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People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exi
by belorn 3y ago
People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen, but someone could become the first and do that.
Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested in delivering green steel, which pays much better than hydrogen-burning turbines. The general idea is that this will in the future reduce prices down to energy grid levels, and a researcher here in Sweden working on such project estimated prices to drop to those levels around ~2060-2080.
This could happen much earlier if prices continue to increase as they do, but who knows. It would make for a good A/B testing to produce both and see which one was the cheaper option, and if the green hydrogen power plant fail they can always just produce more hydrogen for steel production.
- pfdietz 3y agoPlenty of investment is going into green hydrogen, to mature the remaining technologies (such as electrolysers and hydrogen combustors) and drive their costs down learning curves. Note, however, that as long as your grid is still burning natural gas for power, it doesn't make much sense to burn green hydrogen on it too. Eventually the natural gas will get very expensive (CO2 charges if nothing else), but for now price spikes are short term because LNG can be brought in (this is what Europe has done after Russia shut off the gas.) Green hydrogen is going to have to be something that is produced, because the world uses about 100 million tonnes of hydrogen a year. Ammonia is an essential commodity chemical made from hydrogen. Some 6% of current world natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen. These markets can and will be served by green hydrogen even before hydrogen is used for grid generation, and this will serve as dispatchable demand to help smooth renewable intermittency even without hydrogen being burned for power generation. And once there are large stockpiles of green hydrogen, it will be a small step to divert some of it for backup generation.
- philipkglass 3y agoThe ACES project for green hydrogen and electricity production is currently under construction in Utah: https://www.deseret.com/2022/5/9/23046910/green-hydrogen-energy-advanced-clean-energy-storage-project-utah-politics-renewables-delta-ipp https://www.deseret.com/2022/5/9/23046910/green-hydrogen-ene... The project will take that excess solar and wind capacity and through a process called alkaline electrolysis it will separate oxygen and hydrogen from water through 220 megawatt electrolyzers, producing up to 110 tons of hydrogen a day. It is called green hydrogen because it is derived from renewable power sources. ... The other “wow” factor of the project is the salt cavern storage reservoirs. “Those salt caverns will be the largest single storage site for hydrogen, globally,” Ducker said. He pointed out that the battery storage capacity across the United States sits at two gigawatt hours via lithium ion batteries. The Utah project will have storage for 300 gigawatt hours of energy. ... The salt domes for storing the hydrogen will be 3,500 feet underground and will be as deep as the Empire State building is tall — about 1,500 feet. Ducker said the caverns will enable long duration storage of energy and prevent monthly curtailments of solar and wind energy. Mitsubishi delivered the gas turbine generators for the project a few days ago: https://power.mhi.com/regions/amer/news/20230727 https://power.mhi.com/regions/amer/news/20230727
- pfdietz 3y agoAnd note that these storage caverns are only a small fraction of the potential of that salt formation.