Crossing the Valley of Death

Crossing the Valley of Death: Transitioning from green hydrogen production pilots to full-scale commercial production using transition management theories in order to realise energy transition ambitions

Szadkowski, Xavier (TU Delft Civil Engineering and Geosciences)

Blok, K. (mentor)
Leijten, M. (mentor)
Schraven, D.F.J. (graduation committee)
Duvoort, Dr. M. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Civil Engineering | Construction Management and Engineering

2021-07-27

Ambitious decarbonisation targets that have been set by both the Dutch Government and corporations alike can be achieved. However, this requires the current approach of fulfilling the energy supply and demand to be drastically changed over the next decade. Failure to do so will result in a prolonged energy transition which ultimately results in the failure of realising decarbonisation targets by 2030. This is particularly important because the development of alternative energy sources that is partly necessary for the realisation of the energy transition, tend to have long lead times and are not straightforward to implement.

Transition management in general, and Strategic Niche Management literature specifically are in line with the developments and changes that are currently observed in the energy transition. Nevertheless, a major challenge lies ahead of us in order to empirically validate the partly descriptive and partly prescriptive components of transition management literature. Therefore, the objective of this research can be described as: elaborate, generalize and verify the barriers that lead to procrastination during the pilot- and scale-up phases of green hydrogen pilots. Additionally capture the influence of SNM on these barriers in order to realise energy transition ambitions.

A single case-study – concerning the green hydrogen case in the Netherlands – was adopted to study the state of green hydrogen technology and the potential of SNM literature to aid the development of pilots and their scale-up.

The study showed that a multitude of barriers lead to procrastination of pilot- and scale-up developments with regard to green hydrogen technology. The top five consists of Legislation and regulations, directionality failures, corporate internal factors, lack of subsidy and lack of market demand and supply. Most of the failure mechanisms that were mentioned by respondents are validated and described in SNM literature. However, the theory falls short in naming corporate internal factors as an important reason for impeding the development of the green hydrogen technology.

Furthermore, no distinction is made between the investment decision framework for the scalability of green hydrogen technology and regular investment decisions. The scale-up phase however poses many uncertainties and therefore most definitely results in negative business cases when assessed with regular investment decision frameworks. SNM literature does not provide solutions for this problem and needs to be updated accordingly. SNM theory is however a descriptive theory, rather than prescriptive, however, the energy transition requires literature to aid practitioners with practical guidelines.

Innovation Systems
Failures Framework
Transition management
Strategic Niche Management
Green hydrogen
Pilot projects
Take-off phase
Procrastination phase
Business drivers

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Student theses

master thesis

© 2021 Xavier Szadkowski