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Solar energy storage breakthrough could make households self-sufficient
- spaniard89277 3y agoTell me when it's in production and I can see a price listed somewhere.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThere are commercial-scale MHHC storage options already. The difference here, post vaporware, would be seeing a residential-scale one deployed and in use.
- narrator 3y agoAmmonia is probably the most scalable medium for energy storage. It doesn't need to be pressurized, and doesn't leak as easily as hydrogen does. You can also turn it into fertilizer, which is a huge advantage that gasoline doesn't have. It's going to be the go to solution for ocean container ships and many companies are already working on large scale marine ammonia engines. More Discussion of ammonia's potential over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38053586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38053586
- pictureofabear 3y agoYou can also turn it into a bomb. That would be neat.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoAs opposed to gasoline, hydrogen, or methane?
- pictureofabear 3y agoYes, those are quite flammable too.
- louthy 3y agoThey’re also all inflammable
- red-iron-pine 3y agopaper is flammable. highly refined flour is flammable. gas is combustible aka it explodes.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agomethane/hydrogen/kinda gasoline at least combust into relatively benign substances, what happens when ammonia burns?
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe larger problem is when it doesn’t burn. Ammonia is nasty.
- euroderf 3y agoNitrogen compounds, plus a bit of leftover ammonia. All in need of cleaning up.
- mhandley 3y agoThe Royal Society produced quite a good policy brief on green ammonia a couple of years back. Does sound very promising for a number of industries. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-ammonia/green-ammonia-policy-briefing.pdf https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-ammon...
- rnk 3y agoThe problem is there's no practical green hydrogen today. It comes from basically boiling/splitting water or extracted from natural gas or other fossil fuels. And the energy you could use to make the hydrogen could more efficiently just be used as electricity and stored in an ev battery. When/if we figure out how to efficiently separate hydrogen from water we can come back to it.
- defrost 3y agoThat's mighty big of you to step up and make these collective decisions for us all regarding hydrogen. It's a pity break away billionaires with heavy industry backgrounds haven't heeded your sage advice and are pressing ahead regardless. * https://www.ttnews.com/articles/phoenix-hub-plug-power https://www.ttnews.com/articles/phoenix-hub-plug-power * https://norwegianhydrogen.com/ https://norwegianhydrogen.com/ * https://www.incitecpivot.com.au/sustainability/projects/green-ammonia-at-gibson-island https://www.incitecpivot.com.au/sustainability/projects/gree...
- rnk 3y agoI'm not making decisions for society. I'm reporting the current reality. Consider looking at the disastrous situation in California for people with hydrogen powered cars. Typical discussion is at https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/comments/17md2gr/called_toyota_about_a_buyback/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/comments/17md2gr/called_toyot... I'm all in favor of alternatives for gasoline. We just need some that don't perpetuate carbon fuel use. The mirai folks end up paying way more for hydrogen than gas, way way more in that subreddit, run into unavailability of fuel, the stations break and aren't repaired. I was quite surprised when I came upon the discussions there. When or if we can create h fuel without using lots of fossil fuel and energy it would be great. Today it's primarily companies and govts perpetuating their industrial bases in Japan that seem to be pushing hydrogen.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWill every house need a windsock? (As required by industrial use of anhydrous ammonia). Maybe an ammonia leak detector like a carbon monoxide alarm?
- anon84873628 3y agoThat's what I'm wondering -- how significant are its irritant properties? When gasoline spills the fumes aren't pleasant (to most people) but they seem fairly tolerable even at close distances. Contrast with my experience of concentrated ammonia in the chemistry lab, where if you get one strong whiff it can send you reeling with burnt sinuses. But I may not be aware of safety strategies that are already in use.
- blacksqr 3y agoAmmonia was used in early home refrigerators, and people died in their sleep from exposure to leaked refrigerant with distressing frequency. There was a race to design leak-proof refrigerators; Einstein was issued a patent. Then non-toxic freon was introduced and rendered those efforts irrelevant.
