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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

by 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.
- zackmorris 3y ago
  It will, but that's also an x/y problem. We're seeing ridiculous energy costs and supply chain issues for crypto and AI because they're using the wrong architecture: GPU/SIMD. I got my computer engineering degree back in the 90s because superscalar VLSI was popular and I wanted to design highly-concurrent multicore CPUs with 256 cores or more. Had GPUs not totally dominated the market, Apple's multicore M1 line approach with local memories would have happened in the early 2000s, instead of the smartphone revolution which prioritized low cost and low energy use above all. We would have had 1000 core machines in 2010 and 100,000-1 million core machines for 2020, for under $1000 at current transistor count costs. Programmed with languages like Erlang/Go, MATLAB/Octave, and Julia/Clojure in an auto-parallelized scatter-gather immutable functional programming approach where a single thread of execution distributes all loops and conditional logic across the cores and joins it under a synchronous blocking programming model. Basically the opposite of where the tech industry has gone with async (today's goto). That put us all on the wrong path and left us where we are today with relatively ok LLMs and training data drawn from surveillance capitalism. Whereas we could have had a democratized AI model with multiple fabs producing big dumb multicore CPUs and people training them at home on distributed learning systems similar to SETI@home. Now it's too late, and thankfully nobody cares what people like me think anyway. So the GPU status quo is cemented for the foreseeable future, and competitors won't be able to compete with established players like Nvidia. The only downside is having to live in the wrong reality. Multiply this change of perception by all tech everywhere. I like to think of living in a bizarro reality like this one as the misanthropic principle.
MrVitaliy 3y ago
I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate, but it will take a long time to bring up the infrastructure for it. Expect it to appear first on select freight routes. Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclosed cabin is a formula for disaster.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate ? Are you suggesting this will be a result of regulatory action? Since it would most likely be more expensive for the first decade, even if I gave you a tap on the airfield labelled "free H2"
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      It is because the very large difference in fuel weight for a flight leaves radically increased capacity for carrying paying freight. As LH2 produced on-site at airports gets cheaper than Jet-A fuel, the gap widens.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        I'd need to see the numbers on this on joule/kg, and then allowing for the increased tankage size.
        angiosperm 3y ago
        Volume is cheap, on aircraft. If a normal freighter today takes off with 25t of kerosene, the similar-sized LH2 craft needs only 10t of LH2. That means it can take an additional 15t of paying cargo.
pjc50 3y ago
> few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap Nuclear has never managed to be cheap. The really big nuclear buildouts always had a national security subsidy: either for energy security (France), or for nuclear weapons (US, UK, USSR, China, and also France). This is partly why non-weaponizable reactor designs never became popular either. > They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent. This isn't quite it. Energy production is always going to be dominated by capital owners because it's a capital-intensive business. Doubly so for renewables. No, the real reason fossil fuel companies keep pushing for hydrogen is so they can sell hydrogen produced from natural gas as "green", after they've dumped the inconvenient carbon atoms into the atmosphere. The medium term real, important uses for renewable hydrogen are (1) Haber process (3H2 + N2 -> 2HN3) and (2) steel production by reducing (removing oxygen from) raw iron ores. Edit: btw, I think the underlying paper is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411
- slashdev 3y ago
  As much as I’ve been rooting for nuclear, I think the ship has sailed. If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it. Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula. Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s literally a hundred alternative there. I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference, we don’t need to restrict that to existing dams. But there’s lots of options there and many are very viable. So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive. If you look at planned energy projects, the market has very clearly spoken. That doesn’t mean it can’t change, but I don’t think it’s likely.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference Not really economical unless you've got some suitably-shaped geology to build most of the storage vessels out of. The lithium issues may be addressed by sodium-ion, which is now mature enough that you can buy it on aliexpress.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Altria bought Juul. Nothing stops a company from leveraging itself with the beast that will one day eat it.
surgical_fire 3y ago
I favor nuclear. It is clean, reliable, and surprisingly safe, especially with all the regulations on the sector. But it was never, and will never be "cheap". Also not all places might be suitable for nuclear, for various reasons. Hydrogen might be a good option.
- rfgmendoza 3y ago
  nuclear isn't cheap if you are thinking about the cost to build out a new plant under current design. but the per kw cost is relatively low as i understand it since the fuel is so efficient and its getting cheaper as new reactor designs get cheaper and safer
  - efitz 3y ago
    I wonder how much of the cost of nuclear is regulatory and lawfare related rather than intrinsic.
    - efitz 3y ago
      Why was this downvoted?
RetroTechie 3y ago
Hydrogen can be generated on-site (and in quite a few cases, that's preferable over filling up elsewhere). So if the efficiency of generating hydrogen is increased, that's a win for endusers no matter if they do it themselves or pump it somewhere from 3rd party. You are correct about the subscription model though.
_hypx 3y ago
BEVs are the biggest example of greenwashing today. You will need a vast increase in raw material demand and it is arguably completely unsustainable. Especially once you realize that we are making battery powered SUVs. In reality, people are spreading a conspiracy theory to mentally distract from this fact. They do not want to admit that they have been fooled by battery makers, so they create a narrative that the alternative is somehow an ever bigger scam.

