After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit • Hacker News Board

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#151

Post by manfredo » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #127

svara wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the things you're saying aren't correct, see my other comment (sibling to yours) for references. Nuclear is not cheap compared to photovoltaics, wind and hydro. Since the former two are bursty, overcapacity in them leads to cheap excess energy at times, which needs to be stored. Which storage method is the best depends on multiple factors, particularly on the duration of storage, capacity required and frequen…

Do we really need long-term storage? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to overprovision production?

Seasonal fluctuations in energy production are more extreme in far northern and southern latitudes. Which just so happens to be where the majority of energy consumption is located.

The amount of energy storage required even to just handle the daily duck curve is staggering. To put this in perspective, the US consumed 11.5TWh of electricity daily. Global lithium ion battery production is 300GWh per year.

Until some truly groundbreaking storage mechanism gets developed, renewables have difficulty providing more than 40-50% of energy demand.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#152

Post by toomuchtodo » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

dgut wrote: post #149

newacct583 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solyndra's failure had nothing to do with technology at all. They failed because Chinese manufacturers undercut them in price , quite severely. Allegations of dumping (or fraud, on the other side) notwithstanding, what this says is that solar is actually much cheaper and more readily available than Solyndra's investors expected. And that's sort of the opposite of your point, no? Similarly the Tesla plant is doing exa…

Solar power is alive and kicking in Spain and increasingly more cost effective (removing the need of subsidies since 2018).

Spain just shuttered half of their coal capacity at the end of June 2020 partially due to this (also because of emissions requirements owners didn’t want to meet), and intend to shutter the rest by 2025 (additional wind power and pumped hydro for storage is coming online in that time).

https://english.elpais.com/economy_and_business/2020-06-29/s...

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#153

Post by Gibbon1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

thinkcontext wrote: post #53

cultofmetatron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like Iceland would do well to export hydrogen from electrolysis

Iceland exports renewable energy in the form of aluminum. They have the potential to develop more energy but it's controversial because of impact on the landscape.

I ran into a fascinating paper published in the 1950's by a Norwegian group who ran a pilot plant to electrowin iron from iron-sulfide waste from a copper mine. They claimed something like 4-5 kwh per kg. Unlike electrowining aluminum it's a room temp aqueous process. My thought is, it's probably economic if you have access to intermittent sources of really cheap electricity.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#154

Post by jepler » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

dmckeon wrote: post #138

atombender wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this diagram from Volkswagen visualizing the energy loss at every step for hydrogen versus BEV: https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/hydrogen-vs-electric--volksw... This image (don't know the source), which includes oil and coal, is also a good visualization: https://i.imgur.com/Wuhnlvu.png Even simpler: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPkaz0nX4AAcr_v.jpg

With regard to https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPkaz0nX4AAcr_v.jpg if the capture and separate elements can be decentralized, then distribution and one storage phase are eliminated. In other words, if a refueling station can do solar or wind capture and electrolysis on-site, the economics are better. This would be unlikely for stations in urban or high-density areas, but for rural and suburban locations it might be a win…

Check my math:

Say a fueling station needs to serve (only) 100 cars per day, providing 50kWh per car. That's 200kW average generation power needed. Ballpark, a 1 m2 solar panel can generate 200kWh/year, or 23W average. (quora answer, 2018). You need .. really? 9100 m2 of area, which is .91 hectare or 2.25 US acres.

A 200kW per day (73000kWh/year) wind turbine might stand 25m tall. (uk wind energy report, 2014) Will these function in suburban to urban settings? Would they be accepted by the public? In the US, siting rules are a mess, but one example I found called for 2500 feet (760+m) distance to property line and 1.5 times turbine height to overhead utility lines. (NCSL, 2016)

Given these fairly large size requirements, unless I slipped some decimal points, it doesn't seem likely to work out.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-kWh-will-1-sq-meter-of-solar-...

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.renewableuk.com/resource/resmgr/Do...

https://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/state-wind-energy-sitin...

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#155

Post by wlesieutre » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

meditative wrote: post #140

dmix wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read about a couple of solar projects that projected x/kWh and turned out to be much worse in production. Pakistan's big deployment is one example, it was planned to be 100MW but only produced 18MW. Mostly because they didn't factor in the dust that would cover the panels, keeping them clean was very expensive (I'm curious how this applies to other proposed desert deployments). Nor factoring in the typical malai…

Tesla's Australian battery was not for storage, it's for power quality.