- kragen 3y agoi think it was sulfur dioxide that was the culprit in those deaths, and the einstein-szilard refrigerator was also an ammonia-absorption refrigerator, though it didn't have leak-prone moving seals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator ammonia-absorption refrigerators of more or less the einstein-szilard type still aren't leak-proof, even without moving seals as you will easily learn if you go to a junkyard to find spare parts for one (they're still popular in rvs, and i stayed in a hotel room earlier this year that had one, manufactured within the last decade) freon was a huge safety improvement over early vapor-compression refrigerants like propane and sulfur dioxide, but ammonia-absorption refrigerators are a different beast entirely
- batushka3 3y ago
- Tade0 3y agoWhen it does leak, it forms an aerosol that travels low to the ground and that is pretty deadly.
- argiopetech 3y ago"Pretty deadly" in the "2 good breaths and you're unconscious in it till you die" sense.
- mapt 3y agoJust as with chlorine gas: Luckily, we're incredibly sensitive to the odor of even safe-ish trace quantities of the toxin, so the actual risk is dramatically mitigated in any environment where there's air mixing. Smell it, back away until you can't smell it, and you're a survivor. Just don't, say, descend an elevator shaft into an un-ventilated sub-basement with ammonia storage. The amount of inconsequentially small ammonia leaks which nevertheless the owner insists on a service technician fixing immediately because of the alarming odor, actually form most of the case against ammonia as a refrigerant, which it's otherwise well-suited to.
- euroderf 3y agoNose-detectable at 1 ppm. Dangerous at (IIRC) 10 or 20 ppm.
- theluketaylor 3y agoYeah, it can be nasty. Ammonia is a very common refrigerant for ice rinks here in Canada. Operators die every so often across the country due to undetected leaks. Ammonia seems like a grid scale storage solution, not something we can distribute across people’s homes. Home storage we should start focused on thermal batteries since it’s highly proven technology that needs almost zero maintenance.
- marcosdumay 3y agoAnd when burned it produces high amounts of pollutants that are about as deadly. (Fixable with the application of enough catalizers, that are made of material that is more expensive than gold.) Besides, differently from what the GP claims, it does need to be pressurized. It can indeed be used as a fertilizer, requiring careful application because if it's over-applied it's pretty deadly to any plant, and if applied incorrectly it can leak from the soil and become pretty deadly to anything above it. But some people really do love the stuff and believe it's a solution to everything.
- mike_d 3y agoIt will never happen because if you can get large amounts of anhydrous ammonia or something you can convert into it you can make large amounts of meth.
- jacquesm 3y agoNot happening, way too many safety concerns for this to be viable tech. What we need is better batteries, not Ammonia or Hydrogen, those are essentially obsolete given present day tech, another billion or two into battery research and we should see the end of Lithium Ion (we're pretty much there already but for a penalty in density, but that's not a limitation for stationary storage systems) cost wise.
- euroderf 3y agoIn Scandinavia you have summers with vast amounts of uncaptured sunlight. I wonder if ammonia is the way to capture and use it.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoSounds like micro-scale MHHC. A press release isn't going to reveal their secret sauce and I didn't come across specifics in a quick review of the research literature, but I'm curious which materials and processes go into manufacturing the substrate.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoIs there a better/more balanced article that describes this company's technology more accurately? This device does not use "solid hydrogen", and that absurd misnomer made me discount most of this article. They did say elsewhere that it is instead a solid-oxide fuel cell [1], but I have no idea if this is in any way. significantly better/cheaper option than batteries. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_fuel_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_fuel_cell
