Anthony Wang, a mechanical engineer by training, spent years as a researcher on hydrogen technologies. He worked with governments to develop policy and infrastructure plans — he was project manager on the EU's big hydrogen backbone project — and with private companies like Total and Shell to develop hydrogen technology roadmaps. He has authored or co-authored several industry-defining reports on hydrogen and been cited in countless publications.A few years ago, he decided to throw his hat in the ring and try to actually build hydrogen projects in the real world. All his research and contacts in the energy world led him to a very specific — and, to me, extremely intriguing — business model.ETFuels, the company he co-founded, develops projects that couple giant off-grid renewable energy installations with hydrogen electrolyzers; it then uses the resulting green hydrogen to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels. (First up is methanol for shipping, but the company plans to branch out into other e-fuels.)This model somehow manages to implicate half the stuff I’m interested in these days — green hydrogen, markets for hydrogen fuels, off-grid renewables, coupling renewables directly with industrial loads — so I was eager to talk with Wang about it. We dug into the limits of “electrify everything,” the difficulty of transporting hydrogen, and the economics of e-fuels, among other things.This one gets fairly deep in the weeds, but if you find the real-world challenges of developing clean-energy projects interesting, you don’t want to miss it. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe