11 ms·

Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

114 points by simonebrunozzi 3y ago

matthewfelgate 3y ago
[flagged]
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  How so
  - causi 3y ago
    Too many efficiency losses. Let's compare a BeV and a hydrogen vehicle. starting with a fully renewable source of electricity. For the BeV, we lose 5-6% over transmission lines, 5% of that converting AC to DC, another 5% on losses charging the battery, then another 10% at the electric motor. That's ~75% efficiency from your starting electricity to your wheels. With hydrogen, you lose 30% to electrolysis, another ~25% to transportation, 50% converting the hydrogen back to electricity, then 10% at the electric motor. That's a power to road efficiency of 20-25%. So this big advance is improving the electrolysis efficiency from 70% to 90%. That's a big advance, but it still only improves your overall efficiency from 20% to 30%, well below the BeV level.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      That’s hardly a “scam” though. The use cases are simply different. Batteries are good. Transportable fuel is also good.
      - causi 3y ago
        I didn't call it a scam; I just explained why the grandparent comment did.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        Explaining the logic of someone else’s claim with no further commentary feels to me like an implicit claim of its legitimacy.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Efficiency is important when energy is expensive; I can easily believe that other issues dominate. Not that any of those other issues mean "and in conclusion: hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen!", it's just that people care about sticker price and safety as well. (On the "wanting safety" front: the memetic destruction of the Hindenburg and the way people conflate chemical and atomic hydrogen bombs is a point against hydrogen fuel).
- londons_explore 3y ago
  I have one. It works. It powers a little light bulb and clock on my windowsill...
ben_w 3y ago
Interesting; I wonder if similar approaches will help make the fuel cells cheaper as well as hydrogen? Even if not, even if vehicles remain fully electric (which is my assumption): > The scientists said gray, black, and brown hydrogen release 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of hydrogen produced. Yet, they correspond to 95% of all hydrogen currently produced worldwide for agricultural and industrial needs. Even if this green hydrogen does not help move a vehicle, it is a welcome way to curb the production of the gray and black kinds. It's good to see them prompting all the other things this will also be useful for. - On a separate topic: this is the second site in a row where the full-screen "we respect your privacy click here to agree" banner won't actually let me scroll down to any of the buttons. I'm glad reader mode works, or I wouldn't be able to see any actual content.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  I've started having the "impossible to navigate to the buttons" issue more and more. My best guess is that they just aren't made to work on my 5.4" phone screen. Which is absurd, since I still feel like it's "too big."
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > The scientists said gray, black, and brown hydrogen release 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of hydrogen produced. Yet, they correspond to 95% of all hydrogen currently produced worldwide for agricultural and industrial needs. Even if this green hydrogen does not help move a vehicle, it is a welcome way to curb the production of the gray and black kinds. It will only do that if countries put laws in place to require green hydrogen. green hydrogen is not just expensive because it is new, but theoretically expensive because there are currently two routes to turn natural gas into hydrogen: gas -> combined cycle gas turbine (40% loss) -> generator -> electricity electricity -> electrolysis (10-50% loss) -> hydrogen gas -> steam reforming (25% loss) -> hydrogen. From this, you can make equations bounding the prices of gas, electricity, and hydrogen for any process to be profitable. It turns out that for the middle process to work out economically, the first must be non-economic. ie. the price of electricity must be very low while the price of gas is very high. With gas just flowing out of the ground in the USA, russia, saudi arabia, and others, this will never happen. In fact, in many places the price of gas is so low we just burn it off because it isn't even valuable enough to collect or transport.
felipesabino 3y ago
Is this the new Nikola [1] ? [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/nikola-founders-trial-us-fraud-charges-get-under-way-2022-09-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/nikola-founders-trial-us-fraud...
boringg 3y ago
They miss another core argument the cost to transport and store it is quite high.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  And conversion back into mechanical energy to push the car forward :|
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
  This is not true at all. The cost of storage scales very well for hydrogen, must better than any other alternative. Transportation is context dependent. If you can build transmission lines, then do so. But hydrogen and synthetic fuels allow you to ship energy half way around the world. It is still the second best option even in that case.
