5 ms·

I don't see hydrogen playing any role for energy storage or grid demand balancing. Even if all the technical and engineering challenges associated with storing

• vkou 4y ago
  > Since the cost of green hydrogen production is mostly cap-ex not op-ex Is it? I always thought that it was always op-ex, because you need to burn two joules of energy, in order to produce one joule of hydrogen-potential energy. Which, in a world where you can dig coal out of the ground for $30/tonne, is uneconomic.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    When electricity op-ex is free, as from panels, electrolysis is too.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Thats like fantasy ecobomics - you have to consider electricity at market price for the comparison to be meaningfull. Electricity is currently much more expensive than it was last year. Aluminium refineries use OP-ex heavy, so the day your dream of cheap electricity materialises, aluminium will become nearly free
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        Yes, as energy production prices fall, prices for commodities that depend on it will, too. Aluminum is today "nearly free" by standards of a century ago. We will still need to mine bauxite or collect recycled cans, and handle ingots.
• plutonorm 4y ago
  The only reason it's discussed is because the fossil fuel industry has a lot of experience and infrastructure around liquid fuels. It wants a future where there is a new liquid fuel so that it can leverage that experience and infrastructure. They are pouring huge sums into moving the academic and public conversation in the direction of hydrogen - it's like the tobacco companies all over again. Don't trust a word that comes out of anyones mouth, it's all designed to further some agenda or other. There's continuous information warfare going on all around us.
  • Animats 4y ago
    Yes. I'm surprised to see this from Bill Gates: "Another option is to produce hydrogen using the current methods that burn fossil fuels and then capture the CO2 produced in the process before it’s released in the atmosphere. It may never be economical to capture 100 percent of the carbon released using incumbent technologies, but while we’re waiting for thousands of industrial facilities to retrofit their infrastructure, carbon capture can help drive emissions way down." That's the oil industry position. See "Blue hydrogen". The "hydrogen economy" concept made more sense a decade ago. Solar cells, wind farms, and batteries have improved so much that it's obsolete. (Now if we can just get the US auto industry to produce electric cars fast enough to keep up with demand. The electric light truck sector is running at least a year behind. This is being used as an excuse for premium pricing.)
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      There will be market for as much hydrogen as we can ever produce. Much of it will be bound to nitrogen, for ammonia, or to carbon, for kerosene, used directly in e.g. steel manufacture and in aircraft, and as feedstock for thousands of chemical processes. It will undercut any sort of extractive stuff, because marginal cost is near zero. Wherever it can be used in place of one of the other things, it will be, because it will be the cheapest portable energy.
  • lukeschlather 4y ago
    While we do need to be suspicious, we can't reject technical solutions on the grounds that it would be too convenient if it worked. Whatever we do does need to be reasonably convenient.
• rich_sasha 4y ago
  The point is that some countries have long dark winters, often with windless spells. Some are also lowland countries with little or no access to hydro. For green energy, you'd need to literally store months' worth of energy somehow, and the cost of doing that via batteries is prohibitive too. I guess the hope is that storing hydrogen, difficult and expensive that it is, could be made to be more like storing hydrocarbons, basically in a hole in the ground. Then you could produce it in the windy sunny months and use it in winter. Maybe...
  • leobg 4y ago
    Exactly. The solar energy that can be captured throughout the year using not much more than the roof area of a single-family home would be enough to cover its entire annual energy needs, both for electricity and heating. The problem is that you need to store about 30,000 kWh of energy over a period of several months. That’s on the order of 400 Tesla Model 3 batteries worth of storage. Not only is it prohibitively expensive. Those batteries would also be missing in production of electric vehicles.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      The peoblem is your consumption of energy happens through you consuming goods, and energy was used to produce them, so its industrial.
      • leobg 4y ago
        That’s a good point. But for industry, it could work the same. Solar plus seasonal storage. Probably not important for countries like the US, that don’t depend on imports of oil and gas. But for those countries to do, being able to utilize the energy that comes down from the sky for free could be a game changer both in terms of economics and foreign affairs.
  • elihu 4y ago
    Having some cheap long-term energy storage option is one way to solve that problem, but another is better power grid interconnection. For instance, Chicago could get solar power from Chile in the winter time to buffer out the seasonal variability. Or if they didn't even want to have to maintain a smaller buffer to deal with day/night cycles, they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day. Power losses would be significant, but probably not all that worse than doing local electricity-to-hydrogen-to-electricity. To quote wikipedia on HVDC lines: > Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current An infrastructure project like that would probably be hugely expensive, but so is manufacturing lots of batteries or doing large scale hydrogen production and storage.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  The gray stuff isn't cheaper, the cost is just passed onto someone who can't directly input into the decision to use it or an alternative. If they could, the problem solves itself because it's obviously more expensive to be dumping stuff and then extracting it again rather than just not dumping it in the first place. Four decades of climate change discussion and the single most important economic lesson to be taken from it, one that is absolutely basic free market economics, is still successfully suppressed and widely misunderstood, even in technical forums like this, full of people who think of themselves as libertarians. It's an impressively evil achievement for the fossil fuel producers.
• lukeschlather 4y ago
  > it means leaving your capital-expensive electrolysis plant idle for half or 2/3rds of the day. I think that's an exaggeration, and neglects the possibility of overbuilding solar/wind. It may mean leaving your relatively low capital expenditure wind and solar farms 50% underutilized for half the day but the benefit here is that you can guarantee a 95% capacity factor year-round for the expensive electrolysis plant.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Electrolysis equipment will move relentlessly toward 100% usage, drawing down other forms of storage, and transmission lines, when top-line generation flags. You might turn it off just when demand peaks. We absolutely will overbuild solar and wind to have enough to charge up storage for 24-hour use. Making hydrogen will be such a use.
