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After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

economist.com

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

#221

Post by nicoburns »

manfredo wrote: post #205
pfdietz wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very lame argument. Manufacturing capacity isn't some fixed constant of nature, it's whatever makes sense given the market for the product. So if there's a large market, a large manufacturing capacity will be created. https://cleantechnica.com/files/2019/04/2019-Q1-Growth-in-Gl...

Even if we assume that the production capacity will continuously increases at the predicted rate, think you missed the part where that was just the US's storage requirements. Global electricity consumption annually was 22.3 PWh in 2017, yielding 61TWh per day. And while battery production increases, so too does electricity demand. Even if we assume that battery production increases to 1TWh-2TWh per year by 2030 as pe…

> The prevalence of metal deposits does not respond to the market. Increasing prices of lithium will make more people search for lithium deposits, but there's a finite number of said deposits.

There are battery technologies based off of metals other than lithium. For example, the key downside of sodium batteries seems to be weight/volume, which is less of an issue for grid storage. And there's a lot of easily accessible sodium.

It also seems reasonable to expect at least one significant breakthrough in battery technology over the next 10-30 years, given how important a problem it is, and how many promising approaches there are already.

Finally, there is a lot we can do to reduce storage requirements by strategically spreading load. If we get enough generation capacity and are storage constrained, then electricity could become significantly during generation hours, which would cause people to do things like run their washing machines during the day.

> And while battery production increases, so too does electricity demand.

This is probably true on a worldwide basis. But here in the UK, electrical demand has actually been falling due to more efficient appliances.

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

#222

Post by jaggederest »

nappy wrote: post #167
walrus01 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I always say in software projects, if some of your tasks aren't failing, you're not being ambitious enough in your goals, or are not ditching ineffective work soon enough.

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

#223

Post by Jedd »

dmix wrote: post #109
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…

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…

> Pakistan's big deployment is one example ..

A valid example of what can go wrong when you pick the wrong technology, don't do small scale trials first, and rely on government oversight. (Refer the Background & Operation section of the wikipedia article -- toe-curlingly alarming, yet ultimately unsurprising.)

They almost definitely should have pursued concentrated solar thermal. It partly solves the 'storage problem', provides power well into the evening, doesn't need more water than they have to clean it, and improves magnificently with high temperatures (the wikipedia article cites the problem of regular 45C days, which are above the 25C optimum temperature for PV panels).

Given all this was known and understood before they broke ground, this sounds like a traditional government project problem -- susceptibility to corruption, vanity, hubris etc.

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

#224

Post by pfdietz »

manfredo wrote: post #212
pfdietz wrote: post #202

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…

You are pointing to RETAIL electricity costs. Rookie error, man. Hydrogen would be produced at wholesale, especially with cut rate power when renewables are overproducing. In some places this number becomes negative.

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

#225

Post by arrrg »

threatripper wrote: post #7

Hydrogen has an efficiency problem. You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. Then you need to store it and transport it, which is costly and may impose quite some energy cost for cooling or compression. Then you need to convert it back to electricity, also at a loss. If you start at electricity, the electrical grid and batteries would be much more efficient. If you start at oil or gas, you cou…

Hydrogen makes sense in industrial applications (steel, chemistry, e.g. ammonia production). Electricity often isn’t even an option there (same with aviation).

I think people tend to be too blinded in their focus on cars here? I don’t think hydrogen cars make much sense. Batteries all the way – but that doesn’t mean that hydrogen is without merit for other applications.

And if you want to replace all greenhouse gases in industrial applications with green hydrogen you still need a shitton of hydrogen (since, yeah, it’s inefficient – but if it’s the most efficient greenhouse-neutral way to get there – what choice is there?), so that’s not something you can just improvise. You need to tackle it head-on.

That’s why I fear people being stubbornly focused on cars. Even if not a single car will ever use hydrogen ever we could still need a lot of green hydrogen for other purposes if we want to be greenhouse-neutra.

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

#226

Post by pfdietz »

nicoburns wrote: post #216
pfdietz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You can. It's cheaper to also have some hydrogen. Not just for seasonal storage, but to act as a backup for rare long lulls during winter. Without this insurance policy, the renewables have to be sized for extreme worst cases.

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

#227

Post by aidenn0 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #101
Xylakant wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium is inert and not prone to explode when it sees the first spark. Also, as you indicate: storing helium is expensive - it is only economically viable because there is no competing product and hence whatever the price for helium storage is, it will get paid.

Remind me but there is also no way to make new helium. It’s not a renewable, is it? I thought it was only available as a byproduct of natural gas collection.

If we ever figure out fusion, some forms of fusion result in helium.

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

#228

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

Windshield wipers are a mature and cheap technology that seems applicable.

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

#229

Post by lappet »

dmix wrote: post #109
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…

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 am curious, how do Solar Parks in India work? The Quaid-e-Azam park is in the Thar desert and the desert extends to India as well in the state of Rajasthan. India seems to have built a solar park at Bhadla, ~300 km away from Quaid-e-Azam, in a different part of the same desert.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park

Apparently Bhadla is the world's largest solar park. I wonder if the two countries can co-operate on this (I know relations are mostly hostile currently)

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

#230

Post by ajb »

klipt wrote: post #171
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…

How high does the dust go? Maybe they could cut down on cleaning by just building a wall around the power plant, or add some fans to keep the dust out?

Well, supposedly the Amazon is kept fertile by dust from the Sahara, so I'd guess pretty high.
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