  - boringg 3y ago
    You need to compress hydrogen and storage containers need to be specially built for H2. It requires more energy and specific tankers to be able to handle it under pressure. It is a fuel which has that advantage in that is it does transport around the world and can utilized on the specific site intentioned. That said it is expensive specifically for hydrogen relative to other fuels that don't need special handling/containers/pressurizing.
PuffinBlue 3y ago
This link has a better written overview of the work: https://english.m.tau.ac.il/green_hydrogen_2023 https://english.m.tau.ac.il/green_hydrogen_2023
_aavaa_ 3y ago
> When it is genuinely green, it is obtained through electrolysis, a process that is only 70% to 80% efficient. That's not bad compared to internal combustion engines (ICEs), but fuel cell detractors use that to bash them anyway. Scientists at Tel Aviv University plan to kill that argument with a method that is over 90% efficient in generating green hydrogen. This is highly disingenuous. The problem isn't just that electrolysis isn't 100% efficient. It's that the electrolysis and the compression and the transmission and the distribution and the fuel cell all have efficiency problems, and are all much more expensive that the alternative (straight electric).
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
  The obsession with efficiency is disingenuous too. The two limiting factors are generation capacity and cost/economics. Efficiency by itself says nothing. In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too, but for a whole century gasoline powered transportation was more feasible. Aviation is still only feasible with kerosene despite it being less efficient than electric propulsion.
  - bkor 3y ago
    Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics, something that you've highlighted. If significant more energy is needed, it'll likely be more expensive. Hydrogen is sometimes only a third as efficient as other solutions. It's pretty logical to assume it'll be > In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy before it's easy to transport, which is what you responded to. In any case, in the early 1900s, gasoline had a huge amount of stored energy. It was a matter of using it efficiently, you're comparing apples to oranges. With Green Hydrogren too often people say that some technological improvement will solve the drawbacks. While ignoring that for e.g. hydrogen it's not so easy, for other options it is/was. Same for the often suggested "solution" of using surplus energy. A factory that doesn't work 24/7 is more costly. Aside from that I understood that hydrogen is best produced continuously for it to be efficient.
    - 3y ago
taylodl 3y ago
"Hydrogen storage would still be a problem unless the gas was transformed into synthetic fuel. Hopefully, another scientific breakthrough could address that as soon as possible. We also have another idea floating around that may help solve that." This statement at the end of the article leads me to believe any widespread distribution of hydrogen is at least 10 years off. It'll be interesting to see if Toyota is vindicated after all! Realistically speaking, this seems like a good solution for long range trucks.
- greenthrow 3y ago
  Nope. It doesn't make sense for long range trucks either. Hydrogen trucks do not have more range than BEV trucks, and they are significantly more expensive to fuel. Battery energy density is increasing and cost is decreasing so fast that hydrogen is irrelevant for all ground transport. In 10 years we will laugh that anyone thought hydrogen was the future.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  In ten years, expect nothing visible to happen. The time horizon for a heavy H2 infrastructure is at least 20 years, probably more.
choeger 3y ago
Let's see if white hydrogen turns into something real. Could be bad for anyone invested in electrolytes, but great for fuel cells, etc.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
Even if hydrogen could be created with 100% efficiency it would still be very poor compared to just using electricity from batteries. The issue is the engines themselves are very inefficient, something like 20-30% and as such the same electricity will go a lot further directly compared to burning hydrogen. There are so many extra inefficiencies with transport and storage compared to existing and improved electrical infrastructure, its just not competitive. It might have some benefits in certain vehicle types where energy density and being far from a grid might make it beneficial but it will be a lot more expensive than electrical vehicles. Portable charging infrastructure with and wind and solar will often be a better option. I can't see hydrogen being anything but niche now unless substantial efficiency is found in the engine optimisation, generation and storage.
konschubert 3y ago
Okay, what's the cost of the machine? Because with cheap solar power, I care relatively more about the cost of the machine than about efficiency.
thadjo 3y ago