by rcarr 3y ago

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.
zackmorris 3y ago
It will, but that's also an x/y problem. We're seeing ridiculous energy costs and supply chain issues for crypto and AI because they're using the wrong architecture: GPU/SIMD. I got my computer engineering degree back in the 90s because superscalar VLSI was popular and I wanted to design highly-concurrent multicore CPUs with 256 cores or more. Had GPUs not totally dominated the market, Apple's multicore M1 line approach with local memories would have happened in the early 2000s, instead of the smartphone revolution which prioritized low cost and low energy use above all. We would have had 1000 core machines in 2010 and 100,000-1 million core machines for 2020, for under $1000 at current transistor count costs. Programmed with languages like Erlang/Go, MATLAB/Octave, and Julia/Clojure in an auto-parallelized scatter-gather immutable functional programming approach where a single thread of execution distributes all loops and conditional logic across the cores and joins it under a synchronous blocking programming model. Basically the opposite of where the tech industry has gone with async (today's goto). That put us all on the wrong path and left us where we are today with relatively ok LLMs and training data drawn from surveillance capitalism. Whereas we could have had a democratized AI model with multiple fabs producing big dumb multicore CPUs and people training them at home on distributed learning systems similar to SETI@home. Now it's too late, and thankfully nobody cares what people like me think anyway. So the GPU status quo is cemented for the foreseeable future, and competitors won't be able to compete with established players like Nvidia. The only downside is having to live in the wrong reality. Multiply this change of perception by all tech everywhere. I like to think of living in a bizarro reality like this one as the misanthropic principle.

MrVitaliy 3y ago

I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.

angiosperm 3y ago
Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate, but it will take a long time to bring up the infrastructure for it. Expect it to appear first on select freight routes. Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclosed cabin is a formula for disaster.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate ? Are you suggesting this will be a result of regulatory action? Since it would most likely be more expensive for the first decade, even if I gave you a tap on the airfield labelled "free H2"
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    It is because the very large difference in fuel weight for a flight leaves radically increased capacity for carrying paying freight. As LH2 produced on-site at airports gets cheaper than Jet-A fuel, the gap widens.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      I'd need to see the numbers on this on joule/kg, and then allowing for the increased tankage size.
      - angiosperm 3y ago
        Volume is cheap, on aircraft. If a normal freighter today takes off with 25t of kerosene, the similar-sized LH2 craft needs only 10t of LH2. That means it can take an additional 15t of paying cargo.

pjc50 3y ago

> few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap Nuclear has never managed to be cheap. The really big nuclear buildouts always had a national security subsidy: either for energy security (France), or for nuclear weapons (US, UK, USSR, China, and also France). This is partly why non-weaponizable reactor designs never became popular either. > They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent. This isn't quite it. Energy production is always going to be dominated by capital owners because it's a capital-intensive business. Doubly so for renewables. No, the real reason fossil fuel companies keep pushing for hydrogen is so they can sell hydrogen produced from natural gas as "green", after they've dumped the inconvenient carbon atoms into the atmosphere. The medium term real, important uses for renewable hydrogen are (1) Haber process (3H2 + N2 -> 2HN3) and (2) steel production by reducing (removing oxygen from) raw iron ores. Edit: btw, I think the underlying paper is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411

slashdev 3y ago
As much as I’ve been rooting for nuclear, I think the ship has sailed. If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it. Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula. Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s literally a hundred alternative there. I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference, we don’t need to restrict that to existing dams. But there’s lots of options there and many are very viable. So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive. If you look at planned energy projects, the market has very clearly spoken. That doesn’t mean it can’t change, but I don’t think it’s likely.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference Not really economical unless you've got some suitably-shaped geology to build most of the storage vessels out of. The lithium issues may be addressed by sodium-ion, which is now mature enough that you can buy it on aliexpress.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

Altria bought Juul. Nothing stops a company from leveraging itself with the beast that will one day eat it.

surgical_fire 3y ago

I favor nuclear. It is clean, reliable, and surprisingly safe, especially with all the regulations on the sector. But it was never, and will never be "cheap". Also not all places might be suitable for nuclear, for various reasons. Hydrogen might be a good option.

rfgmendoza 3y ago
nuclear isn't cheap if you are thinking about the cost to build out a new plant under current design. but the per kw cost is relatively low as i understand it since the fuel is so efficient and its getting cheaper as new reactor designs get cheaper and safer
- efitz 3y ago
  I wonder how much of the cost of nuclear is regulatory and lawfare related rather than intrinsic.
  - efitz 3y ago
    Why was this downvoted?

RetroTechie 3y ago

Hydrogen can be generated on-site (and in quite a few cases, that's preferable over filling up elsewhere). So if the efficiency of generating hydrogen is increased, that's a win for endusers no matter if they do it themselves or pump it somewhere from 3rd party. You are correct about the subscription model though.

_hypx 3y ago

BEVs are the biggest example of greenwashing today. You will need a vast increase in raw material demand and it is arguably completely unsustainable. Especially once you realize that we are making battery powered SUVs. In reality, people are spreading a conspiracy theory to mentally distract from this fact. They do not want to admit that they have been fooled by battery makers, so they create a narrative that the alternative is somehow an ever bigger scam.