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>One could imagine a system in which solar cells produce hydrogen and the hydrogen is stored until needed or sold to industrial or retail customers. You would
by macspoofing 6y ago
>One could imagine a system in which solar cells produce hydrogen and the hydrogen is stored until needed or sold to industrial or retail customers.
You would need to massively over-provision your solar deployment because you not only need to produce enough energy for current needs, but also to produce enough spare hydrogen to bridge the intermittency gap ... and it is incredibly inefficient to produce hydrogen via solar-generated electricity. Worse than that, you need to over-provision not just for daily load (i.e. night and peak), but for seasonal (summer vs winter) and inter-seasonal variance. All this means you have huge amount of infrastructure that most of the time is doing nothing.
I'm also not sure about the feasibility of using hydrogen as battery backup. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to handle, move and store - and the fact nobody is building out this infrastructure right now is probably indicative of this.
- twic 6y agoIf you wanted to get by with only solar and hydrogen storage, then you would need to store a lot of hydrogen. But fortunately, we also have wind, and a moderate amount of on-demand renewable power (hydro, biomass). To smooth that out, you need to store much less hydrogen.
- macspoofing 6y agoHydro is a great option ... as long as you have the geography for it. Biomass is an environmental disaster. You're destroying huge swaths of natural habitats so you can grow corn or whatever just to burn ... does that sound like technology of the future? Wind has the exact same problems as solar and buys you almost nothing.
- twic 6y agoWind and solar tend to produce power at different times. The intermittency of wind + solar is much less than either alone.
- macspoofing 6y agoThey really don't. That's one problem.