I'm seeing a lot of people here assuming that the purpose of green hydrogen is for fuel cells / automotive transport, but I don't see many people in this space talking about that anymore (except Toyota). Instead there is a lot more interest in using green hydrogen for industrial purposes or as a key building block for cleaner fuels like methanol. Currently green hydrogen is expensive to make and sucks to transport. But it will likely get a lot cheaper to produce in the next 10 years and you can convert it into fuels that are easier to transport. There is recent episode of Volts that interviews a startup trying to do this: https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
  I agree with this. I think there will still be niche products using liquid fuels. Like for example "explorer" or "offroader" type vehicles that require higher energy densities. And aviation of course. But commuter transportation will be using direct current or batteries. But the two chief uses will be in industrial processes that use hydrogen directly, in chemical processes that use hydrocarbons directly, and in energy storage applications where you need to store large quantities of energy for weeks or months or years.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    > I think there will still be niche products using liquid fuels. One of those niches: boats. Specifically: user-owned recreational ones. Not because it's hard to build electric propulsion systems for boats. There already exist many types of motors, batteries & control systems to choose from. Not because battery weight / size is a problem (it isn't). Not because of safety issues (gas/diesel have their own). But because it requires a big upfront investment. Converting to electrical propulsion is (for most boats) expensive. For someone who already owns a gas/diesel powered boat, but not the $$ to convert into all-electric, that's a big hurdle. Of course new boats will replace old ones over time. But average boat lasts much longer (read: takes much longer to replace) than eg. cars. Average car is what, 6..8y old? Average boat more like 20y+. Electric conversion that's both easy and cheap, is not a thing (yet?). Professional owners like ferries, commercial shipping or boat rental, will deal with this. Private owners of recreational boats, not so quick. That means: there will be gas/diesel powered boats around for many years. Having 'green' fuel for those available everywhere, would be quite a boon.
rcarr 3y ago
Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. That's more money and self-enpowerment for the consumer, and far less for the energy companies. They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent.
- slushh 3y ago
  Won't AI change the energy market? Once GPU production is fully ramped up, I would expect AI to become energy bound. Can we install enough renewable energy and nuclear power plants to fulfill the demand to the point that energy will be ridiculously cheap?
  - gizajob 3y ago
    What’s all that AI going to be doing all day to become energy-bound?
    - pjc50 3y ago
      Write spam on everything with a text field?
    - rfgmendoza 3y ago
      AI as currently modeled can pretty much never get enough data, so mostly data processing, and model generation. when a query is asked of an AI it has to generate a response from all of that data and the query and response themselves become data running an LLM on local consumer hardware can take upwards of 20 minutes for a single query, so an AI service that may be responding to up millions of requests a day would need a massive hyper-parallelized server infrastructure
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    It’s energy bound in the sense that Datacenters only have so much energy supply, and heat dissipation capabilities. And the grid these DCs are hooked to only have so much excess generation that can be tapped. But there’s ways to solve that through energy generation and DC investments.
JTbane 3y ago
Hydrogen is dead on arrival because steam methane reforming will always be cheaper than electrolysis, it's basically a fossil fuel.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  It will be cheaper until it isn't. Then, it won't be. Hydrogen electrolysed using zero-marginal-cost power from solar farms producing in excess of demand, on cheapest-conceivable electrolysers, will become cheaper than what depends on extracting, concentrating, and transporting NG.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    What you describe still is uneconomical: building out solar farms to exceed demand.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      It might one day be a thing, as a matter of load-shifting and providing energy-dense fuels for applications where that's convenient (like airplanes). But today it's not, and a lot of talk about hydrogen comes from the fossil fuel industry trying to delay adoption of renewables like solar.
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      Solar farms are necessarily built to exceed instantaneous demand, because they must meet demand when sunshine is reduced.
angiosperm 3y ago
The sweet spot for electrolysers will, instead, be cheapest possible inefficient units, because the power to drive them will have "marginal cost zero", i.e. be free, coming from production in massively over-provisioned solar farms in excess of immediate demand. Capital cost dominates because of intermittent utilization.

