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$2 trillion of tanks and $1 trillion of pipelines, just for North America. Meanwhile, electrical grids already exist.
by NoblePublius 5y ago
$2 trillion of tanks and $1 trillion of pipelines, just for North America. Meanwhile, electrical grids already exist.
- viburnum 5y agoThat’s cheap. USA spends $8 trillion on defense every ten years.
- ncmncm 5y agoAnd gets nothing for it.
- new_realist 5y agoElectrical grids don't store energy. If you wanted to store just 10% of the U.S. electrical generation from summer to winter using lithium-ion batteries, it would cost roughly $42 trillion dollars. Yes, trillion. Storing 10% of the U.S. daily needs for less time (say, one day) is a better story for batteries: only $115 billion. That's how un-scalable long-term battery storage is. Hydrogen is more so: you can store hydrogen in vast quantities in salt caverns, and move it around. Pumped hydro is best, but sites are limited. Compressed air is another solid contender.
- Weryj 5y agoHow's the gravity storage going, it looked really promising and simple.
- dragontamer 5y agoIf you count pumped hydro, gravity storage is the #1 storage of the USA. Turns out that pumping water up-hill and running generators when the water flows backwards is a very efficient energy storage mechanism.
- thinkcontext 5y agoAside from pumped hydro I'm only aware of tiny, one-off pilot projects.
- cure 5y ago> Electrical grids don't store energy. If you wanted to store just 10% of the U.S. electrical generation from summer to winter using lithium-ion batteries, it would cost roughly $42 trillion dollars. Yes, trillion. Do you mean 10% of the generation on a typical summer day? Or 10% of the generation of an entire summer? The problem with this kind of calculation is that battery technology (and cost) is very much a moving target. LFP would probably be the better choice today. It's cheaper, safer, and can handle far more load cycles. That comes at a cost of a lower energy density, but that hardly matters for utility scale batteries. Tesla's megapacks use LFP already - https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/11/tesla-transitions-to-lfp-battery-cells-for-megapack-installations/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/11/tesla-transitions-to-lf.... Like you say, there are many other energy storage options like pumped hydro, compressed air, etc. My personal favorite is the train full of concrete that goes up and down a hill (https://interestingengineering.com/concrete-gravity-trains-may-solve-energy-storage-problem https://interestingengineering.com/concrete-gravity-trains-m...).
- Hypx_ 5y ago10% of a whole summer.
- mgfist 5y agoYou don't need to store that much energy. It's much more cost-efficient to over-provision energy sources. In a few decades we will see solar over-provisioned to 2-3x normal consumption and some battery and that will provide 100% uptime.
- oblio 5y agoYou're overprovisioning at the wrong time with solar, though. What good is 2-3x the power output during the day when you're at 0 during the night? You'd still need 12h of storage or more realistically a mixed energy production setup.
- u320 5y agoMaybe in Arizona. In places where clouds is a thing you are looking at weeks of storage. And some of that stored energy would need to be collected months ahead of time. This is simply not doable with batteries, hydrogen storage is absolutely essential.
- oblio 5y agoI think we're in agreement, maybe my phrasing was unclear :-) My opinion is that we need a mix of energy sources and we need a mix of energy storage solutions.
- ncmncm 5y agoThere will be absolutely massive demand for H2, for myriad industrial processes, not limited to ammonia and hydrocarbon synthesis. So, whatever excess power you can generate will find a ready market with anybody equipped to bank H2. And, banking industrial quantities of H2 is cheap, whether you liquify and store in underground tanks, or pump into caverns under moderate pressure.
- u320 5y agoThe most cost-effective way is a combination of over-provisioning, batteries and hydrogen storage. The exact mix is determined by consumption patterns and local wind/solar conditions. Generally though it's extremely expensive to rely on over-provisioning+batteries alone in places with unreliable weather patterns. Falling battery prices helps of course but we are very far from a point where we can eliminate the need for hydrogen.
- sdenton4 5y agoAnother contender I noticed the other day: build transport cables eight time zones long...
- esturk 5y agoStorage like all the cars we're planning to build anyway? Sorry, but there's something arbitrary about "summer to winter" that you're quoting to fit your narrative here. First of all, Li-ion battery wasn't made to storage energy that long. Second, there are flow batteries for that which will be far better than Hydrogen.
- Tade0 5y agoYou don't need that much storage. You'd really need at most 12h of peak power, but probably closer to 4h. A 10k km HVDC line is enough to draw power from places 90 degrees apart in terms of latitude. Similarly, between the east and west coast of the US there's around 3h of a time difference. Chile is planning on building an even longer cable, so it's entirely in the realm of possibility: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export-solar-energy-to-asia-via-15000km-submarine-cable/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...
- nautilius 5y agoHow does a grid solve a storage problem?
- unchocked 5y agoGreat! That's cheap for what you get. As soon as we've built out a few $trillion in battery storage, we can get going on long-term hydrogen storage and distribution!
- cjensen 5y ago$1 trillion of pipelines? Why? This is about splitting water using electricity. You can create and use the fuel at the same site. Just need a water pipe and a connection to the grid. Splitting off hydrogen at a separate site is just wastefull.
- sp332 5y agoSame reason that we put solar and wind power where land is cheap and transport the electricity to where we need it.
- djrogers 5y agoYou ever seen a gas station with enough land to have a huge solar farm attached to it? That's not the norm...
- cjensen 5y agoA think you may have missed the part where I wrote "connection to the grid." My point is create an energy storage station, all you need is water and grid power. No pipelines needed. This hypothetical power storage site would generate hydrogen during the daytime from surplus grid solar, then burn the hydrogen at night delivering the power back to the grid. To be clear, I'm not necessarily talking about a solution for homeowners. An energy storage facility could cheerfully be as large Diablo Canyon Power Station. It just depends on the efficiencies of everything from the water-splitting process, storage solution, grid losses, and grid capacity.
- pensatoio 5y agoWhy can't we produce hydrogen, store it, and generate power with it? I imagine the cost of hydrogen storage is significantly less than batteries, thereby offsetting the reduced efficiency of turning solar power into electricity. The main issue we have with solar is storage for when the sun isn't out.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe round-trip efficiency is not very high, and fuel cells are still very expensive. Efficiency is becoming less important as top-line generation gets absurdly cheap, and fuel cell catalysts are improving fast.
- Hypx_ 5y agoWe'll likely use underground hydrogen storage in the form of salt caverns and expended natural gas reservoirs.