Implementing Hydrogen Projects in Complex Socio-Economic Environments

Abstract

Real-world laboratories have become important institutions of the energy transition in Germany and the EU. They represent innovation networks that integrate public and private actors in energy transition projects. In the past, they focused on urban districts, but, more recently, the real-world laboratories have been expanded to include large-scale, capital-intensive projects for the development of a hydrogen economy. This has increased the complexity of such projects and poses new challenges in contextualising the new form of real-world laboratories. This article analyses the response of one of the first of these new projects and how it dealt with this new organisational form at the project communication level. It shows that the co-creation of a common story shared by all project partners—or the lack of it—may be an early indicator of whether the necessary legitimacy from business, politics, and society can be gained.

1. Introduction

In conjunction with announcing its National Hydrogen Strategy 2020 [1], Germany has allocated funding for a number of small and large hydrogen research projects. The objective of these projects is to deliver green hydrogen, which is produced by splitting water with renewable electricity. The utilisation of green hydrogen has been identified as a pivotal strategy for the decarbonisation of industrial production processes. Historically, many industrial processes have been relying on grey hydrogen, produced from fossil natural gas. The large, high-calibre industrial hydrogen projects in Germany represent real-world laboratories that test innovative technologies under real-world conditions at an industrial scale [2].

In this article, the organisational form of one of Germany’s real-world laboratories is examined, analysing in particular the manner in which the project is communicated with its environment. Projects or project networks, as organisational forms, have become the hallmark of successful organisations and institutions [3,4]. They are used by many firms and, in particular, by innovative ones, i.e., those that engage strongly in R&D. Indeed, joint R&D projects have a larger effect on the entry probabilities of technologies than R&D projects conducted by single organisations [5]. This finding is indicative of the efficacy of this particular organisational form. Several dimensions have been identified in which organisations are embedded in their social environment when they collaborate in projects [6,7]. In particular, integrating public research institutes and development agencies in such projects may strengthen cognitive and institutional ties arising during such collaboration.

In terms of practical application, project networks necessitate legitimacy work. In particular, during their early formation phase, when innovators seek to develop positive externalities for their innovations, they strive for legitimacy [8]. In this particular phase, the primary objective of legitimacy is to facilitate market formation, resource mobilisation, and the creation of positive externalities from shared standards, infrastructure, or technological hardware [9]. This perspective has been taken up again by evolutionary economic geographers who suggest “that developments in a regional industry’s legitimacy are in particular influenced by relations to (1) other regional industries, (2) broader regional sectors, (3) the industry’s development in other geographical contexts, and (4) the wider political context.” [8] (p. 3).

Hence, our case study considers the legitimacy work of one of Germany’s real-world laboratories when it developed a regional communication strategy. This project is located in Northern Germany and is one of a series of projects initiated by the regional development agency to promote renewable energy and sector coupling in the region. Initially, competences in the project region were developed in the field of wind energy generation but have since expanded to include load and grid management, sector coupling, and low-exergy heating. Today, the region is one of Germany’s pioneering regions in the energy transition [10] (p. 48); it hosts around 6.7 gigawatts of installed wind power onshore and 1.8 gigawatts offshore and operates feed-in and dynamic load management on its grid. The region also features biomass-derived renewable energy, i.e., biogas, electricity, and heat, with more potential for wind power from on- and off-shore sites (ibid). The regional production plans for hydrogen benefit from the existing green and fossil industries in terms of related knowledge and skills (cf. [11]). Likewise, there are regional sales markets (cf. [12]) for the use of hydrogen and its by-products that involve a refinery, the local town, a cement production plant, and an international airport.

In this sense, the project integrates several industries, all of which could eventually be served by a green hydrogen-based supply chain. However, the immediate objective of the project is to construct a 30-megawatt electrolysis plant and to learn about its operation, maintenance, control, and grid compatibility, with a view to scale up its production capacity in due course. With a view to the future integration of hydrogen into the energy system, a natural gas cavern will be converted for hydrogen storage. In addition, an intermixture of hydrogen and natural gas will be tested on households’ gas boilers in a dedicated district using the existing gas distribution network of the local town.