[flagged]

jncfhnb 3y ago
How so
- causi 3y ago
  Too many efficiency losses. Let's compare a BeV and a hydrogen vehicle. starting with a fully renewable source of electricity. For the BeV, we lose 5-6% over transmission lines, 5% of that converting AC to DC, another 5% on losses charging the battery, then another 10% at the electric motor. That's ~75% efficiency from your starting electricity to your wheels. With hydrogen, you lose 30% to electrolysis, another ~25% to transportation, 50% converting the hydrogen back to electricity, then 10% at the electric motor. That's a power to road efficiency of 20-25%. So this big advance is improving the electrolysis efficiency from 70% to 90%. That's a big advance, but it still only improves your overall efficiency from 20% to 30%, well below the BeV level.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    That’s hardly a “scam” though. The use cases are simply different. Batteries are good. Transportable fuel is also good.
    - causi 3y ago
      I didn't call it a scam; I just explained why the grandparent comment did.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Explaining the logic of someone else’s claim with no further commentary feels to me like an implicit claim of its legitimacy.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Efficiency is important when energy is expensive; I can easily believe that other issues dominate. Not that any of those other issues mean "and in conclusion: hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen!", it's just that people care about sticker price and safety as well. (On the "wanting safety" front: the memetic destruction of the Hindenburg and the way people conflate chemical and atomic hydrogen bombs is a point against hydrogen fuel).
londons_explore 3y ago
I have one. It works. It powers a little light bulb and clock on my windowsill...

Interesting; I wonder if similar approaches will help make the fuel cells cheaper as well as hydrogen? Even if not, even if vehicles remain fully electric (which is my assumption): > The scientists said gray, black, and brown hydrogen release 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of hydrogen produced. Yet, they correspond to 95% of all hydrogen currently produced worldwide for agricultural and industrial needs. Even if this green hydrogen does not help move a vehicle, it is a welcome way to curb the production of the gray and black kinds. It's good to see them prompting all the other things this will also be useful for. - On a separate topic: this is the second site in a row where the full-screen "we respect your privacy click here to agree" banner won't actually let me scroll down to any of the buttons. I'm glad reader mode works, or I wouldn't be able to see any actual content.

IggleSniggle 3y ago
I've started having the "impossible to navigate to the buttons" issue more and more. My best guess is that they just aren't made to work on my 5.4" phone screen. Which is absurd, since I still feel like it's "too big."
londons_explore 3y ago
> The scientists said gray, black, and brown hydrogen release 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of hydrogen produced. Yet, they correspond to 95% of all hydrogen currently produced worldwide for agricultural and industrial needs. Even if this green hydrogen does not help move a vehicle, it is a welcome way to curb the production of the gray and black kinds. It will only do that if countries put laws in place to require green hydrogen. green hydrogen is not just expensive because it is new, but theoretically expensive because there are currently two routes to turn natural gas into hydrogen: gas -> combined cycle gas turbine (40% loss) -> generator -> electricity electricity -> electrolysis (10-50% loss) -> hydrogen gas -> steam reforming (25% loss) -> hydrogen. From this, you can make equations bounding the prices of gas, electricity, and hydrogen for any process to be profitable. It turns out that for the middle process to work out economically, the first must be non-economic. ie. the price of electricity must be very low while the price of gas is very high. With gas just flowing out of the ground in the USA, russia, saudi arabia, and others, this will never happen. In fact, in many places the price of gas is so low we just burn it off because it isn't even valuable enough to collect or transport.

felipesabino 3y ago

Is this the new Nikola [1] ? [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/nikola-founders-trial-us-fraud-charges-get-under-way-2022-09-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/nikola-founders-trial-us-fraud...

boringg 3y ago

They miss another core argument the cost to transport and store it is quite high.

sebstefan 3y ago
And conversion back into mechanical energy to push the car forward :|
mustafa_pasi 3y ago
This is not true at all. The cost of storage scales very well for hydrogen, must better than any other alternative. Transportation is context dependent. If you can build transmission lines, then do so. But hydrogen and synthetic fuels allow you to ship energy half way around the world. It is still the second best option even in that case.
- boringg 3y ago
  You need to compress hydrogen and storage containers need to be specially built for H2. It requires more energy and specific tankers to be able to handle it under pressure. It is a fuel which has that advantage in that is it does transport around the world and can utilized on the specific site intentioned. That said it is expensive specifically for hydrogen relative to other fuels that don't need special handling/containers/pressurizing.