• ParksNet 4y ago
  If we want to be serious about grid storage, look to the gigantic fleet of EVs we're building out. All of those vehicles should be able to charge and discharge to the grid based on daily demand and user preference. I'm looking at buying a base Model 3. Huge (57.5 kWh)chunk of battery that will be sitting there most of the week (wife and I both work from home). Charging at 40c/kWh during the day (from abundant solar) and discharging at 85c/kWh (for evening peak) would yield about $23 daily - or $8,400 annually if the car was never driven.
  • osigurdson 4y ago
    I would think that EVs would largely be a net load on the grid at night since that is when they would normally be charged. It could possibly be a revenue source for those with non-standard usage patterns of course.
    • ParksNet 4y ago
      Here's California's energy usage by hour from 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341393321/figure/fig3/AS:891268183883782@1589506302716/Wholesale-California-electricity-prices-over-24-h-on-a-spring-day.png https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341393321/figure/fi... We need some kind of alignment between Electricity producers / the Grid, and EVs / manufacturers.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  Couldn't it be very useful for instances where weight to fuel (energy) ratio is very important?
• osigurdson 4y ago
  I think for larger plants the goal is not to store hydrogen in a fuel cell but in a depleted gas reservoir. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S036031991531781X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
• Mvandenbergh 4y ago
  I agree that at current CapEx you could never run a plant 1/3 of the time and make it look good but I think this ignore two things: 1) If you take net zero as a hard goal, i.e. not one that is subject to economic tests except in relative terms then hydrogen as large scale energy storage only has to beat alternative technologies, regardless of how expensive it is. Battery storage will absolutely dominate intra-day balancing and hydrogen will have no role to play there but the high cost per unit of energy stored of a battery doesn't work for inter-seasonal or for dealing with an unusually high demand year. (in a European context, a very cold winter for instance). No, future cost reductions will not solve that for the simple reason that the capital cost of a unit of battery capacity has to be recovered over its cycles. So a battery that cycles once a year incurs 365x the capital cost per cycle that one which cycles once a day does. In many renewable dominated power markets, current battery tech is competitive in the intra-day market. To be equally competitive in the seasonal market, you'd need two orders of magnitude cost reduction which doesn't seem possible on materials cost grounds alone. I don't see how iron-air and other battery chemistries stack up here either and to be honest, if we're going to compare long term energy storage technologies on a level playing field we have to compare like with like. We can't say "batteries" are getting much better and cheaper and are proven technology compared to hydrogen storage and then it turns out that the batteries in question are early stage VC projects. When I look at the trajectory of grid scale battery storage vs hydrogen, I see a battery technology developing that will completely own the intra-day and probably the intra-week world but that has no chance of dealing with seasonal peaks. Europe is prone to extended periods of cold, overcast, and windless weather which lasts for weeks and stretches from Ireland to the practically the Urals. That is the system stress condition and no system that cannot handle it can be said to be functional. The same might not be true everywhere, solar has less variation than wind and maybe California doesn't need seasonal storage, I don't know, but this is at least one area of the world which does and I suspect there are more. Ideas which involve very long distance electricity transmission simply will not work for geopolitical reasons. If anyone fantasised about it before February of this year, they can now forget about it. No doubt electricity will be moved substantial distances but no government will allow the ability of its citizens to have winter heating / summer cooling to depend instantaneously on governments it cannot trust. Short distance integration of the kind we see in Western Europe, sure, but that doesn't really help because there's a lot of temperature, wind and insolation correlation between those countries anyway. So hydrogen storage is lossy but the alternatives don't make the models stack up, except for a massive wave of nuclear new-build. I don't know which will be cheaper but these are both not cheap options. Proposed alternatives have to pass the test of dealing with this seasonal (and multi-year scale issue) 2) If you look at where power generation is going in high renewables markets, it is clear that we will soon have a situation where for many thousands of hours a year, we have deeply oversupplied instantaneous demand. That will be true even after intra-day load shifting, EV charging etc. This is in fact efficient since the cost of undersupply is asymmetric and vastly higher than the economic cost of oversupply. The system will be net long for most of the year and net short for a much smaller number of hours, during which period the value of dispatchable energy will be very high. More overbuilding shortens the net-short period but creates much more energy over-generated over the course of the year. That means that your capital intensive electrolyser plant can run at full capacity the majority of the time, reduced capacity occasionally, and has to be off maybe 10% to 20% of the time. That is much easier to make work than 33%. (I am assuming only modest electrolyser cost reductions) The issues I have with a lot of analysis of hydrogen is that people do a quick order of magnitude comparison to either fossil gas or to batteries in the intra-day world and say, "why would you do this?" as a rhetorical question when they should be noting that fossil gas isn't a long term option, batteries aren't playing in the more than a day market at all (since there is currently no reason for such a thing to exist) and asking the question seriously rather than rhetorically. People have been spoiled by the easy energy transition successes so far, moderately deep penetration of wind and solar into electricity and EVs and they expect that the whole energy transition will be delivered by technologies that compare favourably even without costing carbon emissions with the fossil fuels they displace and the reality is that we are not owed a set of technologies that are cheaper than fossil fuels.
• bamboozled 4y ago
  I guess we just have to give up on it then...