactly how important coal will be in
­Cambridge and Basel, habilitated in Berlin. His main focus is on the combination of scientific and technical applications as well as nanochemically
­optimized materials for energy storage.
“We have excellent
techniques for
transforming material energy sources
into electricity.”
Robert Schlögl
12 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Research meets industry: Robert Schlögl, a professor of chemistry, and veteran power engineer Michael Weinhold work
together in the Future Energy Systems Initiative.
the 2050s will depend mainly on where
it’s being used. “Coal is evenly dis­
tributed around the world, and the
proven reserves will last for more
than 170 years,” Weinhold knows. In
emerging economies like India and
China, coal will be used far into the
second half of the century. “In Europe,
on the other hand, I don’t expect much
coal to be used moving towards 2050.”
Renewables, hydropower, and even
the efficient use of gas will be much
cheaper then, and there are environ­
mental regulations to be considered
as well.
Diversity, flexibility, and efficiency –
those are three keywords that
­describe the future of energy as
u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 13
Energy Scenario 2050
Good chemistry:
Robert Schlögl and
Michael Weinhold
met at the Max
Planck Institute for
Chemical Energy
Conversion in
­Mülheim a.d. Ruhr,
Germany.
Schlögl and Weinhold see it. With an
ever-higher share of renewables in
the global energy mix, and with ever
more consumers becoming energy
producers as well, the issue of ener­
gy carriers has become as important
as the energy sources themselves.
How can consumers and industry be
reliably supplied with all the energy
they need? Michael Weinhold thinks
there is only one way. “In 2050, elec­
trical power will be the one power
source for the consumer. Even heat
supply, which in a country like
­Germany counts for a third of the to­
tal energy consumption, will come
from the socket. When we look at
housing estates currently being built,
we can see that less and less of them
are even connected to gas supply
lines, but rather to a power line only.”
The Start of a Pioneering Age
Weinhold believes that a real pioneering age of electrotechnology
has begun: “No other power source
is as flexible as electricity. It can be
used for almost everything, it can be
produced in a wide variety of ways,
and it can also be perfectly transmit­
ted.” In China, for example, huge
amounts of energy are generated in­
land and then transferred to the
heavily industrialized coastal regions
via huge electricity highways. “In the
area of Shanghai with its 200 million
inhabitants, you have high-voltage
power lines that transport gigawatts
of energy,” Weinhold notes. “The
Chinese have even invested heavily
in ultra-high voltage power lines,
­because it gives you a further boost
in efficiency.”
Those super energy highways use
­direct-current (DC) rather than alter­
nating-current voltage (AC) lines.
And if you ask Weinhold, he is con­
vinced that not only point-to-point
energy supply, but even grids will
use DC in the future, “because you
only need half the corridor to trans­
port a certain amount of energy
compared to AC, and you have less
transfer losses as well.” Technically,
DC supergrids would pose no major
problem, Weinhold says, as the nec­
Michael Weinhold
Background
Michael Weinhold is the Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Energy and a
member of the Siemens Sustainability Board. In 1997, he was honored as
“Siemens Inventor of the Year.” Weinhold is one of Siemens’ Top Innovators
and has been one of the company’s Senior Principal Key Experts since 2006.
Education
Weinhold studied electrical engineering at Ruhr University Bochum and at
the Purdue University in West Lafayette (USA).
“No other power
source is as flexible
as electricity.”
Michael Weinhold
essary capacity for data processing,
and the major components required
are already available today.
Options for Storage
With the new energy mix, the
need for storage will rise further.
In fact, in some regions, oversupply
of energy is already reaching record
heights. “We have excellent tech­
niques for transforming material
­energy sources into electricity,”
Schlögl says. “But the reverse is much
more complicated, and that is due
to some basic scientific problems we
haven’t solved yet.” While power can
be stored in pumped storage power
plants, in form of heated water, or
u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 15
Future Energy Systems
Energy Scenario 2050
very powerful fuel that could store
endless amounts of energy.” To split
water molecules, energy is needed.
“Nuclear fusion would be the most
efficient way to do that: We’d use the
energy provided to transform huge
amounts of water into hydrogen, while
the waste heat would fuel a power
plant.” The problem is: Nobody knows
whether nuclear fusion – the very
process that fuels the sun – is even
possible on a large scale. But if it is,
Schlögl expects to know well ­before
2050. “The Chinese have decided to
build their own reactor. They are in­
vesting several billion US dollars
­into this technology, and they are
­eager to have the reactor up and run­
ning by 2030.”
Basic Research and Industry
Practice
At the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, scientists aim to find
ways of converting energy into chemical compounds for better storage and usage.
in batteries, none of these solve the
problem that comes with the boom
in renewables: the need to store
­ever-changing amounts of energy,
and huge amounts, for that matter.