It's for both - 70% of capacity is for grid stability and the other 30% is for storing power when it's cheap and selling it back when it's expensive.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#156

Post by Retric » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #84

svara wrote: post #24

I've been diving into this literature a bit recently, and it's been mostly encouraging. Affordable clean energy is realistic. Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1]. The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down ex…

Regarding [1], the article quotes production costs of USD 50/MWh for renewables, and USD 100/MWh for coal (graph 3). You/[1] is saying that with storage costs of USD 150,000 per MWh, renewables can be competitive? It doesn't compute, unless I misunderstand something.

150,000$ / 3,000 charge cycles (~8.3 years) = 50$/MWh = 0.05c/kWh.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#157

Post by dghughes » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:01 PM UTC

hnick wrote: post #12

admax88q wrote: post #2

Hydrogen production is almost entirely produced from fossil fuels currently. Its not really a low carbon energy source unless electrolysis can be made much more efficient. Its a shame this article didn't examine the production side of hydrogen.

I don't think most people consider it an energy source, more so a battery or storage medium. And cheaper storage is an important part of the renewables story because local supply can be unpredictable. I saw this article earlier today along those lines: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/alchemy-of... Supposedly this stores hydrogen metal hydrides cheaper than lithium batteries, whatever that means, but…

There is a video on YouTube about Bob Lazar the area 51 guy. Only it's about how he uses solar and wind to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen. He stores the hydrogen as a metal hydride. The tanks are heated to release the hydrogen and it's used to power his car.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#158

Post by manfredo » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

ljf wrote: post #128

threatripper wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of the things you're saying aren't correct, see my other comment (sibling to yours) for references. I really wish that I was wrong instead of just semi-accurate and sloppy. > Nuclear is not cheap compared to photovoltaics, wind and hydro. The price of nuclear power is dominated by regulation. Running the power plant is quite cheap. The real cost is satisfying regulation and getting rid of the nuclear waste. If…

Nuclear power is only dirt cheap if the government/society picks up all the externalised costs for the storage and recycling of waste. Can you tell me which nuclear stations cover all their own costs? As far as I am aware, all nuclear power stations in the world do not bear that cost - it is always picked up by the government. They often figure that the long term cost is worth it for energy stability - not because nu…

The cost of storing waste is miniscule. Because there's so little of it. The entirety of the US's nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 meters high [1]. The government did build a waste storage facility, which was planned to have cost $150 million [2]. Which is tiny compared to the tens of billions that nuclear plants themselves actually cost.

The notion that cost of storing nuclear waste would make nuclear power considerably more expensive is incorrect.

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#159

Post by Gibbon1 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #6

I used to drive a hydrogen car once in a while a few years ago. It was nice to fill the car in a few minutes and get about 300km of range, but that was it. With the hydrogen you have so few refueling stations, they are very expensive, that range anxiety is a thing. To not improve things, reliability is very poor. My work had a hydrogen refueling station on its parking. It was often broken and actually a bit scary to…

I feel like the draw of hydrogen as a fuel source is that it doesn't disturb the current power structure which is based on control of oil and gas supplies. Countries have to constantly import oil and gas to power their transport networks. That requires those countries to pay in dollars (usually). Control that and you have them by the nose.

Electrification completely upends that. A country that is self sufficient in energy can tell other countries to take a hike.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#160

Post by zamfi » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #143

dmix wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read about a couple of solar projects that projected x/kWh and turned out to be much worse in production. Pakistan's big deployment is one example, it was planned to be 100MW but only produced 18MW. Mostly because they didn't factor in the dust that would cover the panels, keeping them clean was very expensive (I'm curious how this applies to other proposed desert deployments). Nor factoring in the typical malai…

I'm honestly curious what is the big challenge with keeping large arrays of ground mounted panels clean in Pakistan. The prevailing wage for unskilled labor for a 6 day a week, 45-hour work week for one laborer to clean panels is probably about $250-300 a month (USD equivalent, in rupees) in that area. That would be a good wage compared to construction work or farm work in that region. With some basic equipment like…

Quoting the Wikipedia page cited above:

> It required one litre of water to clean, each of 400,000 installed panels. A total 15 days cleaning cycle required, 124 million litres of water enough to sustain 9000 people, while rain in Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning methods allowed setting of dust before it was re-cleaned.