The green credentials of this supply chain are based on renewable energy, which is why various ‘green’ expectations in the region are feeding into the local buzz around the project [13]. While some stakeholders criticise green hydrogen production, on the grounds that renewable electricity could be used more efficiently directly, elsewhere in the region, stakeholders lobby against the electrification of local train lines, preferring hydrogen-powered trains instead [14]. The region has also seen protests against the storage of CO₂ in the past [15], which should, however, not be interpreted as the endorsement of a carbon capture and utilisation approach. However, it is uncertain whether such options, let alone the differences between them, are well understood by the public [16] even if renewables are widely accepted in the region [17]. These expectations are growing as fossil fuels come under increasing pressure, as evidenced by large-scale protests against a proposed LNG terminal in the region [18,19]. However, the protests faded in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ensuing gas supply shock led to the terminal being constructed within months. Taken together, these differing expectations highlight several potential challenges for an emerging hydrogen economy.

Despite the construction of the LNG terminal, the regional development of green hydrogen within the transformation of Germany’s energy sector is still fully supported by local, regional, and national governments. The national hydrogen strategy is coordinating national and international efforts aiming firstly at the substitution of fossil-fuel-based hydrogen in the basic industry—especially chemical and steel production—and secondly at the establishment of hydrogen as a (global) energy carrier through the rapid upscaling and diffusion of power-to-x technology (ptx) [1]. However, there is still some ambivalence regarding the integration of hydrogen into the wider transformation of the energy system, in terms of regulation, the environmental impact of importing hydrogen over long distances, and the efficient use of hydrogen in linking the mobility, residential, and industrial sectors [20].

In the next section, we outline the theories that informed and guided the qualitative study of our case. This is followed by a discussion of the methods used to undertake this case study, providing a detailed description of the particular tools employed over the course of three successive workshops. These workshops served two purposes: on the one hand, the results informed the project directly; on the other, they enabled us to depict observations at the workshops that seemed to be closely related to the hypotheses underlying the theories. In our discussion of the workshop results, we demonstrate where the respective theories provide direction for future research in relation to the planned hydrogen supply chain.

Theoretical Context

Real-world laboratories have become an institutionalised organisational form in the transformation of the energy system in Germany. They have been most successfully applied in urban contexts to reduce residential energy use. According to Heiskanen et al. [21], successfully setting up this organisational form depends on finding the right combination of context, mechanism, and outcome, and this is mostly attributed to niche development. However, collaboration may encounter different challenges in real-world laboratories, such as competing technologies [22] and branching technological innovation pathways [23]. As a consequence, real-world laboratories may include organisations that can be attributed to a niche and a regime simultaneously (cf. [24]). Against this background, gaining legitimacy for an industrial project and the innovations it seeks to develop or install in a real-world laboratory may require a broader problem-framing than is normally the case (cf. [25]). Yet it may also require a concept to address the tension between niche development and regime.

According to Truffer et al. [26], social expectations can notably influence the direction of technological innovations such as electrolysis at an industrial scale. And Jolly and Hansen [27] also emphasise that the legitimacy of a regional industry is influenced by its relations with other regional industries and by the broader regional sectors. The first aspect refers to the companies in an industry located in the region, while the second refers to the regional institutions and regulated industries. If a region can rely on a variety of industries with technological relations, there is a high potential for inter-industry learning, the recombination of knowledge, and thus for the development of new growth paths within that region [28,29]. This largely takes place in innovation networks in which the alignment of the involved actors “depends on different kinds of expectations that these actors hold: (i) expectations about future context conditions, under which the sector has to work, (ii) expectations about future performance characteristics of specific socio-technical configurations and (iii) also expectations about the likely role specific actor groups (or individuals) will hold in the future.” [19] (p. 1360).

Te Kulve et al. [30] have highlighted the influence that public authorities can exert on innovation networks, but they also characterise these fields as follows: “While at the firm level scenarios and strategies can be focused to the more or less coherent perspectives of actors within the firm, sustainable transformations of product fields or entire sectors necessitate the integration of a broader range of roles, competences, rationalities and interests of different actor groups. In such a context, coordination failures and conflicts come to the fore and require the development of a high degree of reflexivity on the side of participating actors.” [30] (p. 1361). A less ambivalent social influence on transformation projects has been observed by Grimm et al. [31] who found that collaborative pilot and demonstration projects in the energy sector that brought together industry, academia, government, and civil society were particularly well received by consumers. In order to avoid “a mismatch between the attributes and characteristics of technological solutions on the one hand and the needs, desires and perceptions of potential adopters in civil society on the other”, they argue, “it is of utmost importance to include the perspective of the individual participants in the design process of such pilot, test and demonstration projects” [31] (p. 10). Obviously, Grimm et al. [31] are referring to the more specific influence of consumers rather than society as a whole.

While project networks are still often analysed as unique inter-organisational projects, most projects are in fact part of a succession of projects. The resulting cognitive ties are established and maintained through ongoing social relationships between the participating organisations [32] as well as feedback from this collaboration on subsequent projects. Participating organisations bring their individual portfolios to the projects, and organisational path dependencies may alter subsequent variances between companies [33]. As a result, project networks are also influenced by multiple centres of authority, which usually involve the coordination of different actors and relationships [34] and require the ongoing coordination and (re)negotiation of work, for example, of deliverables or steering groups at different levels of the project network.

Similarly, Nonaka has suggested that organisations should develop their individual strategies in small steps based on current projects within the organisation [35]. He proposed understanding practical strategy building as an internal co-creation process leading to a collective narrative, which prepares the organisation for changes in the environment better than finance-driven strategy building [36]. The ability of narratives to ‘model’ the world performatively through language has also been brought forward by other authors, who suggest that, by linking the past, present, and future, narratives can redesign existing economic functions, such as the provision of basic industries [37].

In the context of project-based innovation networks, such co-creative narratives would need to emerge from the consortium partners of a real-world laboratory and substantially engage external stakeholders if the benefits highlighted by Grimm et al. [31] are to be realised. In the context of real-world laboratories, it seems that even more complex narratives are required than those described by Nonaka, not least because legally independent organisations need to co-construct these narratives, potentially over the course of successive projects, and also because the transformation of energy systems involves re-designing functions over time when coupling sectors. All this has to be achieved within consortia that may have heterogeneous interests and diverging technologies to sell.

2. Materials and Methods

While the choice and use of methods took place against the above theoretical background, all methods had to be implemented as applied research. The methods were adapted to the requirements and available participants, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wish of the project partners to discern and manage the external stakeholders of the project. This resulted in an iterative process of, in total, three workshops. All three workshops relied on the project partners’ subjective perception of the external regional stakeholders in order to build a shared understanding of how to engage with these stakeholders. In addition, the workshops were primarily attended by representatives of the respective communication departments.

The first workshop offered an opportunity for the project partners to understand local stakeholder interests and to identify similarities and possible cognitive overlaps between different stakeholder groups. To this end, a two-stage design was developed, consisting of an (internal) online survey and an interactive online workshop.

The second workshop developed messages for the regional stakeholders. It built on the results from the first workshop and served to refine the existing project communication, which had already been established with the project start through a project webpage and several press releases. In addition to that the project was also communicated by the individual public relations of the project partners. These had disseminated information about the project through the trade press, social media, and regional and national media. While the project partners were thus already all actively communicating about the project as part of their ongoing communication efforts, local communication was largely left to the partners in the region.

In order to pull the findings of the two workshops together and elaborate on them, a third workshop was carried out. Its immediate aim was to provide answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) and to find key elements for a storyline that could stand up to the expectations of the stakeholders in the region.

The three workshops did not simply require a suitable workshop design—with the particular challenge imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic to provide an online format—but also pre-structured input for the participants. To this end, stakeholders and news reports had to be identified, analysed, and visualised in order to provide participants with adequate information. The data were diverse and collected through searches and surveys. It was generated using, among others, the online survey tool LimeSurvey^® and analysed using descriptive statistics based on Python software 3.2 packages or qualitative content analysis (QCA) using Maxqda^® software Version 22. Both software packages included visualisation tools or provided them through extensions (Plotly for Python). Furthermore, the workshops were carried out on the online whiteboard MURAL^®.

2.1. Workshop I

In order to develop an awareness of stakeholders’ interest and their influence on the project, the first workshop drew on Mendelow’s stakeholder matrix approach, which is a well-established tool for representing the project environment of external stakeholders [38]. The method shows how to relate the external stakeholders to a project. Building this relationship might either be conceived as a form of communicative risk management approach [39] or of public project communication [40,41]. Furthermore, the workshop relied on a two-stage design, consisting of an online survey and an interactive online workshop.

In preparation for the (internal) survey, the project partners were asked to name local stakeholders that they considered relevant for the successful delivery of the project. To facilitate the process, they could draw on a comprehensive list of regional stakeholders prepared by the authors. This resulted in a consolidated list of 19 stakeholder groups, which were later assessed according to their assumed level of interest and influence in the online poll using a five-point Likert scale.

