The defunct Moorburg coal-fired power plant was purchased by the city of Hamburg from Vattenfall.
The Senate declared that as of March 1st, the corporation, comprising the buildings and the remaining pieces, as well as the related property on Moorburger Schanze, had been bought by the municipal Hamburg energy works.
Due to the German coal phase-out, the power plant, which had 94 employees at the time, was shut down in July 2021 after six years of operation. It is currently being destroyed. Six months prior, Vattenfall, Shell, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), and Hamburger Energiewerke had reached an agreement to develop a hydrogen infrastructure on the Moorburg and to designate portions of the former power plant for the city’s use as a source of renewable energy.
Setting up the anticipated large-scale hydrogen production and deconstructing the current power plant are now in one’s hands. Now, competing interests between infrastructure construction and demolition and conversion could be avoided.
With its two blocks, each with an output of 827 megawatts, Moorburg was one of the most advanced coal-fired power plants in Germany and was able to produce 11 terawatt hours of electricity annually. This is roughly equivalent to the Hanseatic city’s whole electrical needs. 3 billion euros were spent on the building.
A “Green Hydrogen Hub,” among other things, is envisioned for the location of the former coal-fired power station. The initial idea is to construct an electrolyser that can produce 100 megawatts of electricity using both solar and wind energy. Also, it needs to be determined how much of Moorburg’s current infrastructure can be used to produce electricity from renewable sources in the future. There was speculation that hydrogen manufacturing would begin in 2025 in 2021.
