“Hungary is to become involved in projects relating to the electric highway being developed by the German state of Baden-Württemberg”, Minister of Innovation and Technology László Palkovics said on Wednesday in Stuttgart, the state’s capital.

The experimental eHighway project involves the installation of electric cables above motorways that will enable hybrid heavy goods vehicles equipped with pantographs to charge their batteries while en route.

“Hungary will be becoming involved in this major Baden-Württemberg project”, the Minister said in a telephone statement to Hungarian news agency MTI on the first day of his visit to Stuttgart.

He recalled that the Hungary – Baden-Württemberg Joint Economic Committee held a plenary session in Budapest in June. “The meeting in Budapest, which was chaired by Green party politician, State Minister Theresa Schopper, was followed by several other ‘fruitful talks’ in the capital of the German state, which is regarded as an engine of innovation”, Mr. Palkovics said.

As he explained, the processes that began in Budapest must be continued and supplemented with further ones, adding that possibilities for further cooperation were primarily examined from within the fields of innovation and research. “Intensive negotiations also took place on energy-related issues, for instance on the use of hydrogen generated using electricity as a so-called intermediate energy carrier (for the storage and transport of renewable energy), which will also be included in Hungary’s National Energy Strategy”, he added.

In addition to meeting the heads of research centres and major corporations, Mr. Palkovics also held talks with political leaders, including Deputy Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg and the state’s Minister of the Interior, Digitalisation and Migration Thomas Strobl, the President of the state’s section of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and with Wolfgang Reinhart, head of the party’s group in the state parliament (Landtag).

(Ministry of Innovation and Technology/MTI)