These results were described statistically, visualised, and presented to the project partners in the workshop. The partners were divided into small break-out groups and asked to provide more insight into the different stakeholder groups, e.g., by drawing on their previous experiences with them. This qualitative information was mapped against the stakeholders’ perceived opportunities to influence the project. Both aspects were finally integrated in a panel session by answering the hands-on question of how to convince political groups to support the project.

The workshop results were evaluated by means of a qualitative content analysis [42]. For this purpose, the workshop results were independently and fully coded by three researchers to ensure full coverage of the data and guarantee a maximum of intersubjectivity. This was performed inductively, i.e., the codings emerged from the statements (and were not defined ex ante), grouping similar content under one code. Intercoder agreement was assessed by using the respective Maxqda tool.

2.2. Workshop II

The second workshop took up the results of the first. In addition, it built on an analysis (QCA) of the media coverage of the project to refine the ongoing communication efforts if deemed necessary. To understand current issues in the media, a sample of 103 documents was collected from articles reporting on the project during the period between August 2020 to June 2021. The sample was drawn from all existing 50 local newspapers, the national press, and the trade press, as well as Twitter, while local advertising papers were omitted. For comparison, the sample included the original press releases of the individual project partners and the consortium. Most of the reporting on the project took place in the local press, with a total of 58 articles. The project was subject of nine articles in the national press and six in the trade press. A total of 21 tweets from the social media platform Twitter published by individual users and organisations were added to the sample as well as six press releases from the project partners.

A total of 59 codes were established and later clustered into these seven sets: energy transition and climate protection, hydrogen supply chain, sector coupling, markets and market formation, acceptance, pilot project and up-scaling, and funding and investment. An additional code set bundled all explicit criticism of the project but was excluded from this workshop. All codes, except for the last one, were used as input for the third workshop.

2.3. Workshop III

The immediate aim of the third workshop was to develop answers for a FAQs and to identify key elements of a storyline accomplished enough to stand up to potential criticism from within and outside the region. To this end, enquiries that were received via the project website were compiled. These enquiries were supplemented by more basic questions about the project. Together with the enquiries, these were grouped and edited and sent out by the organisers to the project partners. Although the response was modest, it could be used to inform the workshop.

The workshop responses that failed to provide concise answers were marked. Due to the time constraints of a workshop, a selection of questions took place, and participants were asked to address the shortcomings of the provided answers. Using the familiar online whiteboard, the project partners collaborated in small breakout groups to answer the questions on the MURAL board.

3. Results

3.1. Workshop I: Implementation and Results

The stakeholder analysis involved a quantitative and a qualitative analysis to understand their potential positioning towards the project and unlock (perceived) opportunities and risks of managing them. The survey in the run-up to the first workshop was completed by 13 persons who represented all project partners. The results show that only a few appraisals differed meaningfully with regard to interest or influence including all adjoining sectors. The findings were mapped into the Mendelow matrix (Figure 1). The matrix lays out stakeholder groups in quadrants according to whether the project should keep I. close contact to, II. satisfy, III. monitor, or IV. inform the stakeholder.

It indicates that, according to the project partners’ assessment, close contact should be sought with the majority of stakeholders (11/19). Only a few stakeholder groups were found to deserve less attention, i.e., should just be satisfied (5/19), monitored (3/19), or kept informed (1/19).

This information was subsequently expanded with the results from the first workshop, which detailed external stakeholders’ perceived interest and assumed influence. This information was, in principle qualitative, but it was also analysed quantitatively: the codes of the qualitative content analysis were also evaluated according to the frequencies of the respective codings. Overall, most codings were assigned to political groups and members of the parliament (18), agricultural associations (17), vocational schools and universities (15), and chambers of industry and commerce, the energy industry and local craftsmen/heat service providers (14), as well as to local banks and investors (13). At first sight, the comparatively low appraisal of, in particular, the energy industry might be cause for surprise. However, the perceived up- and downstream challenges of the project seem to explain this appraisal.

The analysis showed that some stakeholders were more strongly associated with certain topics than others. For instance, the topics of jobs and industrial location were mostly associated with the chamber of commerce and industry, members of the parliament/parliamentary parties, and mayors. The analysis also showed that the long-term goal of decarbonisation was not attributed to any stakeholder group except for the basic industries.

Correlating the codes to the perceived self-interest of stakeholders and their powers to influence the project outcome positively or negatively suggested that the interest in the project was predominantly perceived as resulting from self-interest (cf.

