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After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

economist.com

211–220 of 343 posts

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

#211
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Agree. They could probably just have people walk around with blowers to blow the sand off.

Would those be a gasoline powered blowers ? ( ͜ʖ)

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what's the alternative? Kinetic storage is geographically limited. Th Sabatier process has end to end efficiency of ~30% not to mention it needs an external source of carbon dioxide. The remaining proposals are at the experimental stage (thermal storage, hydrogen storage).

Underground hydrogen storage is a demonstrated technology, not experimental. All that's required is scaling it up, and there's plenty of room to do that. The only real missing piece was sufficiently cheap electrolysers for use with intermittently available power, but that's coming along very fast now too, with rumors of costs as low as $200/kW in China (and a recent contract win of $350/kW from a European maker of al…

Underground hydrogen storage had the same issue as kinetic storage: it's geographically limited. It's not just a matter of scaling it up, it's also matter to implementing it in places without empty salt mines handy.

And as you point out, generating this hydrogen is nowhere near cost efficient. To put this in perspective, energy costs in the US average about $.10-$.20 per KWh [1]. You're literally talking about a 1,000x increase in the cost of electricity for hydrogen storage even if the rumors of "cheap" $200/KWh hydrogen production turn out to be true.

1. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

This thread is being rate limited, reply in edit:

> You are pointing to RETAIL electricity costs. Rookie error, man.

Elaborate on what you mean by emphasizing retail energy costs. That is the cost that customers pay for the electricity that is delivered to them. Some of this is subsidized, but this subsidy is not large. The US provides $3-5 subsidy per MWh of electricity. [2] Half a cent per KWh.

Even if we ignore subsidies, hundreds of dollars per kilowatt hour of hydrogen storage is still a factor of a thousand more expensive.

2. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/policy/how-much-...

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

#214
post #109
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…

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…

the point of the tesla battery in south australia wasnt to provide base load continuous power it was to provide close to instant peaking power to smooth the grid it was directly competing with natural gas peaking plants. (which it beats)

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underground hydrogen storage is a demonstrated technology, not experimental. All that's required is scaling it up, and there's plenty of room to do that. The only real missing piece was sufficiently cheap electrolysers for use with intermittently available power, but that's coming along very fast now too, with rumors of costs as low as $200/kW in China (and a recent contract win of $350/kW from a European maker of al…

Underground hydrogen storage had the same issue as kinetic storage: it's geographically limited. It's not just a matter of scaling it up, it's also matter to implementing it in places without empty salt mines handy. And as you point out, generating this hydrogen is nowhere near cost efficient. To put this in perspective, energy costs in the US average about $.10-$.20 per KWh [1]. You're literally talking about a 1,00…

My understanding is that salt domes previously used for natural gas storage can be retooled to store hydrogen. Those have enormous capacities, months worth. At least in europe and north america they're hardly georaphically limited in the sense that pumped hydro is.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost always cheaper to overbuild renewables than to use seasonal storage. Seasonal storage is used once a year, so if you can store a Kwh of energy for $1 it still increases the cost of the stored electricity by 4-5 cents per Kwh. Let's look at a 1 Kw average output. Assume that you have 6 Kw of solar, along with 18 Kwh of batteries. This will work fine 7-8 months out of the year, but will not be sufficient fo…

> It's almost always cheaper to overbuild renewables than to use seasonal storage. I disagree, especially at high latitudes. Try that in the UK, for example, at https://model.energy/

Can't we just use more wind in the UK?

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

#217
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This is the point (one of the points) that Vaclav Smil makes about renewables: abysmal energy density of production (in Watts/square meter: more like 'intensity' than 'density' to me). The only thing that beats oil is nuclear fission. With everything else, production takes up land that could be used for something else, or isn't being used for something else because it has problems such as distance or inhospitable cli…

What you're calling "energy intensity of production" doesn't look like a very important parameter. There's plenty of unused land that could host solar or wind installations and transporting electricity really is a solved problem.

I understand the impulse to defend nuclear power against seemingly irrational criticism, but that shouldn't distract you from the incredible advances that other technologies have been making. Nuclear has had its time, and today it's just not a competitive way of making electricity anymore.

Beside, you're never going to convince people that nuclear is perfectly safe - it just isn't. Even if you can completely rule out catastrophic failure, you still have a bunch of people who need to go to work every day and work with radioactive materials. Yes, it can be done safely, but personally I'm happy I don't have to (and I do work with other toxic crap in the lab on a regular basis ;)).

So, at the end of the day, you're going to need to make an argument that goes like "... but nuclear power is worth it because we have no better alternatives" at some point. But look at this report on levelized cost of energy (LCOE) [0]. Wind and solar are absurdly cheap! We need to focus on solving the intermittent supply issue now, and that looks to be totally doable, if expensive, with current technology. But it's only getting cheaper (see literature I've cited in a different post in this thread).

Of course, calculations might change if there's some sort of technology breakthrough in nuclear technology - as in any technology.

[0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019

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

#218
post #211
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. They could probably just have people walk around with blowers to blow the sand off.

Would those be a gasoline powered blowers ? ( ͜ʖ)

Perhaps a step down transformer that directly feeds a dyson blade style blower at one of the edges of each panel. More up front equipment and infrastructure cost but no employee wages. However I'm sure this is full of holes due to cost multiplied by number of solar panels and the number of transformers needed. It is also only able to clean only during the day assuming no battery or pumped hydro storage.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I wonder how much of the 1L evaporates.

During the night and very early morning, probably very little.

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

#220
post #211
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. They could probably just have people walk around with blowers to blow the sand off.

Would those be a gasoline powered blowers ? ( ͜ʖ)

What about solar powered golf carts with blowers?
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