PuffinBlue 3y ago

This link has a better written overview of the work: https://english.m.tau.ac.il/green_hydrogen_2023 https://english.m.tau.ac.il/green_hydrogen_2023

_aavaa_ 3y ago

> When it is genuinely green, it is obtained through electrolysis, a process that is only 70% to 80% efficient. That's not bad compared to internal combustion engines (ICEs), but fuel cell detractors use that to bash them anyway. Scientists at Tel Aviv University plan to kill that argument with a method that is over 90% efficient in generating green hydrogen. This is highly disingenuous. The problem isn't just that electrolysis isn't 100% efficient. It's that the electrolysis and the compression and the transmission and the distribution and the fuel cell all have efficiency problems, and are all much more expensive that the alternative (straight electric).

mustafa_pasi 3y ago
The obsession with efficiency is disingenuous too. The two limiting factors are generation capacity and cost/economics. Efficiency by itself says nothing. In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too, but for a whole century gasoline powered transportation was more feasible. Aviation is still only feasible with kerosene despite it being less efficient than electric propulsion.
- bkor 3y ago
  Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics, something that you've highlighted. If significant more energy is needed, it'll likely be more expensive. Hydrogen is sometimes only a third as efficient as other solutions. It's pretty logical to assume it'll be > In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy before it's easy to transport, which is what you responded to. In any case, in the early 1900s, gasoline had a huge amount of stored energy. It was a matter of using it efficiently, you're comparing apples to oranges. With Green Hydrogren too often people say that some technological improvement will solve the drawbacks. While ignoring that for e.g. hydrogen it's not so easy, for other options it is/was. Same for the often suggested "solution" of using surplus energy. A factory that doesn't work 24/7 is more costly. Aside from that I understood that hydrogen is best produced continuously for it to be efficient.
  - 3y ago

taylodl 3y ago

"Hydrogen storage would still be a problem unless the gas was transformed into synthetic fuel. Hopefully, another scientific breakthrough could address that as soon as possible. We also have another idea floating around that may help solve that." This statement at the end of the article leads me to believe any widespread distribution of hydrogen is at least 10 years off. It'll be interesting to see if Toyota is vindicated after all! Realistically speaking, this seems like a good solution for long range trucks.

greenthrow 3y ago
Nope. It doesn't make sense for long range trucks either. Hydrogen trucks do not have more range than BEV trucks, and they are significantly more expensive to fuel. Battery energy density is increasing and cost is decreasing so fast that hydrogen is irrelevant for all ground transport. In 10 years we will laugh that anyone thought hydrogen was the future.
angiosperm 3y ago
In ten years, expect nothing visible to happen. The time horizon for a heavy H2 infrastructure is at least 20 years, probably more.

choeger 3y ago

Let's see if white hydrogen turns into something real. Could be bad for anyone invested in electrolytes, but great for fuel cells, etc.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

Even if hydrogen could be created with 100% efficiency it would still be very poor compared to just using electricity from batteries. The issue is the engines themselves are very inefficient, something like 20-30% and as such the same electricity will go a lot further directly compared to burning hydrogen. There are so many extra inefficiencies with transport and storage compared to existing and improved electrical infrastructure, its just not competitive. It might have some benefits in certain vehicle types where energy density and being far from a grid might make it beneficial but it will be a lot more expensive than electrical vehicles. Portable charging infrastructure with and wind and solar will often be a better option. I can't see hydrogen being anything but niche now unless substantial efficiency is found in the engine optimisation, generation and storage.

konschubert 3y ago

Okay, what's the cost of the machine? Because with cheap solar power, I care relatively more about the cost of the machine than about efficiency.

