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I think the charts are saying roughly a litre of lithium battery has 1kwh, a litre of liquid hydrogen 3kw and a litre of petrol 10kw. By 2050 your litre of gree

I think the charts are saying roughly a litre of lithium battery has 1kwh, a litre of liquid hydrogen 3kw and a litre of petrol 10kw. By 2050 your litre of green hydrogen might cost 10 cents to make or 3c per kWh.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
Electricity is approaching 1c per kWh in some recent solar plant bids. For example, there were a few bids in the middle east recently that were getting close to that. Battery cost is on track to dip below 100$ per kwh. E.g. Tesla is rumored to be at or below that already/in the near future. By 2050, energy cost is going to be measured differently. IMHO it stops being a variable cost once it dips substantially below 1c per kwh. Your basically spending more on coffee to keep yourself going on an average journey, Arguably, if you have access to square meters, it's a cost that is amortized over the one time cost of installing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other infrastructure. Kind of expensive today but doable; that will be very much different 3 decades from now. Any business operating fleets of vehicles will want to minimize this cost. That means investing in cheap sources of energy and a mass switch to battery electric vehicles that is already kicking off right now. This takes time obviously and doesn't happen overnight. But it's also not going to take decades. It's one of those things where the payoff is non linear meaning it goes from "oh wouldn't that be nice" to "I must do this now to survive as a business" in just a few years. In other words, this will have largely been completed by 2050. This is good news for hydrogen as well because it means that there will be plenty of excess energy from peak solar/wind that's basically there to be used. Producing hydrogen and other synthetic fuels (and water) is an obvious way to put that to use and can be used as a solution to fix e.g. shipping, heavy industrial use, and other sectors currently depending on oil or coal. That's after we've topped up our TWH of deployed grid and ev batteries of course. And maybe we'll figure out fusion as well by that time.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Electricity is approaching 1c per kWh in some recent solar plant bids. For example, there were a few bids in the middle east recently that were getting close to that. Battery cost is on track to dip below 100$ per kwh. E.g. Tesla is rumored to be at or below that already/in the near future. By 2050, energy cost is going to be measured differently. IMHO it stops being a variable cost once it dips substantially below 1c per kwh. Your basically spending more on coffee to keep yourself going on an average journey, Arguably, if you have access to square meters, it's a cost that is amortized over the one time cost of installing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other infrastructure. Kind of expensive today but doable; that will be very much different 3 decades from now. Any business operating fleets of vehicles will want to minimize this cost. That means investing in cheap sources of energy and a mass switch to battery electric vehicles that is already kicking off right now. This takes time obviously and doesn't happen overnight. But it's also not going to take decades. It's one of those things where the payoff is non linear meaning it goes from "oh wouldn't that be nice" to "I must do this now to survive as a business" in just a few years. In other words, this will have largely been completed by 2050. This is good news for hydrogen as well because it means that there will be plenty of excess energy from peak solar/wind that's basically there to be used. Producing hydrogen and other synthetic fuels (and water) is an obvious way to put that to use and can be used as a solution to fix e.g. shipping, heavy industrial use, and other sectors currently depending on oil or coal. That's after we've topped up our TWH of deployed grid and ev batteries of course. And maybe we'll figure out fusion as well by that time.