The Global Energy Summit Spring 2024 was organized as a public panel discussion chaired by Felix Zuckschwerdt, Head of Mission for East and Southern Africa at the Diplomatic Council. Invited panellists: Vandre Spellmeier, German-Angolan Hydrogen Office, H2 diplo (Angola), Frank Obrist, CEO & Founder, Obrist Group (Germany/Austria), Thomas Wu, Board Member, DSE Green Technology Holdings (Proprietary) Ltd (Namibia), Jonathan Metcalfe, Business Development, Enertrag South Africa (South Africa), Joel Vogl, CEO & Co-Founder, Infener AG (Switzerland), Dr. Thomas Krimmel, Director, Southern BioPower Ltd (Zambia), Tumi Leie, Managing Director, Ekapa Energy and Mining (South Africa), Yasmin Ali, Project Development Manager (Hydrogen), RWE (United Kingdom) and Hans-Henning Judek, Director, Energy Visions Japan Co, Ltd (Japan).

The use of solar energy to produce hydrogen is at the heart of renewable energy concepts. Africa and other regions in the Earth's sun belt play a key role here, as only there is sufficient solar intensity to make hydrogen production by electrolysis economically viable. The question of how to transport the hydrogen produced there to the industrialised world remains unanswered. In its pure gaseous state, hydrogen is highly unsuitable for this purpose, as huge pressurised containers would be required for transport and the risk of explosion is high. The resulting high costs and dangers make hydrogen unsuitable as a substitute for fossil fuels. However, there are processes for liquefying hydrogen into methanol or ammonia, which would make it easy and cheap to transport using all existing infrastructures (conventional tankers, wagons, road tankers, pipelines) ("liquefied solar energy"). But even with unchanged transport infrastructures, there are huge economic and political challenges to achieving a global methanol or ammonia economy. The cost of building the energy plants alone runs into billions of dollars. Nevertheless, investors are ready and willing to invest because of the billions of dollars in profits to be made by shifting the global economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.