6 ms·

> It's hellishly inefficient, but I repeat: the energy is free. Can you give pointers about who gives away hydrogen generation systems for free? Because the c

by pyrale 2y ago

> It's hellishly inefficient, but I repeat: the energy is free. Can you give pointers about who gives away hydrogen generation systems for free? Because the cost of energy usually factors in the cost of amortizing equipment required to produce and distribute it. > The nice thing about going all the way to synthetic fuels and not hydrogen is that long term storage becomes trivially cheap Once you've financed all of the horribly expensive capital expenditure, and provided you disregard that operating costs actually require paying people to monitor, repair and operate that infrastructure, the rest is basically free.

ben_w 2y ago
> Can you give pointers about who gives away hydrogen generation systems for free? If you don't care about efficiency (because the electricity is free), a 9 year old can make hydrogen generators out of old pencils and jam jars. Citation: me, I did that.
- pyrale 2y ago
  I can also make some methane depending on what's on the lunch menu, but that doesn't mean cheap renewable natural gas is a solved problem.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Do you really not understand the point I'm making here? The technical skills needed to make a device that turns water and electricity into hydrogen are so minimal that they can be performed by someone too young for you to be allowed to employ them. When you don't care about efficiency, hydrogen is trivial. The limiting factor is how much electricity you can shove through the water, not human effort.
    - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
      To be fair the problem with hydrogen isn't the production (that is ~free, once you have free energy at least some amount of time) but it's storage and then usage. Storage is a fundamental physics problem. Usage is something where low efficiency may or may not be a problem, depending on the over provisioning that we applied at the generation and storage stages.
      - Matumio 2y ago
        Production is trivial, but storage and transport really isn't: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/can-we-use-pipelines-and-power-plants-we-have-now-transport-and-burn-hydrogen-or-do-we-need https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/can-we-use-pipelines-and-pow...
        Calwestjobs 2y ago
        first of all, youre spreading misinformation. storage is CHEAP AF. BUT not kind every misinfo guru from youtube tells you about. this is cheaper - https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iron-as-an-inexpensive-storage-medium-for-hydrogen.html https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iro... also https://www.rotterdaminnovationcity.com/co2-neutral-living-is-now-closer-than-ever-before-thanks-to-hydrogen/ https://www.rotterdaminnovationcity.com/co2-neutral-living-i... AND most importantly, WHY do you need to transport hydrogen ? You do not need. think about it. you get electricity to your plant, make hydrogen on site, store hydrogen on site for almost nothing. why do you need to transport anything ? you do not.
        hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        Oh wow. I read about that project some time last year. But I didn't do the calculations back then. If I did my math correctly then this H2-in-iron comes out to 2EUR/kWh_el. I wonder what the catch is
        Calwestjobs 2y ago
        how much of kWh is your house needing for heating, hot water and how much for tv,notebook etc ? calculate what percentage / ratio your tv is. caring about electricity is nonsense, care about 95% of your household consumption. and yes your cooling bill is 0 dollars because you have PV on roof.
        Matumio 2y ago
        Interesting references, thanks. But both seem to be at the research and feasibility stage. From the ETH group's web page: (https://fml.ethz.ch/research/ses.html https://fml.ethz.ch/research/ses.html) > To demonstrate the technical feasability of this process, we buildt a 10MWh pilot plant at ETH Hönggerberg. The first charing cycle, using hydrogen to reduce iron oxide to iron, was successfully completed over a time span of 4 months. The discharging cycle is currently ongoing. So either they haven't managed to do a full cycle yet, or they are not updating their research page. It sounds like this should work, so I'm tentatively optimistic. But this looks like a technology you'd have to bet on, not yet a certain path to a commercial seasonal battery just waiting for mass deployment.
    - dang 2y ago
      > Do you really not understand the point I'm making here? This is the sort of thing that the site guidelines ask you to edit out of your comments here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Your post would be just fine without that bit.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Oops, noted.
Veedrac 2y ago
Hydrogen generation systems exist on the same balance. When the input electricity is expensive, you want to build them to be more efficient, and that costs money, in catalysts and low-loss reaction chambers and such. If a huge amount of energy at peak times is free, then the optimal point is very different, and indeed if you try to minimize capital costs you end up needing something barely more sophisticated than a kettle. Kettles aren't particularly expensive to run! While competition will quickly drive this towards a more even balance, as cheap storage displaces yet-more excess solar buildout, the point of the argument was just to show why naïvely extrapolating to extreme overproduction (>2x) is misleading.

