D8.1 & D8.2 State of the art technologies in the current gas grid and gap definition with the future hydrogen grid

The Dutch government’s central goal with the National Climate Agreement is to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions in the Netherlands by 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels and 100% by 2050. Hydrogen will carry out a number of critical functions within energy and raw material systems. The Distribution System Operators (DSO’s) in the Netherlands may play an important role delivering (green) hydrogen to the built environment via their existing gas transport network for sustainable heating of homes and business. Replacing natural gas by hydrogen in the existing DSO infrastructure will give several challenges (next to safety aspects, social acceptance, etc.) on the security of supply of energy to the end-users, related to the physical aspects of the assets in the hydrogen network. We would like to analyse where digital technology can contribute in accelerating the natural gas grid transformation. The scope of the research is limited to 100% hydrogen grids. As a research methodology to execute work we chose for the following approach: Get insight in the state of the art of digitalization of the current DSO gas grids, by sending a questionnaire and interviewing DSO representatives. The same questionnaire has been sent to TSO Gasunie to get a benchmark. Get insight in the needed digitalization of the future hydrogen grid. This was done by: Literature study, mainly regarding foreign DSO’s. A workshop with Dutch DSO representatives. Both the literature study and the outcome of the workshop with the DSO’s give an indication of the desired situation of digitalization of the (future) hydrogen grid.The concrete topics can be compared with the current situation regarding Modelling, Monitoring and Control. Within in the scope of this research, we will give a qualitatively description on the technology gap, and a (preliminary) prioritization of the gaps. Main results from the state of the art investigation for three systems are given below. Modelling All DSO’s use commercial tools for capacity calculation, designing the gas grid and determining risk levels regarding delivery. All capacity simulations are based on worst case scenario’s, like maximum demand at -12 or -13 °C. No dynamic hourly demand profiles are used. For risk analysis the N-1 approach (omitting one asset) is used, in most cases for design reasons. The tools are able to work with different gas compositions, but are only used for natural gas at this moment. For most DSO’s the capacity calculation tool is vali