thadjo 3y ago

I'm seeing a lot of people here assuming that the purpose of green hydrogen is for fuel cells / automotive transport, but I don't see many people in this space talking about that anymore (except Toyota). Instead there is a lot more interest in using green hydrogen for industrial purposes or as a key building block for cleaner fuels like methanol. Currently green hydrogen is expensive to make and sucks to transport. But it will likely get a lot cheaper to produce in the next 10 years and you can convert it into fuels that are easier to transport. There is recent episode of Volts that interviews a startup trying to do this: https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...

mustafa_pasi 3y ago
I agree with this. I think there will still be niche products using liquid fuels. Like for example "explorer" or "offroader" type vehicles that require higher energy densities. And aviation of course. But commuter transportation will be using direct current or batteries. But the two chief uses will be in industrial processes that use hydrogen directly, in chemical processes that use hydrocarbons directly, and in energy storage applications where you need to store large quantities of energy for weeks or months or years.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > I think there will still be niche products using liquid fuels. One of those niches: boats. Specifically: user-owned recreational ones. Not because it's hard to build electric propulsion systems for boats. There already exist many types of motors, batteries & control systems to choose from. Not because battery weight / size is a problem (it isn't). Not because of safety issues (gas/diesel have their own). But because it requires a big upfront investment. Converting to electrical propulsion is (for most boats) expensive. For someone who already owns a gas/diesel powered boat, but not the $$ to convert into all-electric, that's a big hurdle. Of course new boats will replace old ones over time. But average boat lasts much longer (read: takes much longer to replace) than eg. cars. Average car is what, 6..8y old? Average boat more like 20y+. Electric conversion that's both easy and cheap, is not a thing (yet?). Professional owners like ferries, commercial shipping or boat rental, will deal with this. Private owners of recreational boats, not so quick. That means: there will be gas/diesel powered boats around for many years. Having 'green' fuel for those available everywhere, would be quite a boon.

rcarr 3y ago

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. That's more money and self-enpowerment for the consumer, and far less for the energy companies. They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent.

slushh 3y ago
Won't AI change the energy market? Once GPU production is fully ramped up, I would expect AI to become energy bound. Can we install enough renewable energy and nuclear power plants to fulfill the demand to the point that energy will be ridiculously cheap?
- gizajob 3y ago
  What’s all that AI going to be doing all day to become energy-bound?
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Write spam on everything with a text field?
  - rfgmendoza 3y ago
    AI as currently modeled can pretty much never get enough data, so mostly data processing, and model generation. when a query is asked of an AI it has to generate a response from all of that data and the query and response themselves become data running an LLM on local consumer hardware can take upwards of 20 minutes for a single query, so an AI service that may be responding to up millions of requests a day would need a massive hyper-parallelized server infrastructure
- bushbaba 3y ago
  It’s energy bound in the sense that Datacenters only have so much energy supply, and heat dissipation capabilities. And the grid these DCs are hooked to only have so much excess generation that can be tapped. But there’s ways to solve that through energy generation and DC investments.

JTbane 3y ago

Hydrogen is dead on arrival because steam methane reforming will always be cheaper than electrolysis, it's basically a fossil fuel.

angiosperm 3y ago
It will be cheaper until it isn't. Then, it won't be. Hydrogen electrolysed using zero-marginal-cost power from solar farms producing in excess of demand, on cheapest-conceivable electrolysers, will become cheaper than what depends on extracting, concentrating, and transporting NG.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  What you describe still is uneconomical: building out solar farms to exceed demand.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    It might one day be a thing, as a matter of load-shifting and providing energy-dense fuels for applications where that's convenient (like airplanes). But today it's not, and a lot of talk about hydrogen comes from the fossil fuel industry trying to delay adoption of renewables like solar.
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    Solar farms are necessarily built to exceed instantaneous demand, because they must meet demand when sunshine is reduced.

angiosperm 3y ago

The sweet spot for electrolysers will, instead, be cheapest possible inefficient units, because the power to drive them will have "marginal cost zero", i.e. be free, coming from production in massively over-provisioned solar farms in excess of immediate demand. Capital cost dominates because of intermittent utilization.