20 ms·

That's great. How much does a 25 TWh storage plant cost?

• pfdietz 4y ago
  The cost of storing hydrogen underground can be as low as $1/kWh, so that would be $25B (electrolyzers and turbines/generators are additional, but that's not per-energy capacity cost.)
  • thrown_22 4y ago
    For the low low price of 6 over budget 1TW nuclear power plants we could have a single hydrogen _storage_ plant. What a bargain. Oh sorry, we could have the storage facilities of a single hydrogen storage plant with none of the equipment needed to turn the stored hydrogen to electricity.
    • pfdietz 4y ago
      Nuclear power plants are more like 1 GW, not 1 TW. You mean six reactors that produce about the storage capacity of the hydrogen storage facility over a year, I'm guessing. The problem is the nuclear power plants just dribble out their power at a constant rate, while hydrogen storage can deliver its output just when it's needed (and is most valuable). In other words, the hydrogen output is dispatchable, nuclear is not. The output part of the hydrogen storage would be either simple cycle turbines or combined cycle, which are 20x (10x for CC) cheaper than NPPs per unit power output.
• defrost 4y ago
  For my local state, some three times larger than Texas, that's irrelevant. Total yearly energy consumption here (of all forms of energy) is 1,271.9 PJ aka 3.533056e+11 kilowatt hours aka 353.3 TWh or approx 1 TWh / day. Given the dispersed area we're more interested in distributed buffering storage to smooth solar, wind, and wave generated energy over the top of natural gas baseload generation. Thanks for the ridiculous non applicable straw question though, that was a chuckle.