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> This would still be cheaper than nuclear. Source needed. Germany electricity price is one of the highest price in europe while having invested heavily in ren

• pfdietz 4y ago
  All the elements of hydrogen for grid leveling are demonstrated: electrolysers (now available at $300/kW in China), underground storage, combustion in turbines. It's really just a matter of integrating existing components. This is the easiest and surest kind of innovation. All that's left to be done is the regulatory background to push fossil fuels out of the way (sufficient CO2 taxes) and perhaps running some of these parts further down experience curves. The biggest uncertainty is whether there's an even cheaper way to deal with the problem of leveling renewables, which wouldn't help nuclear in the slightest. Germany's residental rates are irrelevant; what matters is the cost at the wholesale level of providing the input energy to the grid. Germany soaks its citizens to subsidize power for its industry.
  • Kuinox 4y ago
    > All the elements of hydrogen for grid leveling are demonstrated: It's not, the ultimate demonstration being it deployed at scale. > sufficient CO2 taxes Which will reduce solar competitiveness to nuclear, since solar have 4x the CO2 per kwh of nuclear electricity. It also doesn't solve the big problem solar have in Europe, since it produce less than 10% of it's installed capacity right now (last 30 days average for Germany), it's not even winter yet. & > Germany's residental rates are irrelevant Except being directly tied to energy production price. > Germany soaks its citizens to subsidize power for its industry. Which should make household price cheaper, not costlier.
    • pfdietz 4y ago
      The "at scale" argument is flaccid. It's feckless unless you can give a reason why the technology would not scale. For hydrogen, what would be that reason? We don't need to build bigger turbines or electrolysers; we just need to build more of them. That sort of thing scales wonderfully. About the only thing that might not scale is storage capacity underground, but there are plenty of salt formations and spent gas fields to store hydrogen in. We already store a seasons' worth of natural gas underground in such formations. If you want to see a GOOD example of "cannot scale", look at today's nuclear reactors. LWRs cannot scale to power the world because uranium runs out. This was the motivation for building breeder reactors. Unlike hydrogen burning turbines, hydrogen storage in underground caverns, and electrolysers, breeder reactors are still a technology under development, with serious issues (safety, economics, reliability, proliferation.)
      • Kuinox 4y ago
        > breeder reactors are still a technology under development It's been 40 years we know how to build breeder reactors. And there are already been multiple commercial fast breeder reactor. But like regular nuclear reactors, yes it is a technology under development. But we also have more than 100 years to figure out the rest. > The "at scale" argument is flaccid. It's feckless unless you can give a reason why the technology would not scale. Cost, and cost. Power2Gaz already exists, you never showed how it was inferior to your tech. But in both case, there is an enormous problem you never mentioned: the efficiency of power2gas is currently of 60% at most, hydrogen included. Without including the equipement cost needed, stored solar electricity is suddendly costlier than nuclear.
        • pfdietz 4y ago
          There have been no successful commercial fast breeder reactors (that is, competitive with existing burner reactors, especially when the cost of reprocessing is included.) France has mothballed their entire fast reactor effort, not even building another prototype. Fast breeders have grave safety issues inherent in their physics. The delayed neutron fraction of plutonium (or U-233) is about half that of U-235. This means any breeder is skating closer to prompt supercriticality. If a fast reactor goes prompt supercritical, it will explode more violently than Chernobyl, since the time for the neutron population to double (for a given value of k) will be orders of magnitude shorter. Worst case, it would be an actual nuclear explosion. Fast breeders also present proliferation concerns. To get a good breeding ratio, a blanket of fertile material is placed around the fissioning core, so the neutrons escaping the core are efficiently utilized. If this is U-238, the Pu produced in the blanket will be "superweapon grade", with very low concentrations of higher Pu isotopes. Thorium breeders also have proliferation concerns, from the need to separate Pa-231 and allow it to decay before. This produces essentially pure U-233 outside the core. > cost and cost Let's look at a simple model to see how using hydrogen affects cost. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Try Germany using 2011 or 2012 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions (note the cost of electrolysers in China is already half the number assumed there.) The overall cost of providing a steady 100 MW output is not bad, lower than what one would pay from a newly constructed nuclear plant including the cost of construction and financing. Hydrogen helps reduce the cost here, not increase it. Even very slight amounts of hydrogen noticeably help, covering for rare prolonged dark/calm periods.