The solution Schlögl and his team
of 200 scientists are working on
sounds simple enough: “If we could
transform water molecules into
­hydrogen, we would have created a
16 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Should nuclear fusion fail, there
would still be other options. One
that is already in use is electrolysis.
“Next year, we will be installing an
electrolyzer system with a capacity
of 6 megawatts for a client who will
use it to make his grid more flexible,”
explains Weinhold. The electrolyzer
uses electrodes made of precious
metals to split the water molecule.
It’s an approved technique used in
labs all around the world, and Schlögl
himself says: “It works, otherwise
Siemens wouldn’t sell it.” However,
Schlögl doubts that electrolyzers
are scalable up to the size that would
be needed to generate hydrogen in
large enough quantities to supply the
power required by cities or even
whole countries. “It’s one of those
cases where research and industry
are working on different aspects of
the same technology,” Weinhold
­admits. “Basic research is needed,
but at the same time we do practical
research in our labs, both to the
same end.”
The appeal of hydrogen is its trans­
formability. “You can transform
­energy into hydrogen and then burn
it again in a power plant,” Weinhold
points out. “However, from the point
of efficiency, it’s by far not the best
solution – in the end, you might have
“System-wide, if you fix a problem on one side,
you might create a new one on the other. But
being aware of these connections is essential.”
Robert Schlögl
lost more than half of the initial
­energy.” That’s where Schlögl and his
chemists come in, again. Because
once water has been transformed
into hydrogen, it can be used to
create other chemicals. “It’s like a
solar refinery: You can use hydrogen
in chemical processes similarly to
oil, only that the source of the hydro­
gen in that case is not fossil, but re­
newable.” And it doesn’t end there.
“For example, we can introduce CO2
into the equation and thus produce
methanol from water, CO2, and elec­
tricity. Methanol is a ­basis for a re­
newable diesel fuel. ­Depending on
the amount of excess energy avail­
able, you can fuel truck fleets in a
whole country with methanol instead
of diesel.” In the process, one could
eliminate huge amounts of green­
house gas in a model example of car­
bon capture and use.
There are even more possibilities,
such as the production of polymers.
Methanol could also serve as an en­
ergy carrier; if solar energy were col­
lected in Greece, it could be trans­
formed into methanol and brought
to northern Europe by ship in the
same way oil is transported today.
“You could even use the existing in­
frastructure,” Schlögl beams. These
concepts, as futuristic as they may
sound, might turn out to be essential
to the world’s energy future. “This
interface between electricity and
u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 17
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Energy Scenario 2050
chemistry could be the link we need
to create a closed system,” Weinhold
believes. While hydrogen offers huge
potentials, it is not the only way to
deal with excess energy. When it comes
to storage, Schlögl likes to tell the
story that energy can even be stored
in a stone. “If you heat it up, you can
store energy in that way, ­especially if
you need it for heat generation – you
just have to make sure that the stone
isn’t ripped apart in the process.”
IT and Smart Grids as
­Catalysts
Engineers like Weinhold believe
that smart grids will shape the
­future of energy as well. “If you can
access and process all the necessary
data, you can steer whole energy sys­
tems by regulating consumer or in­
dustry demand. Incentive programs
are already in place to encourage
flexible industrial loads.” Weinhold
also argues in favor of storage solu­
tions that are integrated into the
grids, in order to strengthen whole
energy systems rather than single
­entities. “If you have a million house­
holds with photovoltaic systems,
there is no point in installing bat­
teries in every single one of them.
What you need instead is a gridbased ­energy storage station inside
the system, so that energy can be
stored and accessed centrally.”
Information technology has enabled engineers to design grids
on a scale not thought possible
only a decade ago, so Weinhold’s
expectations for 2050 are huge.
“With proper clustering of generation
and loads, we can already simulate
the whole European grid in real time,
which we currently do to develop a
kind of autopilot for smart grids.
Computing capacity and speed are so
much higher than they used to be,
and they will ­develop further. I am
convinced that with more and more
sensors placed along the entire ener­
gy conversion chain and by applying
predictive analytics, for example, we
will speed up all of the developments
we talked about. Things will certain­
ly happen quicker than we think.”
18 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
A Glossary of Future Energy
We don’t know what the energy system will look like 40 years from now,
but we do know that with its innovative strength and technical advances,
Siemens will help shape an energy system that is reliable, economical, and
in line with the needs of the population.
Hydrogen
Using mainly wind power, proton exchange membrane electrolysis systems
(scalable from a few kilowatts to over 100
megawatts) produce
hydrogen, which is used in the chemical industry, as a car fuel, and can be
stored to e
­ nsure energy security through reconversion in combined
cycle power plants.
Wind
Offshore wind turbines reliably generate large amounts of electricity; onshore wind turbines have become the price-cutters. With rotor diameters of
up to 150 meters and capacities of 3 to 5 megawatts, these wind power
plants produce electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants.
