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Towards a hydrogen and fuel cell infrastructure
Annual DWV meeting decides about new name
Hydrogen and fuel cells will be an important element of a future energy system which will be friendly to the environment and sustainable. This became obvious on the annual DWV meeting which was held on Friday in Leipzig.
Leipzig's deputy mayor Holger Tschense presented the DWV innovation award to Dr. Jens Mathiak from Duisburg for his thesis about a distributed home energy supply based on PEM fuel cells. A special award was presented to Dr. Rolf Stromberger who investigated the way to build up a hydrogen infrastructure for the fuel supply of cars. Large scale technology was the topic of Mr. Hermann Wunram speaking for Linde who gave an overview of the already existing plants in the Leipzig / Bitterfeld region. There is the intention to join the individual activities. All three presentations thus dealt with infrastructure.
The effects which a hydrogen economy might or will have on atmosphere and climate were the topic of Dr. Schultz (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg). His conclusion was that the risks with handling hydrogen, including leaks, have very little effect on the composition of the atmosphere and the climate. What really matters, and this positively, is the fact that there will be less emissions of dangerous substances which are associated with conventional fossil fuels.
Due to the high and still increasing importance of the fuel cell for the hydrogen application the meeting decided to rename the association to „German Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association“. (The abbreviation DWV remains.) This is a recognition of the fact that the highly efficient energy conversion in the fuel cell is the ideal counterpart of the environmentally positive properties of hydrogen. Both technologies combined are a stepping stone to the future of energy.
The Board of Directors of DWV under the chairmanship of Dr. Johannes Toepler (Stuttgart) was re-elected for two years.
Published by the German Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association (DWV), Berlin
V. i. S. d. P.: Dr. Ulrich Schmidtchen, Berlin
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