- mdip 3y agoThanks for this. The first thing I'm reading is some statement about how they don't actually want to locate these things on your property, but nearby, which makes me think (a) either "I wouldn't want this thing on my property" or (b) it's "not practical and/or safe to locate this thing on my property" (a being a subset of b). And then "solid hydrogen" is mentioned and I'm thinking ... huh? Glad I wasn't alone. So nobody on Earth would ever confuse me with a chemist, but (at least) I think I have some of the basics down. Hydrogen isn't solid until you drop the temperature a whole hell of a lot or increase the pressure a whole hell of a lot. Now, I guess the upside is that "solid hydrogen" requires temps/pressures that render oxygen similarly frozen which[0] I guess reduces the probability that said "hydrogen battery" doesn't become a "crater surrounded by the fiery wreckage of the neighborhood where said hydrogen battery once was." But, gee, it better be one hell of a power storage source to offset the cost of cooling/pressurizing its storage. I guess the more logical explanation is "an attempt to dress up what is likely a different use of/material-but-not-flashy-improvement upon an existing technology" which likely hasn't had the slightest bit of practical testing behind it. That sounds a little more cynical than I mean it to -- I mean I really do hope they have something that is as sexy as this thing is trying to sound but the best I could get out of reading that "skeptically" was: "Put some (top of the line) solar panels on a building (for reasons unmentioned, we aren't using your roof) and store the power in these things just outside your neighborhood (for reasons unmentioned, we aren't small enough/safe enough/it's otherwise impractical to store these on your property/in your home) and they'll go in this sleek-looking 3D rendered thing that we haven't yet worked all the details out of yet[1]." [0] ... according to the two second Google search that I did. [1] The cynic in imagines a meeting "Let's see, our technology is something that's solid ... and it's chemical make-up includes something with Hydrogen" ... somewhere along the lines someone was like "F!ck it, let's just call it 'Solid Hydrogen' and see if anyone bites".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rgmerk 3y agoNot an expert but from what scanty technical detail is presented in the article, it sounds like they're using: * metal hydride to store hydrogen. * a reversible fuel cell that can either split water to extract the hydrogen, or combine the hydrogen with oxygen from the air to make electricity * using the "waste" heat as space/water heating (this is another variation of "combined heat and power" and is pretty widely deployed, though perhaps not with fuel cells). There's been talk about using metal hydrides for hydrogen storage for many decades, and they appear to be commercially available [1]. That said, none of the discussion of hydrogen bulk storage at commercial scale seems to be talking about hydrides - it seems more to be about underground caverns just like natural gas, or tanks if you don't have a handy underground cavern. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles all seem to be using cryogenic tanks. If this company has an approach that can lead to anything approximating seasonal storage in a home-friendly form factor at anything approximating a reasonable cost (and that reasonable cost could be pretty high given the functionality), the world will beat a path to their door. [1] https://www.h2planet.eu/en/detail/MyH2300 https://www.h2planet.eu/en/detail/MyH2300
- XorNot 3y agoThere's at least one company in the market in Australia with a metal hydride absorber system[1], and it's still nowhere near cost effective for household usage (or really any usage IMO: I can't figure out where this would fit where batteries or something much larger like Vanadium or Iron-flow would not). CHP is also, IMO, cheating since the retrofits to take advantage of the waste heat aren't simple or non-invasive - i.e. theoretically CHP could power hot water and air conditioning for me via heat pumps, but in practice doing any of that residentially is prohibitively expensive. [1] https://www.lavo.com.au/lavo-hydrogen/ https://www.lavo.com.au/lavo-hydrogen/
- flgb 3y agoAlthough interestingly LAVO is 'pivoting' .. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2023/11/02/lavo-pivots-to-new-model-offering-households-renewable-ecosystems-via-subscription-at-no-upfront-cost/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2023/11/02/lavo-pivots...
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- ChuckMcM 3y agoSigh. Is a 'nickel metal hydride'[1] solid hydrogen? If someone can find a paper on the technology I would appreciate it. As it is, it reads like a university publicist making up things to sell mundane research as ground breaking (I have no idea if it is or isn't but just that the writing style feels like it). [1] Yes I'm being a bit snarky here as NiMH batteries are like last century technology.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> Is a 'nickel metal hydride'[1] solid hydrogen? Solid state hydrogen storage, yes. But it's common for people trying to hype it to call it "solid hydrogen". People have been researching it for decades, but compared to pressurized storage, it's heavy, large, expensive, and low-throughput. But it has no high-pressure, that is one of the things that make storage dangerous, and very low leakage. I am actually more curious about the metal-oxide ion separator they talk about, but the article is intent on not giving any details about anything.
- tjmc 3y agoSceptical - another "energy storage breakthrough" article with no detail of either cost or conversion efficiency. Non-technical founder too.