by pyrale 2y ago

ben_w 2y ago

> Can you give pointers about who gives away hydrogen generation systems for free? If you don't care about efficiency (because the electricity is free), a 9 year old can make hydrogen generators out of old pencils and jam jars. Citation: me, I did that.

pyrale 2y ago
I can also make some methane depending on what's on the lunch menu, but that doesn't mean cheap renewable natural gas is a solved problem.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Do you really not understand the point I'm making here? The technical skills needed to make a device that turns water and electricity into hydrogen are so minimal that they can be performed by someone too young for you to be allowed to employ them. When you don't care about efficiency, hydrogen is trivial. The limiting factor is how much electricity you can shove through the water, not human effort.
  - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
    To be fair the problem with hydrogen isn't the production (that is ~free, once you have free energy at least some amount of time) but it's storage and then usage. Storage is a fundamental physics problem. Usage is something where low efficiency may or may not be a problem, depending on the over provisioning that we applied at the generation and storage stages.
    - Matumio 2y ago
      Production is trivial, but storage and transport really isn't: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/can-we-use-pipelines-and-power-plants-we-have-now-transport-and-burn-hydrogen-or-do-we-need https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/can-we-use-pipelines-and-pow...
      - Calwestjobs 2y ago
        first of all, youre spreading misinformation. storage is CHEAP AF. BUT not kind every misinfo guru from youtube tells you about. this is cheaper - https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iron-as-an-inexpensive-storage-medium-for-hydrogen.html https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iro... also https://www.rotterdaminnovationcity.com/co2-neutral-living-is-now-closer-than-ever-before-thanks-to-hydrogen/ https://www.rotterdaminnovationcity.com/co2-neutral-living-i... AND most importantly, WHY do you need to transport hydrogen ? You do not need. think about it. you get electricity to your plant, make hydrogen on site, store hydrogen on site for almost nothing. why do you need to transport anything ? you do not.
        hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        Oh wow. I read about that project some time last year. But I didn't do the calculations back then. If I did my math correctly then this H2-in-iron comes out to 2EUR/kWh_el. I wonder what the catch is
        Calwestjobs 2y ago
        how much of kWh is your house needing for heating, hot water and how much for tv,notebook etc ? calculate what percentage / ratio your tv is. caring about electricity is nonsense, care about 95% of your household consumption. and yes your cooling bill is 0 dollars because you have PV on roof.
        Matumio 2y ago
        Interesting references, thanks. But both seem to be at the research and feasibility stage. From the ETH group's web page: (https://fml.ethz.ch/research/ses.html https://fml.ethz.ch/research/ses.html) > To demonstrate the technical feasability of this process, we buildt a 10MWh pilot plant at ETH Hönggerberg. The first charing cycle, using hydrogen to reduce iron oxide to iron, was successfully completed over a time span of 4 months. The discharging cycle is currently ongoing. So either they haven't managed to do a full cycle yet, or they are not updating their research page. It sounds like this should work, so I'm tentatively optimistic. But this looks like a technology you'd have to bet on, not yet a certain path to a commercial seasonal battery just waiting for mass deployment.
  - dang 2y ago
    > Do you really not understand the point I'm making here? This is the sort of thing that the site guidelines ask you to edit out of your comments here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Your post would be just fine without that bit.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Oops, noted.

Veedrac 2y ago

Hydrogen generation systems exist on the same balance. When the input electricity is expensive, you want to build them to be more efficient, and that costs money, in catalysts and low-loss reaction chambers and such. If a huge amount of energy at peak times is free, then the optimal point is very different, and indeed if you try to minimize capital costs you end up needing something barely more sophisticated than a kettle. Kettles aren't particularly expensive to run! While competition will quickly drive this towards a more even balance, as cheap storage displaces yet-more excess solar buildout, the point of the argument was just to show why naïvely extrapolating to extreme overproduction (>2x) is misleading.