2 ms·
Talking here about stationary storage only (not transportation, for which I agree that hydrogen is a stupid idea.): Isn’t efficiency kind of irrelevant when th
by leobg 4y ago
Talking here about stationary storage only (not transportation, for which I agree that hydrogen is a stupid idea.):
Isn’t efficiency kind of irrelevant when the energy you are storing - i.e. that of the sun - is essentially free?
You would need to do a comparison across many different strategies. For instance, compare against the cost of energy per kilowatt hour in winter from fossil fuels (ideally also factoring in the costs to the environment). And compare against solar energy, collected in summer, stored using different mediums.
Against batteries, hydrogen, in spite of all the conversions and the compression needed, would be dirt cheap.
- Retric 4y agoNothing is free, still need significant infrastructure to produce hydrogen at scale. It’s not like hydrogen is the only thing that wants cheap electricity and building infrastructure that’s very rarely used get’s expensive in the same way batteries sitting around for most of the year unused is expensive, so let’s assuming you can capture 1/2 of a surplus. If the surplus is 24% for 3 months and you can capture 1/8th of it that’s only 3% for 3 months which is quite a bit of energy but is only useful if the deficit is actually 3% and nobody want’s to build a grid that close to failure simply because weather can make a larger difference than 3%. Which means you don’t get to used your equipment to generate electricity every year. Don’t get me wrong hydrogen works in preparation for black swan events, but seasonal demand is much better dealt with by saving hydroelectric power for much of the year.