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The reason why the Swedish and German green party is so much in favor of green hydrogen is that it seems to be the best bet in their view for a future where the
by belorn 5y ago
The reason why the Swedish and German green party is so much in favor of green hydrogen is that it seems to be the best bet in their view for a future where the primary source of energy is wind. A storage for wind need to be able to last for months, have a output capacity that is proportional to the capacity of the wind, and be expected to repay the storage investment within a reasonable time frame.
The other storage alternatives each have their major drawbacks. Lithium batteries work great for solar as there you only need a few hours of capacity, and the current economical setup seems to be about 80% of output for 4 hours. Each day they get charged and each night they discharge and provide a relative fast return of investment. This doesn't work for wind.
Massive amount of reverse hydro has also been suggested, but getting the capacity up to the same output as current wind installations are difficult. Having a country like Germany operating for months on only hydro power would require a lot of land and constructions, both which carries with them a lot of initial pollution in terms of both methane and co2. It is also very expensive.
There are a few other lesser know storage suggestions like rust batteries and heat storage, but I have yet to hear any of them being currently economical viable to run a whole country.
Green hydrogen can however be created through converting a wind farm into a hydrogen production farm. The cost is currently still prohibitively more expensive compared to nuclear, but it is still the place where those political parties I mentioned early is putting their bets. They are hoping that prices will go down enough that they can start building those kind of wind farms and then convert existing fossil fuel burning power plants and infrastructure to use hydrogen instead.
(I had switched green to blue. Whops. Fixed).
- leoedin 5y agoDo you mean green hydrogen? Blue hydrogen is made from methane - it is essentially a fossil fuel.
- belorn 5y agoYes. Those political parties are betting on green hydrogen. I was commenting on why they are looking towards using hydrogen and wind farms that generate hydrogen, but wrote the wrong color.
- hannob 5y agoThe german green party is not in favor of blue hydrogen, and everything else you say does not make much sense either. Sure you know what blue hydrogen even means?
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoDoes it matter when what the german greenies babble makes no sense at all, either? More Da-Da, more DIE PARTEI, because the party is always right! Ja ja, da da di la lall!
- loicd 5y agoThe question for me would be: is hydrogen really the best chemical for energy storage? (I genuinely do not know actually.) Although you are not explicitely saying that, it seems to me that the underlying assumption behind the hydrogen-as-storage argument is that hydrogen is produced from surplus electricity and then used e.g. in transportation. The choice of hydrogen is then justified because only water is released into the environment in that scenario. However, that seems terribly inefficient to me, if only because you have to move hydrogen around. An efficient storage system should work in a closed loop: you produce hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis with surplus electricity, store hydrogen locally, and use the locally stored hydrogen to produce electricity when needed. There is no need to release anything into the environment. In particular, other chemicals could be used instead of hydrogen.