Combined Cycle Power Plants (CCPPs)
Flexible CCPPs not only achieve an extremely high efficiency rate of up
to 70 percent when fueled with hydrogen, they also realize an overall
­efficiency of up to 95 percent in cogeneration operation.
High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) Supergrids
HVDC supergrids are the backbone of the energy system. With numerous node connections to AC grids, they supply power to distributed net-
“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.” As the coordinator for the Future Energy Systems Initiative, Robert Schlögl must bring
together 50 top-level experts discussing all aspects of a future energy system.
works. Based on smart-grid technologies, these form independent
units ­within the overall system.
Self-Sufficient Industrial Plants, Energy-Efficient
­Buildings
Innovative industrial solutions and building technologies enable efficient
energy use in businesses and private households. In self-sufficient
industrial plants, data management systems coordinate large-scale power
plants, virtual power plants, variable loads, load management, and flexible
storage capacity.
siemens.com/future-of-energy-2050
Neither Weinhold nor Schlögl believe
in a one-size-fits-all solution. They
are aware that there is not only one,
but many futures for the world’s
­energy supply. “But innovation is
global,” says Weinhold. “Scientific
findings are instantly in the global
domain, and some countries benefit
immensely from that kind of collec­
tive progress.” None more so than
­China. “China is diversifying in all
directions: They are investing heavily
in renewables, in nuclear fusion, but
­also in power lines and electromobil­
ity. They do everything, and they do it
all on a massive scale.” More efficiency
is key in Russia, a country with mas­
sive reserves in fossil fuels.
Expect the Unexpected
Then there is the USA, an example
for how fast things can change. “Five
u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 19
Energy Scenario 2050
years ago, they were building termi­
nals for the import of liquefied natu­
ral gas – then came shale gas, and
now those very same terminals are
being refurbished for export,”
­Weinhold smiles. And while Schlögl
thinks that the boom in shale gas
will not solve the USA’s energy prob­
lems in the long run – he points to
ancient grid structures and outdated
power plants – he thinks that there is
a lesson to be learned. “If you are
planning a reform of your energy
sector anywhere in the world,
­never promote a single technology
without an exit scenario. There
can always be unforeseen changes of
­circumstance, a new technology even
that we don’t know about yet.”
It’s lessons like these that are shared
in the Future Energy Systems Initia­
tive, jointly run by Germany’s acade­
mies of science (see the info box on
the right). For the first time ever, sci­
entists of all trades including chem­
ists, engineers, sociologists, ­legal
experts, and economists come togeth­
er to discuss all aspects of the future
of energy. “There are at least three
layers that have to be brought togeth­
er,” says Schlögl, who coordinates the
project. “There’s the technological
side of things, including the question
of resources; there are questions
concerning law and economic feasi­
bility; and then, last but not least,
there’s the social aspect: in a nut­
shell, the user.”
It is easy to imagine the potential
for controversy, but Schlögl focuses
­instead on the common ground.
“A systemic approach is key for a sus­
tainable energy future,” he says.
“Systemic thinking is one of the hard­
est tasks there are. It is really hard to
understand that if you fix a problem
on one side, you might create a new
one on the other. But being aware of
these connections is essential.”
Weinhold readily agrees. “To take
an everyday example: If I spend the
whole day working on complicated
turbine designs in order to generate
better efficiency ratios in a power
plant, and then, on my way home, I
spot some consumer electronics that
20 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
The Future Energy Systems Initiative
It’s something that hasn’t been done before anywhere in the world: 50 toplevel experts discussing all aspects of a future energy system. Physicists and
engineers, sociologists and chemists, legal scholars and economists discuss
the complex challenges involved. The outcomes form the scientific basis for
the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s Energy Transition
Forum, a platform for dialog with decision makers.
Though the eight working groups focus on the energy transition in Germany, or
“Energiewende,” the discussions and outcomes are also relevant for a global audience, coordinator Robert Schlögl believes. “You can’t copy and paste the German
way of energy transition into other countries, because the situation varies so
much around the globe. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has to make the
same mistakes – others can profit from the experience we’ve gathered.”
The initiative is conducted under the leadership of acatech (the German Academy of Engineering), the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the
Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Siemens Energy
CTO Michael Weinhold is one of the few involved actors from the private sector.
“Systemic thinking is one of the
hardest tasks there are.”
Robert Schlögl
are as inefficient as you could possi­
bly imagine – that makes a lot of our
efforts obsolete.” However, neither
Schlögl nor Weinhold are planning
to give up any time soon. “Engineers
must keep on dreaming and having
visions,” is Weinhold’s advice. “And
the times of singular discoveries are
long over. Ours is the age of team­
work, where solutions are found to­
gether in an interdisciplinary way.” p
Marc Engelhardt reports from Geneva on the
UN and international organizations for various
media, including the Berliner Zeitung and Neue
Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 21