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Green hydrogen is not a "source" at all. It's an energy storage mechanism that would have to be powered by additional green capacity. There is a legitimate con

Green hydrogen is not a "source" at all. It's an energy storage mechanism that would have to be powered by additional green capacity. There is a legitimate concern that expanding wind/solar will run into increasing costs, NIMBY, and transmission issues at extremely large scale. Nuclear may help there by virtue of it being highly concentrated and 24/7.

pfdietz 3y ago
Your quibble there does absolutely nothing to refute my argument, so why did you make it? Of course green hydrogen is storage. So what? It acts as a way to produce the firming that is needed to deal with long wavelength intermittency. Your concern mongering there seems entirely vacuous. If anything, wind/solar have seen aggressive experience effects that reduce costs at larger scale, not increase them.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  The point is that if you just look at cost of hydrogen equipment, you're missing the cost of the equipment that has to charge it as well. Have you read Komanoff's hypothesis that any given energy technology's cost scales to first order with sector size? It's quite an argument. He used it to explain unrelated cost escalations in nuclear and coal. It says that the bigger a sector is, the more people are impacted, and the more regulations and other externalities come in. For wind and solar, you can imagine land use leading to more NIMBY and transmission costs, and increasing costs of dealing with high intermittency (e.g. 2-week long wind droughts across 4 huge states that regularly occur in January).
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Ah, but the equipment to charge it is the renewable sources you're already building. These are installed with some overcapacity, so they can more often provide what they're required to provide directly to the grid. But this means they also produce excess output, which can then be diverted to hydrogen production. One gets two bites at the apple here; the two approaches are synergistic with overall cost less than the sum of the costs of each separately. As I have repeatedly pointed out, simulations based on actual weather data show green hydrogen can be highly effective at reducing the overall cost of a RE grid, vs. just using batteries alone.

pfdietz 3y ago

Your quibble there does absolutely nothing to refute my argument, so why did you make it? Of course green hydrogen is storage. So what? It acts as a way to produce the firming that is needed to deal with long wavelength intermittency. Your concern mongering there seems entirely vacuous. If anything, wind/solar have seen aggressive experience effects that reduce costs at larger scale, not increase them.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
The point is that if you just look at cost of hydrogen equipment, you're missing the cost of the equipment that has to charge it as well. Have you read Komanoff's hypothesis that any given energy technology's cost scales to first order with sector size? It's quite an argument. He used it to explain unrelated cost escalations in nuclear and coal. It says that the bigger a sector is, the more people are impacted, and the more regulations and other externalities come in. For wind and solar, you can imagine land use leading to more NIMBY and transmission costs, and increasing costs of dealing with high intermittency (e.g. 2-week long wind droughts across 4 huge states that regularly occur in January).
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Ah, but the equipment to charge it is the renewable sources you're already building. These are installed with some overcapacity, so they can more often provide what they're required to provide directly to the grid. But this means they also produce excess output, which can then be diverted to hydrogen production. One gets two bites at the apple here; the two approaches are synergistic with overall cost less than the sum of the costs of each separately. As I have repeatedly pointed out, simulations based on actual weather data show green hydrogen can be highly effective at reducing the overall cost of a RE grid, vs. just using batteries alone.