- adrianN 3y agoOne fun scenario for the future is rich households progressively going off-grid, leaving poorer households to finance a larger share of the grid costs, which increases incentives to go off-grid until everybody who can afford it is off grid and the remainder struggles to pay for the infrastructure.
- dacryn 3y agoI don't think we'll get there anywhere soon. We're close to being able to go off grid to our current standards of living. Add in 2 EV's per household and you won't be able to do it all year round without grid connections.
- jacquesm 3y agoNo, he's got a point, I'm pretty much there, but for a bit of storage and an inverter upgrade it would be a done deal but for now the grid is still cheaper for storage.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago> 2 EV's per household The only way that's physically possible is if these EV's are electric scooters.
- pjc50 3y agoOnly really going to be a thing in the far exurbs. There's no point in trying to go off grid in a city. Even people in countries with unreliable grids are still connected most of the time.
- grst 3y agoThere's also the Picea from a German company that offers hydrogen storage for homes: https://www.homepowersolutions.de/ https://www.homepowersolutions.de/ You actually buy their product already, but the investment and maintenance cost still require a good deal of idealism. But maybe in a couple of years this becomes interesting...
- Animats 3y ago"The cylinder contains a patented solution of solid hydrogen" Huh? If they actually have a patent, that info should be available. Storing hydrogen in tanks filled with metal chips has been around for years. Overview from 2019.[1] So far, the energy density has been unimpressive. Is there an energy density number for this thing? Cost? There are other companies doing this.[2] That one does have some actual installations, mostly in places where someone needed some off-grid power storage and money was no major problem. [1] https://www.norvento.com/en/blog/hydrogen-storage/ https://www.norvento.com/en/blog/hydrogen-storage/ [2] https://www.gknhydrogen.com/technology-2/ https://www.gknhydrogen.com/technology-2/
- MikhairuBear 3y agoWhile it's exciting territory for renewables, as some others in the comment section have noticed there really isn't anything new to this. Moreover sifted is a very trashy publisher that tends to have much fluff, less substance. Better look for other sources
- hannob 3y agoThey're asking the wrong question. Can you make households self-sufficient with solar? Well, it'll probably work. But also, it's probably expensive. So the question is: should you make households self-sufficient? If you look into the renewable intermittency issue, some of the best and cheapest solutions are not storage, and are not possible in a self-sufficient setting. Those include a combination of wind and solar (they complement somewhat, because days with lots of wind are often days with little sun), grid improvements (transporting electricity is almost always more efficient than storing it), flexible demands in industry etc. Yeah, there is still a need for some expensive storage, but you should only do that if you have no better alternative. The better solutions are on a grid level.
- greenthrow 3y agoThis is a complete puff piece on something that isn't remotely ready for deployment. Meanwhile batteries are available today. My house has one that we use for exactly this purpose (we also have solar.) Also the article claims batteries have short lifespans which is just factually false, especially compared to fuel cells, which are a known wear item which will need to be replaced far sooner than a battery. Overall terrible quality press release masquerading as an article.
- rickydroll 3y agough. more rent seeking. I'll buy batteries, tyvm.
- bergen 3y agoCan someone explain the heating stuff to me? Most sun energy would be available and used in the summer time, where the heat that results from conversion loss is not really of any use?
- rgmerk 3y agoMost people still want hot water in the summer, so some of the surplus heat can be used for that. The thing to keep in mind is that solar panels are cheap, so it’s not that big a deal if some of the energy collected from them is lost as heat during the summer. What really matters for the viability of this system is the cost of the fuel cell and hydrogen storage medium.
- apex_sloth 3y agoEvery few months there is a new breakthrough in energy storage. To this day none really materialized in the way these articles claim. I work in that sector but am not an expert in the technology so make of that what you will.
- rasz 3y agocontrol-F efficiency >Batteries are too expensive and have short lifespans, and high costs and poor efficiency have crossed hydrogen nonsense >The cylinder contains a patented solution of solid hydrogen, which has more efficient storage capabilities than batteries no number >No storage solution is 100% energy efficient, and neither is Photoncycle’s system. tautology