On June 1, 2017 Stephan Kamphues quit his position as the spokesman of the Open Grid Europe (OGE) management board. Since then, he has been the Vier Gas Transport managing director (ener|gate Gasmarkt 07/17). The company owns OGE. Vier Gas Transport is a joint venture company of the four investment firms Macquarie, ABU DHABI INVESTMENT AUTHORITY, British Columbia Investment Management, and MEAG Munich Ergo. Mr Kamphues kept his position as president of the European Network of TSOs, ENTSO-G. Last year, Mr Kamphues told this publication that he had reorganised his professional life to reduce working time and to focus on strategic topics. One aspect of his strategic thinking was to work more on joint issues of more than one TSO. At the time, he mentioned power-to-gas as one concrete topic.
Power-to-gas is a topic for which Mr Kamphues gained public attention early last summer. In June, when Amprion and OGE introduced their project for a 100 MW electrolysis plant, Mr Kamphues held the presentation jointly with the Amprion management board. Allegedly, he was among the people that pushed the preparations for the project.
ener|gate Gasmarkt talked with Mr Kamphues about his new role as well as the power-to-gas project and the environment for such projects.
ener|gate Gasmarkt: Mr Kamphues, last year you said you wanted to work in Germany on crosscompany projects, but there‘s no sign of that yet.
Mr Kamphues: There is the idea or the vision to offer policymakers a cross-company concept for the achievement of climate targets with a binding commitment to carbon reductions. But it’s too early to talk about that idea.