Table 1. Crosstab relating self-interest and influence (+/−) to all other codes. Regional aspects come out strongest, followed by lobbying and networking activities.

	Self-Interest > 0	Influence (−) ≥ 0	Influence (+) ≥ 0	Total
Lobbying	7.9%	9.6%	9.0%	8.7%
Networking	9.2%	5.8%	9.0%	8.2%
Fairness	1.3%	2.0%	1.8%	1.6%
Investments	7.9%	7.6%	7.4%	7.7%
Role Model	3.9%	0.0%	3.0%	2.5%
Participation	3.9%	5.8%	7.4%	7.2%
B2B/B2C	3.9%	2.0%	1.5%	2.5%
Cost Pressure/Prices	7.9%	5.8%	7.4%	7.2%
Delay/Blockade	3.9%	5.8%	3.0%	4.1%
Insecurity	2.7%	5.8%	4.4%	4.1%
Security	5.2%	7.6%	5.9%	6.1%
Migration	3.9%	3.8%	4.4%	4.1%
Attracting Businesses (H2) to SH	3.9%	3.8%	4.4%	4.1%
Value creation and Jobs	6.6%	7.6%	5.9%	6.6%
Regional	10.6%	13.4%	10.5%	11.3%
Vocational Training	5.2%	2.0%	4.4%	4.1%
Stakeholder Learning	1.3%	0.0%	1.5%	1.1%
Emissions Reduction	6.6%	7.6%	7.4%	7.2%
Substitution of fossil energy sources	2.7%	2.0%	3.0%	2.5%
Decarbonisation	1.3%	2.0%	0.0%	1.1%
SUM	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%
N = documents	14	9	13	36

). But, also, networking was seen to be in the self-interest of the majority of stakeholders. In addition, a variety of individual interests were ascribed to the external stakeholders as apparent in Table 1. These findings were generally in line with the survey results.

The perception of the stakeholders’ influence on project delivery revealed a more ambivalent picture. Various stakeholder groups were attributed with both positive and negative opportunities to influence the project. While overall positive perceptions of external stakeholders dominated (81.3 per cent), especially with regard to the regional context, many stakeholders were also perceived to potentially exert negative influence on the project (56.3 per cent). This was somewhat surprising given that the region’s population [17], like the German population as such [43], holds positive attitudes towards renewables and the transformation of the energy system. This mismatch was pointed out to the participants.

It became particularly evident with respect to two stakeholder groups: farmers and their associations, as well as citizens’ action groups, to whom the project partners attributed a blocking or veto attitude, potentially endangering a timely project delivery. Furthermore, the results show that the stakeholders with the largest number of codes overall are also those who were attributed with the greatest self-interest as well as the greatest positive influence on the project. This is especially true for the stakeholder group of members of the parliament and parliamentary parties (self-interest: 4 codings; influence (+): 3 codings), schools, vocational schools, and universities (self-interest: 3; influence (+): 3) and farmers and their associations (self-interest: 3; influence (+): 4). In addition, chambers of industry and commerce (self-interest: 3; influence (+): 2) and mayors and district councils (self-interest: 2; influence (+): 2) are attributed both self-interest and positive influence.

This suggests that, even if stakeholders are considered relevant for the project, the project partner’s stance towards them was nuanced. Public actors, such as policymakers, were considered more reliable champions of the project than, for instance, farmers or the chambers of commerce.

3.2. Workshop II: Implementation and Results

The analysis of the project’s coverage in the news, summarised in Figure 2, revealed that the different media outlets highlighted rather different aspects of the project. Unsurprisingly, the local press stressed its regional dimension and, to a somewhat minor extent, the collaborative nature of the project. The former is also true for the trade press. Furthermore, sector coupling (as such) and ptx technology, together with the innovative green credentials of hydrogen, were common topics, whereas no specific kind of sector coupling dominated. In contrast to the messages communicated by the consortium, decarbonisation, cooperation, and upscaling hydrogen production under real conditions found only some adherence across the press.

When comparing the different communication media, it is also noticeable that local reporting often quoted political actors from Schleswig-Holstein (state). Overall, however, local politicians (municipal) played a subordinate role in the reporting. The trade press had a somewhat similar focus as the local press and emphasised the industrial scale of the green hydrogen production, the ptx technology, and the full downstream integration of the supply chain across different sectors. In addition, it referred to the location of the project as well while stressing the need for this and similar investments. The national press generally covered a broader range of project-related topics. Compared to the trade press, it portrayed the budgeting of the project from the cost rather than the investment side. While the print media showed topical adherence to the project’s press releases, the greatest departure from it occurred on the short-message platform of Twitter. The tweets mostly addressed the technical aspects and the funding of the project.

