Hydrogen pioneer Alexander Voigt: The energy transition is his mission

‘A market on its own doesn’t generate innovation. You always need the right legal framework,’ says Alexander Voigt. The physicist and entrepreneur must know: for over 30 years he has been setting up companies in order to develop technologies for the production of renewable energies. In Lubmin in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the 58-year-old businessman is now going all out. He is aiming to construct a hydrogen power station. Alexander Voigt is part of Team Transformation, a group of five trailblazers working on transformation themes together with the Partners in Transformation.

Lubmin is on the Baltic coast in northern Germany, 25 kilometres east of Greifswald. It is an energy town through and through. In the German Democratic Republic it used to be a nuclear site. Later, the gas transported through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline came ashore here. The pipelines in Lubmin were decommissioned after the start of the war in Ukraine. If Alexander Voigt has his way, the town will shortly be the site of Germany’s first hydrogen power plant – and the pipelines will be used to transport hydrogen throughout Germany. ‘Building approval has been applied for, and we hope to start building this year, before the cold weather sets in,’ says Voigt about the project his company HH2E is implementing with the Swiss MET Group. The consortium wants to start producing hydrogen in 2025. The activities in Lubmin are part of a larger plan. In the last two years HH2E has spent over a billion euros acquiring a total of ten old power stations, most of them in eastern Germany. ‘To maintain the pace required by the energy transition, it made sense for us to use existing infrastructure facilities wherever possible,’ explains Voigt. With the construction of hydrogen power stations, Voigt and his team could be breaking new ground – and not for the first time. How does one develop innovations and have the confidence to put them into practice?

Setting up companies for more sustainability

Alexander Voigt was born in 1965 and grew up in Frankfurt and Darmstadt. In his youth, he was successful in Physics Olympiads. He spent a lot of time in a makeshift camp established by environmentalists to protest against the expansion of Frankfurt airport. There, the young Alexander learned a great deal about the consumption of resources and the environmental consequences of consumer behaviour. Later, while studying for his maths and physics degree, he designed climate models. ‘I worked out what would happen if we kept on pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as in the past. I got a total shock.’ He found an answer to this problem while installing a photovoltaic unit on the roof of a forest hut for a friend of his father. This enabled the hunter to watch football on a small TV in the middle of the forest. ‘It was all very expensive, but I thought: perhaps one day it might work on a larger scale.’ While still a student, Voigt founded his first company as a way of making a living. After his studies, he continued along the path he had already embarked upon. Many companies were to follow. ‘If you can’t find a company to work on the goal you are pursuing, you have to set one up yourself,’ says Alexander Voigt. If you really want to solve problems, you have to take a practical approach. ‘Research and development are important, but if you go to a scientist with a problem, he will come back a week later with ten problems. That’s his job, basic research, to examine the theme in depth. If you go to an engineer with a problem, you’ll have a solution within a week.’ 

Alexander Voigt was not driven solely by the desire to shape the energy transition – before the term itself even came into existence. He was also inspired by the birth of his first daughter in 1992. ‘When all of a sudden you are responsible for a new pair of eyes looking at the world, this naturally motivates you to work for sustainability. Without my children, I would never have managed to cope with this workload.’

Important groundwork for new technologies

In 1998, Alexander Voigt was instrumental in obtaining the first stock exchange listing for a German solar energy company SOLON, which supplied turnkey solar systems. In 2005, Voigt founded Younicos and started developing and manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for power storage. A decade later this led to the construction of Europe’s first battery storage plant. Younicos constructed it for WEMAG AG, an energy utility in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. With GRIPS Energy AG, he formed a company in 2012 to manufacture solar systems in countries of the Global South. Voigt’s projects always followed the same pattern: identify needs, found a company, develop the product until commercially viable and make sure the company can stand on its own feet – and then move on to the next project. Not every company continued trading (SOLON); others he left before they achieved the big breakthrough (Younicos). ‘Perhaps I could have earned more money, and I didn’t always make the most economically efficient decisions.’ Between 2006 and 2008, Voigt invested around 40 million euros of his own money in the development of energy storage technology – even though there was not even the beginnings of a market for such things. ‘At the moment, my investments are not paying me back with interest. But it was important to do the groundwork in order to acquire new knowledge. Our beacon projects have helped advance the development of battery storage and thus the energy transition worldwide,’ says Alexander Voigt. In California, the construction of energy storage systems is a billion-dollar market. Between 2019 and 2024, the State of California increased its energy storage capacity from 770 to over 10,000 megawatts – with technology partly based on the developments of Voigt and his engineers. 

Green hydrogen across Germany

Alexander Voigt has been working for over 35 years to make the energy transition a success. Thirty-five years of groundwork, investment risk and negotiations with policymakers to secure better conditions for establishing renewable energies. How is it possible to stay on the ball and develop new solutions to new problems? ‘You certainly need a degree of stubbornness and persistence to work so long on a problem until you finally have the solution; and you have to have the right environment,’ says Voigt. Some of the engineers he works with today with have been with him for decades in different projects. 

They are again on board at HH2E, Voigt’s company that builds hydrogen power plants. The company’s aims are ambitious. At the ten power plant sites that are planned, the aim is to produce more than 400,000 tonnes of green hydrogen in 2030 using ten gigawatts of electrical power and modern electrolysis processes. The intention is not to use hydrogen solely as a source of energy but also as a storage medium. ‘In food terms, you’d be talking about “containers”. We throw nothing away, but store power that’s not required for later use.’ In total, Voigt and his team want to store 14 terrawatts of power each year and to sell it as green hydrogen – that’s equivalent to the power consumption of the State of Berlin. The Lubmin site assumes a key role here: the power grid in Lubmin is connected to two off-shore wind parks – favourable conditions for ensuring that the hydrogen produced really is carbon neutral. In addition, the rest of the country is to be supplied with hydrogen through the pipeline system. From 2032, hydrogen supplies are to reach as far as Stuttgart. Use the available infrastructure, be bold in taking calculated risks and go all in – no half-measures. If Alexander Voigt and HH2E have a hand in it, the energy transformation might succeed.