For Jacob Krogsgaard, founder and CEO of Everfuel, the inspiration to enter into the energy sector began a long time ago.

Growing up in Thy, in northwest Denmark, he witnessed the development and construction of some of Denmark’s first wind farms in the late 80s and 90s, which were owned by the local farmers. In the mid-90s, the The region experienced a storm, where the winds were so strong that the local power area ended up producing more power than the grid could consume.

“That’s the first place in history where that happened. And it caused a grid collapse because nobody planned for it,” says Jacob.

The early solutions were simple at best – the power company would call farmers ahead of time to switch off the turbines as a form of ‘manual curtailment’. When learning this, it inspired Jacob to find a way to utilise that excess power into something useful. Jacob knew that the problem of curtailment would only become a more significant issue for Europe’s plans to massively scale up renewable energy capacity..

Hydrogen had to be the solution to this problem.