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

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

#161

Post by riku_iki » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #160

walrus01 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 met…

but maybe they can use seawater for cleaning?

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

#162

Post by aitchnyu » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:11 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.

Aluminum is called congealed electricity due to the energy intensive manufacturing process and recycling is very economical.

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

#163

Post by fennecfoxen » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #66

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never needing to fill up is even better. And which technology allows for that? The cars "running on water" that new age alien enthusiasts are always on about?

There's also the work on wireless charging via the roadway, itself. No, it isn't working right now but it's in its infancy. Only the very first prototypes have been rolled out, and they don't wear well, admittedly. Solutions are being worked on. Technology is only limited by your imagination and your ability to problem solve. =)

Capital expenditure, in a system where resources are finite and trade-offs must be made, is a notoriously tricky problem to solve.

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

#164

Post by zamadatix » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:18 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…

According to the Wikipedia article cited it takes 30 people 10-15 days to clean all 392,158 panels fully. That sounds like $100,000/y in raw wages but it seems to be limited by water supply more than raw labor cost. The dust being cited as 40% of the panel efficiency loss and not always being an issue depending on the season also drives some of that RoI down, looks like a good portion of the loss is due to the heat as well. By far the biggest costs seem to have been with corruption from choice of renewable source to choice of contractor vs operation of the actual installation.

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

#165

Post by boublepop » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

mdavis6890 wrote: post #141

I wish I'd stop hearing about Hydrogen as a fuel source. It's not. It's just a battery, and should simply be compared to other types of batteries, like Li-Ion. Maybe Hydrogen fuel cells are better batteries, maybe not. But it's still just a battery, and needs to be charged from the electric power grid (by using the electricity to separate hydrogen from water), just like any other battery would.

The defining difference between fuel-cells and batteries is that fuel-cells don’t need to be “recharged” as in running an electrochemical reaction in reverse, they just need you to change the fuel.

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

#166

Post by mdorazio » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #160

walrus01 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 met…

This seems kind of like a bullshit excuse where they just didn't really want to fix the issue. There are a number of waterless cleaning systems that have been available for years, for example [1]. Additionally, why the hell would you throw away the water used for cleaning? Filtering the dust particulate out of the water is pretty straightforward (hell, you can go from muddy to fairly clean water with nothing more than a cotton t-shirt), then you reuse it to clean more panels. 1L/panel with even basic reclamation is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdidbRQaUEY

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

#167

Post by nappy » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #147

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…

I don't disagree on the point that they were undercut in price. But they were also undercut in price because commodity normal PV panels composed of 156mm polycrystalline or monocrystalline cells (60 or 72 cells) are much cheaper to manufacture than the weird proprietary system they developed. They are also much cheaper to mount on large roofs (home depot/walmart warehouse sized) or on large scale 300kW+ ground arrays…

You can't fund potentially breakthrough innovation and research and only get one tail of the distribution. It's a good thing, not a bad one, the the US government providers funding, and in this case, interest free loans for projects that sometimes fail.

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

#168

Post by VBprogrammer » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #158

ljf wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One way of thinking about it is that nuclear power is the only type of power we have at the moment where all of the negative externalities are baked into the process.

I really want renewables to work but so far grid scale batteries just don't exist. The biggest lithium battery isn't even a blip, it's roughly equivalent to what the UK receives through French over production every 6 minutes.

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

#169

Post by cheesecracker » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

"might" - so it won't, again.

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

#170

Post by vlovich123 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:29 PM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #161

zamfi wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 met…

but maybe they can use seawater for cleaning?

Would the salt be abrasive & damage the panels/coating decreasing efficiency?

I would imagine another challenge is the transporation costs. The nearest fresh water source appears to be Sutlej River ~18 KM straightline. The nearest seawater source appears to be the Arabian Sea, ~800 KM straightline.

The cost to a problem like this would never be labor as that can be trivially automated if it ever gets costly enough. Water is expensive at these scales.

That being said, it's probable that there could be solutions here. Automated scrubber/blower might be able to get most of the efficiency back without the cost (whether integrated into the panel or a robot on a track). Could potentially use any water more judiciously too when needed (moisten a scrub rather than blasting it with water). Don't know enough about the project but I would hope the domain experts responsible for the project would have considered something I only thought about for 30 seconds & there are reasons that they don't do that.