3 ms·

A ton of hydrogen seems to occupy a cube with a 23 meter side. Wonder if a bunch of those could be built to hold the excess gas for night time operation. 100G

A ton of hydrogen seems to occupy a cube with a 23 meter side. Wonder if a bunch of those could be built to hold the excess gas for night time operation. 100GWh is not small, but it's not impossible. The largest solar farm in operation is 5GW, and that could get you theoretically halfway there operating 10 hours a day. It feels like the challenges are a lot easier to solve than with fusion or nuclear.

lurk2 2y ago
The issue doesn't appear to be storage, but transmission. Hydrogen can leak through metal and lead to it becoming brittle, so you can't use conventional natural gas pipelines to transport it.
- foobarian 2y ago
  Exactly, these tanks can be giant balloons right next to the solar panels all feeding the in-situ ammonia plant.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    That was my thinking, but I think what he is saying is that power plants won't generate enough electricity to make building an in-situ ammonia plant economical. You need to network power plants together to operate a centralized ammonia plant 24/7, and the network to move this energy (whether in the form of hydrogen or electricity) doesn't currently exist.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      The land area of an all-in-one plant is maybe the biggest unknown for me with respect to just getting ownership and permits and such. But it's fun to imagine just picking a giant plot somewhere in the desert and plopping down 20 GW of solar panels, enough hydrogen storage to keep the less energy intensive steps operating throughout the night, and presumably batteries for whatever still requires electric power while panels are offline. Water and air in, sweet sweet ammonia out. :-) Cloudy weather would be an interesting problem I guess.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
It is doable in theory but would require the construction of large-scale supporting infrastructure that currently doesn't exist. I am not optimistic about our ability to undertake infrastructure projects of this magnitude without it taking several decades and incurring obscene cost overruns that make even the most pessimistic economic models look optimistic. This will definitely be harder than nuclear. The expansive land use requirements means the legal battles pertaining to that would almost certainly span many decades. At least with nuclear there is a limited number of people that need to sign-off to have a viable project -- reforming that process probably would be simpler.
TylerE 2y ago
I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be stored either as liquid or at least pressurized. Steam has something like 200x the volume of the water it’s boiled from.

lurk2 2y ago

The issue doesn't appear to be storage, but transmission. Hydrogen can leak through metal and lead to it becoming brittle, so you can't use conventional natural gas pipelines to transport it.

foobarian 2y ago
Exactly, these tanks can be giant balloons right next to the solar panels all feeding the in-situ ammonia plant.
- lurk2 2y ago
  That was my thinking, but I think what he is saying is that power plants won't generate enough electricity to make building an in-situ ammonia plant economical. You need to network power plants together to operate a centralized ammonia plant 24/7, and the network to move this energy (whether in the form of hydrogen or electricity) doesn't currently exist.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    The land area of an all-in-one plant is maybe the biggest unknown for me with respect to just getting ownership and permits and such. But it's fun to imagine just picking a giant plot somewhere in the desert and plopping down 20 GW of solar panels, enough hydrogen storage to keep the less energy intensive steps operating throughout the night, and presumably batteries for whatever still requires electric power while panels are offline. Water and air in, sweet sweet ammonia out. :-) Cloudy weather would be an interesting problem I guess.

jandrewrogers 2y ago

It is doable in theory but would require the construction of large-scale supporting infrastructure that currently doesn't exist. I am not optimistic about our ability to undertake infrastructure projects of this magnitude without it taking several decades and incurring obscene cost overruns that make even the most pessimistic economic models look optimistic. This will definitely be harder than nuclear. The expansive land use requirements means the legal battles pertaining to that would almost certainly span many decades. At least with nuclear there is a limited number of people that need to sign-off to have a viable project -- reforming that process probably would be simpler.

TylerE 2y ago

I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be stored either as liquid or at least pressurized. Steam has something like 200x the volume of the water it’s boiled from.