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Power to Gas, a future energy solution to store renewable electricity

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Wind turbines and solar farms often make more power than the grid can use — and PtG turns that wasted electricity into gas you can store for months.

DW’s science program “Tomorrow Today” dedicated a segment to power-to-gas (PtG), a process that takes surplus electricity from wind and solar and locks it away as storable fuel instead of letting it go to waste. The report lays out, step by step, how a grid running on weather-dependent renewables can turn its biggest weakness — unpredictable supply — into a stockpile of usable energy. It’s a technical fix, but the segment frames it in plain terms: split water, add carbon, store gas, burn it later.

• Surplus wind and solar electricity that can’t be consumed immediately is normally curtailed or wasted; power-to-gas is designed to capture it instead.
• Electrolysis splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using that surplus electricity, and a methanation step then combines the hydrogen with CO2 — captured from the air or industrial exhaust — via the Sabatier reaction to make synthetic methane.
• Unlike pure hydrogen, which needs specialized pipelines and tanks, synthetic methane can be injected straight into existing natural gas grids and storage facilities without any modification.

The Curtailment Problem

Renewable output doesn’t arrive on a schedule that matches demand. A gusty afternoon or a sunny midday can flood a regional grid with more electricity than homes and factories need at that exact moment, and without a way to store it, operators are forced to curtail turbines and solar arrays rather than let voltage spike. The “Tomorrow Today” segment treats this as the core problem PtG is built to solve — not generating more renewable power, but making better use of the power that’s already there.

From Electrolysis to Synthetic Methane

The process the segment walks through starts with electrolysis: surplus green electricity runs through water, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen. That hydrogen can be used on its own as an energy vector, but the report goes further into methanation, where the hydrogen is combined with CO2 pulled from the air or from industrial exhaust streams. The chemical reaction driving that combination is the Sabatier reaction, and its output is synthetic methane — chemically indistinguishable from the natural gas already flowing through pipeline networks.

Synthetic Methane Leverages Existing Infrastructure

Hydrogen has real advantages as a fuel, but it’s a difficult one to move and store at scale — it needs specialized pipelines, seals, and pressure tanks that most gas grids simply don’t have. Synthetic methane sidesteps that problem entirely. Researchers cited in the segment point to infrastructure compatibility as the decisive factor: the gas can go straight into pipelines and underground storage caverns already built for natural gas, with no retrofitting required.

Unlike pure hydrogen, synthetic methane can be injected directly into existing natural gas grids and long-term storage facilities without modification.

Closing the Loop

The payoff comes when demand spikes or renewable output drops. The stored gas — hydrogen or synthetic methane — gets burned in standard gas power plants, producing electricity, steam, and CO2, which can then be fed back into another round of methanation. That closed loop is what makes power-to-gas attractive as a grid-balancing tool rather than just a storage gimmick: the same turbines and pipelines already sitting in the gas network do double duty, first as fuel movers and later as the release valve when the wind dies down.

The idea has been circulating in European energy circles for years precisely because it doesn’t require reinventing the gas grid — it just asks that grid to run backward when the sun and wind aren’t cooperating. For a closer look at how storage challenges are shaping other parts of the power sector, the Finland nuclear storage project and the broader push covered under Energy both tackle the same underlying puzzle from different angles: what to do with power when supply and demand refuse to line up.