The findings were used for the second workshop to provide information of the media’s responsiveness to the project. In preparation for the workshop, for each set of codes, corresponding quotations or paraphrases from the articles were selected or formed. As in the first workshop, the online whiteboard was also used for the second workshop. The workshop participants were asked to select those seven items that they considered most relevant for formulating core messages. Afterwards, the quotes/paraphrases with the most votes were selected for further work.

To spell out the project’s core objectives for future communication, Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle [44] was introduced to answer the questions of why the project was being implemented in the region, what its key objectives were, and how these were to be achieved. Answers were constrained to two sentences to produce core statements for the project. In the end, the project partners agreed on four key statements addressing each question.

3.3. Workshop III: Implementation and Results

The third workshop addressed questions brought up by the public via the project webpage in order to develop a list of FAQs. To this end, the existing questions were grouped by the organisers and sent out to the project partners asking them for individual answers. This did not deliver full answers but still allowed us to formulate provisional answers for the workshop.

Due to the time constraints of a workshop (and as a consequence of the quality of the responses), the number of questions to be addressed in greater detail had to be reduced. Thus, workshop participants were asked to select those FAQs that they thought were suitable to contribute to a shared story for the region. After the selection, three groups each answered a set of the provisional answers. Later, the groups were asked in turn to review the answers for suitability and completeness. Interestingly, the selection of questions already revealed a significant bias towards technical questions, while questions that related the project to the energy transition, such as the role of green hydrogen or the expansion of renewable energies and the acceptance of respective transformation pathways in society, were initially excluded. The project partners even evaded further elaboration of the answers when explicitly prompted. Only after the questions were rephrased in more technical terms, some more details were provided.

4. Discussion

The workshops showed that the project partners found it difficult to develop a shared narrative. Despite a memorable project motto, derived from the Golden Circle exercise, the public relations experts found it challenging to address the energy transition in any greater detail. This suggested a rather thin consensus amongst the consortium partners on how to position the project within the broader transition context. There are several possible reasons for this.

Firstly, from the perspective of the industrial partners, the project represented just another large-scale industrial project. However, normal industrial projects differ from real-world laboratories because the latter blend of market-based financing and public subsidies involves the direct collaboration of private and public partners, dependent on forthcoming regulation and because they often evolve over successive projects. Finally, they are under intense public scrutiny due to the continuing public interest in the transformation of the energy system.

The stakeholder exercise showed that the project partners recognised the importance of public actors for the project’s success. They identified political parties, members of regional and national parliament, as well as schools and universities as relevant actors. However, acknowledging their importance and including them as internal project partners in the consortium are two different things. This seems to be strongly linked to two expectations: Firstly, the inclusion of public organisations lends the consortium the necessary credibility to access public funding for scientific expertise, which is positively associated with altering the local and extra-regional knowledge base. Secondly, it is expected that these partners provide social and institutional links to local stakeholders, which are particularly valuable for the extra-regional project partners. In particular, the regional development agency was credited with providing an interface to local businesses, policymakers, and society and, in addition to that, facilitating communication with these regional stakeholders. Ironically, the agency’s central, albeit mostly organising role, was reinforced by the fact that the industry partners were less interested in establishing a continuous communication with the external stakeholders.

As the articles in the local media showed (cf. Figure 2), local, regional, and national policymakers who supported the project unanimously placed it in the wider context of the national and European energy transition. By contrast, the public relations experts preferred a project-centred narrative highlighting their individual technological contribution from early on. But this came with a caveat: companies situated in the region depend on good ongoing relationships with the decision-makers and communities in the region, and, so, they were carefully watching that communication efforts from non-regional partners towards local stakeholders did not precede project delivery. While this was entirely reasonable and also accepted, it highlights some practical limitations of Grimm et al.’s [31] recommendations.

Yet, policymakers also depend on the success of the project to maintain their mandate with local and regional voters. The results of the first and second workshop reflected this social interdependency in as much as, e.g., policymakers were almost unambiguously considered key supporters of the project, while other politically influential stakeholder groups were thought to be ambivalent. Nevertheless, this understanding of stakeholders’ roles proved too narrow when the municipality voted in favour of district heating planning, thus upholding technological openness in the face of the project’s plan to pilot the admixture of hydrogen to the natural gas grid in the municipality.

