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

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

#241

Post by carapace » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #186

carapace wrote: post #91

Hydrogen is sexy but alcohol matches our existing context better. Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture farms is different from mass ethanol production. You can ferment anything that has starch or sugar, the leftovers from the distillation can be composted or fed to livestock. Most existing internal combustion engines can be modified to use alcohol fuel. And it's carbon-neutral.

You get much more fuel out of biomass if you add hydrogen. For example, from carbohydrates, it's basically (CH2O)n + nH2 --> (CH2)n + nH2O (hydrodeoxygenation). This can make drop-in replacements for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.

That's very interesting.

If you've got a ready source of hydrogen, say from molten salt oxidation of plastics, which produces "syngas" (a mixture of CO and H2), I think you could run that through water to make CO2 and more H2, feed the CO2 to a greenhouse and collect all the H2 for the reaction you described. Does that make sense?

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

#242

Post by dmix » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

lappet wrote: post #229

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 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-o…

Interesting, they seemed to be attempting to solve the cleaning problem via automation from an Israeli company:

> In December 2016, Solairedirect signed an agreement with Ecoppia, a PV panel cleaning solutions developer, to provide automated cleaning solutions to the project. Due to the park's location in a desert region, it is prone to dust storms

https://www.pv-tech.org/news/ecoppia-to-provide-cleaning-sol...

Hopefully the project eventually does reach the 2000MW scale it plans. It's not clear from the Wiki how far along it is or whether it's currently operational. It mentions opening targets for Dec 2018.

Softbank is involved for 500MW which is one red flag :p

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

#243

Post by URSpider94 » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 3:10 AM UTC

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…

Tesla’s famous Australian battery farm (not factory) was designed from the start as a frequency maintenance source, not as large-scale storage. It’s designed to be able to source or sink large currents with nearly instantaneous response, which is ideal for responding to sudden rises or falls in production or demand. The farm has been successful in both significantly reducing the spot price for power, but also in making money for the operator. It’s a huge success story.

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

#244

Post by p_l » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 3:30 AM UTC

klft wrote: post #142

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…

Dirt cheap for whom? Chernobyl costs Belarus 20% of its annual budget according to https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/belarus-...

It cost 22% in 1991, which obviously wasn't a good year for Belarusian budget. Despite management so bad that even security services turned against it, by 2002 Belarus spent 6% of its budget on Chernobyl - like Ukraine, majority of it was benefits paid as compensation for around 7 million people.

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

#245

Post by nchase » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

Sorry, haven’t read the mountain of comments yet: will it be possible to have a hybrid car that runs on Electric, with Hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative fuel source?

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

#246

Post by roenxi » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

URSpider94 wrote: post #243

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 famous Australian battery farm (not factory) was designed from the start as a frequency maintenance source, not as large-scale storage. It’s designed to be able to source or sink large currents with nearly instantaneous response, which is ideal for responding to sudden rises or falls in production or demand. The farm has been successful in both significantly reducing the spot price for power, but also in maki…

> It’s a huge success story.

The caveat being the South Australia has a power grid that is sometimes a contender for the worst managed (and most expensive) electricity grid globally. Or at least highly challenging to get it working smoothly.

So the battery is a huge success story and we'll see more like it - but the conditions where it succeeded are not necessarily where the gird wants to be.

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

#247

Post by jillesvangurp » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

carapace wrote: post #91

Hydrogen is sexy but alcohol matches our existing context better. Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture farms is different from mass ethanol production. You can ferment anything that has starch or sugar, the leftovers from the distillation can be composted or fed to livestock. Most existing internal combustion engines can be modified to use alcohol fuel. And it's carbon-neutral.

You can synthesize alcohol and other carbohydrates straight from air and water as well. This actually is something that, similar to producing hydrogen using excess clean energy, would be technically feasible.

The problem is scale. We eat far less food than we burn fuel. So replacing our fuel with a by product of food production is not going to scale.

Bio fuels at scale only make sense with heavy subsidies currently E.g. the corn industry in the US is a good example of something that would not exist without subsidies.

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

#248

Post by esperent » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #164

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…

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 a…

You're off by a factor of 10 based on wages for cleaners in Pakistan which is about $1/hr.

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=164&loct...

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

#249

Post by jillesvangurp » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

gandalfian wrote: post #78

I think the charts are saying roughly a litre of lithium battery has 1kwh, a litre of liquid hydrogen 3kw and a litre of petrol 10kw. By 2050 your litre of green hydrogen might cost 10 cents to make or 3c per kWh.

Electricity is approaching 1c per kWh in some recent solar plant bids. For example, there were a few bids in the middle east recently that were getting close to that. Battery cost is on track to dip below 100$ per kwh. E.g. Tesla is rumored to be at or below that already/in the near future.

By 2050, energy cost is going to be measured differently. IMHO it stops being a variable cost once it dips substantially below 1c per kwh. Your basically spending more on coffee to keep yourself going on an average journey, Arguably, if you have access to square meters, it's a cost that is amortized over the one time cost of installing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other infrastructure. Kind of expensive today but doable; that will be very much different 3 decades from now.

Any business operating fleets of vehicles will want to minimize this cost. That means investing in cheap sources of energy and a mass switch to battery electric vehicles that is already kicking off right now. This takes time obviously and doesn't happen overnight. But it's also not going to take decades. It's one of those things where the payoff is non linear meaning it goes from "oh wouldn't that be nice" to "I must do this now to survive as a business" in just a few years. In other words, this will have largely been completed by 2050.

This is good news for hydrogen as well because it means that there will be plenty of excess energy from peak solar/wind that's basically there to be used. Producing hydrogen and other synthetic fuels (and water) is an obvious way to put that to use and can be used as a solution to fix e.g. shipping, heavy industrial use, and other sectors currently depending on oil or coal. That's after we've topped up our TWH of deployed grid and ev batteries of course.

And maybe we'll figure out fusion as well by that time.

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

#250

Post by dungdang » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

newacct583 wrote: post #136

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…

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…

he is arguing that your brita pitcher working does not mean it's suitable to scale for your city's water purification system. the success of the tesla deployment for its intended purpose hence means zero for large scale systems.

apparently you also think the chinese government using its people's money to sell panels at a loss makes the panel cost less to produce, proving the opposite of his point?

do you actually have a point, beyond 'your point is false because of this fake argument i made up?'