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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 gre

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.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  "they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day." This is basically a proposal to power all of Americas at night using solar deployment in Australia? This is far outside the realm of technical and infrastructural feasability. What about reliability? UK power connection to france has burned down a few months ago and it will take 2 years to fix, and it only moves like 2 GW
  - elihu 4y ago
    I would have thought so too, but there was a story awhile back about China working out a deal with Chile to import solar power from Chile via a trans-Pacific cable. Maybe it's just hype and nothing will actually come of it, but someone at least seems to think it's plausible. 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... Probably the way to handle reliability is to keep some of the fossil fuel plants in operational condition just in case. If everything is working properly they don't have to ever be used, but countries aren't under continual threat that their energy supply is going to be cut because someone damaged the cable (accidentally or deliberately).
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  How would you factor in Geo-political risks to this approach? Seems like we're trading dependency on oil producing countries with a dependency on "sunny and windy" countries. Arguably worse unless the grid is connected like a mesh. Quick google shows that 61% of oil is transported by sea. Non-mesh power-grid interconnection is the equivalent of an oil pipeline with the geo-political downsides associated with it. Though maybe the dependency would at least be bi-directional in some instances.
  - elihu 4y ago
    I think the right way to mitigate the risk is to keep many/most of the fossil fuel plants around so that they can be brought online in an emergency (i.e. someone destroys a cable), but otherwise don't use them.
ncmncm 4y ago
Energy will be stored, at utility scale, in many forms. Hydrogen will be one of those forms. Ammonia, another. Batteries, in small amounts. There are myriad others.

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.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
"they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day." This is basically a proposal to power all of Americas at night using solar deployment in Australia? This is far outside the realm of technical and infrastructural feasability. What about reliability? UK power connection to france has burned down a few months ago and it will take 2 years to fix, and it only moves like 2 GW
- elihu 4y ago
  I would have thought so too, but there was a story awhile back about China working out a deal with Chile to import solar power from Chile via a trans-Pacific cable. Maybe it's just hype and nothing will actually come of it, but someone at least seems to think it's plausible. 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... Probably the way to handle reliability is to keep some of the fossil fuel plants in operational condition just in case. If everything is working properly they don't have to ever be used, but countries aren't under continual threat that their energy supply is going to be cut because someone damaged the cable (accidentally or deliberately).
throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
How would you factor in Geo-political risks to this approach? Seems like we're trading dependency on oil producing countries with a dependency on "sunny and windy" countries. Arguably worse unless the grid is connected like a mesh. Quick google shows that 61% of oil is transported by sea. Non-mesh power-grid interconnection is the equivalent of an oil pipeline with the geo-political downsides associated with it. Though maybe the dependency would at least be bi-directional in some instances.
- elihu 4y ago
  I think the right way to mitigate the risk is to keep many/most of the fossil fuel plants around so that they can be brought online in an emergency (i.e. someone destroys a cable), but otherwise don't use them.

ncmncm 4y ago

Energy will be stored, at utility scale, in many forms. Hydrogen will be one of those forms. Ammonia, another. Batteries, in small amounts. There are myriad others.