More than local embedding and public funding, however, the companies depended on projectable European and national regulations to undertake the necessary investments in a green hydrogen supply chain [45]. In this respect, the consortium supported capping the EEG levy on renewable power, which the government did indeed phase out. However, transformation of the heating sector remained a thorny issue, which found little support from the partners, ultimately leading to an event-based communication with ad hoc support from the regional development agency.

By contrast, the companies made efforts to attract private investors and to provide new business cases in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace—for instance, by highlighting that the project will receive CAPEX funding only. This outreach to B2B and financial markets was anticipated by the public relations experts who specified the stakeholder group, local banks, and investors during the first workshop by adding wind power financiers and green holdings in the region. Yet, this was neither substantiated in the following workshops nor in the later project communication and may have already indicated the internal move of the consortium’s core bodies towards a negative final investment decision, which was taken in the end (ibid.). Still, the communication of the project in the B2B space should be seen as an attempt to create positive externalities in the region (and beyond).

In the workshops, the PR experts refrained from presenting the project as an integrated solution to transform the region’s fossil-based industry. Although hydrogen is an innovative fuel when produced from renewable power, it still coexists with grey hydrogen—that may only eventually be phased out as the admixture concept showed—as well as pink and blue hydrogen that other players still favour for the run-up of hydrogen. Yet, in order to contribute to the 100% renewable narrative of the region, the green credentials of the end-product have to be demonstrated. Actively supporting the use of new renewable sources, i.e., wind and PV, on which the green credentials of the project’s planned hydrogen production depended, could have been one way forward but did not take place. And to communicate coherently in this respect, costs, prices, and conversion efficiencies would have to be part of that as well. Focusing only on first contacts of existing supply chains and perceived roles of stakeholders did not link up well with the regional narrative since it ignored that even supporting stakeholders are not simply individuals but represent institutions that can choose market solutions competing with those promoted by the consortium.

Rather than providing a comprehensive integration into the regional narrative, project communication then relied on occasional press releases to mark specific events, such as the start of the cavern storage test phase or the announcement of the district selected for the hydrogen gas-blending trial. The communication addressed the respective work streams of each company, reflecting their preferred technology option within the wider project objectives. The timely provision of this information ensured some legitimacy, e.g., it suggested that transparency towards the consortium and the public was inscribed in the code of conduct of each project partner. It even suggested that some kind of co-created narrative emerged in the project network, not least via a webpage. However, this did not succeed to fully place the project in the regional 100% renewable context, despite core messages of the project that addressed the region—e.g., with an assurance like “we want to make a specific contribution to climate protection from within the region”—or may even have put the region in the spotlight of the national press. Yet, diverging business orientations towards the transformation ultimately affected these communication efforts: by and large, companies simply continued to communicate in their own way, thereby accepting that they would contribute only temporarily to the 100%-renewable narrative of the region.

In the case at hand, the organisational form of the real-world laboratory allowed a degree of ambivalence that did not integrate the divergent sectoral orientations within the consortium anymore. Eventually, this resulted in an ad hoc approach to communication and only partially and temporally integrated the consortium’s communication into the region’s 100% renewable narrative. Following a negative FID, there is little to suggest that communication can overcome existing ambivalences of a real-world laboratory’s organisational form on its own right, which leads us to recommend that greater care is given to setting up better-integrated consortia.

5. Conclusions

If it is true that a new industry is only accepted when the different stakeholders stop questioning the usefulness of this industry, green hydrogen is likely to remain an ambivalent innovation for some time. There are many challenges pertaining, for instance, to the commensurability of the different colours of hydrogen, various uncertainties including those of future gas supply shocks and ongoing legal uncertainty, and, last but not least, the public acceptance of hydrogen in the face of competing technologies. For the most part, these uncertainties have been met with individual responses from the consortium. While a thin narrative has been co-produced, the lasting narratives are rather associated individually with the project partners. Aligning different sector interests may always be challenging, but, in the real-world laboratory studied here, the project partners were unable to overcome the ambivalence of the real laboratory’s organisational form. There is thus some indication that a greater sectoral focus might help to reduce the ambivalence associated with this organisational form, but, ultimately, that remains to be seen as more real-world laboratories take off.