5 ms·
Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did. All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any particular area. In many places,
by ncmncm 5y ago
Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.
All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any particular area. In many places, the poorer round-trip efficiency of chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia, hydrocarbons) is offset by the massive usefulness of synthesizer output after the tanks are full. That is, when the tanks have been topped off, the excess output generates revenue.
Solar generating capacity has become so cheap that needing 2x, 3x, 4x more, for whatever reason, is no blocker.
- HyperRational 5y ago
- hedora 5y agoEven if batteries and solar get another 10x cheaper, that's not enough to make it through winter in some populated areas. A whole home backup battery is $10K's, and likely stores under 24 hours of normal usage. Buying 90 of those per house (for three months of power backup) would cost millions per house today. A bright overcast day in California can easily drop solar output by 50-75%. Up north, it's much worse, and those days can come in multi-month bursts. Much of the US south will be uninhabitable according to current climate projections, which increases demand up north, creating distribution problems that haven't been solved. Also 40+ state megastorms are becoming common in the US. What happens if the whole continent is cold and cloudy at the same time? I guess you're propsing synthetic natural gas, or similar?
- ncmncm 5y agoBatteries are the most expensive storage medium. No utility will use those to keep more than a few minutes or hours of backup. Pumped hydro is cheap and reliable, but each site has a strict upper limit on how much it can store. Synthetic anhydrous ammonia, and hydrogen, are the favored utility-scale media. They can be stored, but more importantly they can also be shipped in from the tropics, and most importantly can be sold when the tanks are full.
- sudosysgen 5y agoAmmonia is not great for shipping to due low gravimetric energy density. At the same time, ammonia cycle efficiency in a fuel cell is low, and fuel cells are expensive. Hydrogen is a shipping nightmare, as you well know. So at this point we are comparing the cost of a full NH3/H2 backup energy generation, plus the cost of a full renewable energy grid with at least 50% overproduction and hours of battery storage, plus the cost of storing 100 million tons of NH3/NH2, as well as the cost of NH3/NH2 production, and funding of generally idle overproduction in countries with a better climate (!!)
- ncmncm 5y agoLiquified hydrogen carried at atmospheric pressure just needs insulated tanks. We already have a lot of experience shipping liquified natural gas. It can probably be carried in the same tanks. You can burn ammonia where you burn natural gas today. It is probably not suitable as fuel for aircraft, but otherwise it is entirely good enough. Ships burning bunker oil can be converted burn ammonia just by changing out tankage and plumbing. But ammonia fuel cells will only get better, never worse. Building out a H2/NH3 system will be massively expensive, but a tiny fraction of the cost of that much nuke capacity. And, the H2 and NH3 are valuable industrial feedstock, so none of the production capacity ever sits idle.