Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#261

Post by Retric » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

snordgren wrote: post #187

Retric wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s assume at scale you’re buying seasonal power for 0$ so efficiency doesn’t matter and selling it at 10c/kWh given 1$/kWh and a once a year discharge you might break even in 10 years which looks fine except... 1$/kWh is only storage for already existing hydrogen. For this application you also need equipment to both produce and burn it which adds to these costs. Hydrogen generation can’t depend on 0$ prices for ve…

Here in Europe peak electric prices have been far above $1/kWh, rising to around $7/kWh in the worst-hit regions. Due to the build-out of wind power we have also had a few nights of negative electricity prices in recent months. If we had a hydrogen energy storage facility, it could probably have recouped quite a portion of its capital costs this year, depending on its scale. Europe will not be building much base load…

Europe is experiencing those prices due to a dependence on fuels it doesn’t produce and a lack of daily energy storage.

Extrapoatgng prices to stay the same when you swap energy sources and introduce two different kinds of large scale energy sources is clearly wrong.

Ultra low or ultra high prices will represent a small chunk wholesale prices after you construct long term storage. You can’t build equipment that’s utilized 0.01% of the time and expect significant profit.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#262

Post by Retric » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #201

Retric wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s assume at scale you’re buying seasonal power for 0$ so efficiency doesn’t matter and selling it at 10c/kWh given 1$/kWh and a once a year discharge you might break even in 10 years which looks fine except... 1$/kWh is only storage for already existing hydrogen. For this application you also need equipment to both produce and burn it which adds to these costs. Hydrogen generation can’t depend on 0$ prices for ve…

Yes, but the producing and burning is not proportional to the amount of energy stored, but to the rate at which the hydrogen is produced or consumed. In the 100% renewable grid, electricity actually will be in surplus a good part of the time, because so much excess capacity would be installed. This is not the case now, so you can't use the current frequency at which curtailment occurs as some sort of baseline. Yes, y…

The amount of energy stored or is still limited by the rate it can be generated.

The absolute best case for seasonal storage is 1kW * 9 months = 6,480 kWh per 1kW of equipment if you are willing to pay unlimited prices per kWh.

However if you are depending on 0$/kWh which hypothetically occurs 1% of the time you are down to 55kWh per 1kW of equipment. In a world with mass storage wholesale prices will spend less time at 0$ so what matters is the prices when you’re operating not historic prices before you build these facilities.

PS: Conversely, if you’re using that stored energy the grid isn’t going to have a deficit 24/7 the entire winter at your maximum production rate. If you average 8 hours a day for 2 months that’s 480 hours of operation per year. Gas turbines are cheap but not that cheap.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#263

Post by 6510 » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #248

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.

Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...

100+ years ago someone in France build a tunnel for horse and carriage with a propeller and a steam engine on both ends. The tunnel went down at the start helping acceleration and up at the end to slow the cart down.

It might not be incredibly fast or even useful it does show we don't need to put the engine on the vehicle (entirely)

I just imagined a hilarious contraption using slow moving water in a canal. A screw is inserted in the stream driven by a wheel on the road. As long as the speed at which the road moves is different from the speed of the water you can keep extracting more speed from the flow. (haha)

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#264

Post by 6510 » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:06 AM UTC

cbmuser wrote: post #197

enslavedrobot wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Green hydrogen is made from electricity. The cost of green hydrogen is currently high, but it is dropping faster than pretty much any other energy storage technology. Hydrogen storage is an order of magnitude cheaper (or more) than any other tech. It is expensive because of the cost of electrolyzers/fuel-cells that convert between electricity and H2. These costs are dropping fast at efficiencies of 80%+ along with th…

Japan plans to make hydrogen using high-temperature nuclear reactors (HTGR or HTTR). See: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...

While one could easily do arm chair criticism the author of the top article thought it more convenient to just ignore it?

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#265

Post by thworp » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:12 AM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #135

hajile wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you make a battery-powered semi? Tesla claimed to have one then got super-quiet about it. Do the calculation for joules of power to move a fully-loaded tractor-trailer. Do a joule/kg calculation for modern batteries and calculate the series you get due to the rocket fuel problem (it takes a lot of battery to haul your battery). You find that the towing capacity of that semi is miniscule vs an ICE engine. Sam…

The EV semi is in testing with real loads and works fine.

Yes it works with less than half of the 20-25 tons of cargo that a regular semi transports.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#266

Post by pydry » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:14 AM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #251

POPOSYS wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can not discuss these important issues in a football fan like culture of mutual hostility. We need to collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. Hate speech against "the others" does not help at all.

Not sure if that's the point you are making (or the opposite) but it's precisely how I perceive the discussion: football mentality. A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries. Maybe it's the optimum (I'm not convinced). But to narrow down on one approach that doesn't even quite work seems premature. If you wanted to just throw mon…

>A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries.

And most global warming activists aren't climate scientists.

Meanwhile the military industrial complex, who DGAF about the environment but crave lavish taxpayer subsidies for a nuclear economy, is shouting down solar, wind and storage - largely because it competes for subsidies and its low cost renders it a no brainer alternative.

They are louder, richer, more persuasive (cynically leveraging environmental messaging) and considerably more powerful than people who care more for the environment than military supply chains.

As with global warming itself, appeal to moderation doesn't work - the best solution doesnt lie half way between these two extremes.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#267

Post by thworp » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

danaris wrote: post #127

hammock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you hate fossil fuels or do you want to save the planet? I feel your words seem prejudiced against allowing fossil fuel companies to help us fight climate change

At this point, the idea that fossil fuel companies are actually interested in trying to help save the planet in any way more than is mandated by law and public opinion is not supported by evidence. They have shown, time and again, that they will lie about science, falsify documents, and try to get laws changed to allow them to pollute without limits. They have lost all benefit of the doubt. Anyone trying to argue tha…

> saving the planet

It's not about saving the planet, it's about saving humans. The planet will be completely fine and will adapt (painful though it may be). The ecosystem has survived much worse, it's just us humans that don't have a few million years to wait for everything to re-balance.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#268

Post by hokkos » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:17 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #126

XorNot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely could lay a cable that long, and IMO we should . There is no reason not to export abundant renewable energy today while we can, and figure out the long term storage issues as we go. Hydrogen can be manufactured anywhere you have seawater and electricity, so it would be a much better use of resources to lay a subsea superconducting cable once and let Japan store power by generating hydrogen locally.

One large LNG carrier of class Q-Max carries 260000 m3 of liquefied gas. If we stitch to hydrogen, that contains 2.2 million gigajoules of energy, which is 614 GWh, or a bit more than 25 GWd. If we assume a conversion efficiency of 60%, then that's about 15 GWd of electricity after taking into account all the losses. If one carrier arrives every 15 days, then this can produce a sustained 1 GW of electricity, which is…

Except H2 carrier won't carry 1/2 LH2 as LNG but 1/4, liquefaction will consume 35% to 45% of the LHV energy, 9 times more leaks than LNG, completely new infra, and all existing H2 carrier have issues we are nowhere near building them as the same size of LNG and it will cost way more :

https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1596449504194367488

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#269

Post by pydry » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:32 AM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #253

rgbrenner wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are som…

So, the context is: various organisations are researching how hydrogen storage might work. And a gaggle of, hmm, commentators goes "omg did they not get the memo? Hydrogen is stoopid. Batteries much better soon". I'm glad research is funded, because you literally never know where the breakthrough will come. Solar was painfully expensive for most of its history, now it's super-cheap. As far as I'm concerned, a battery…

The organizations researching it /funding it tend to be oil/gas. They are usually more focused on staying relevant and greenwashing themselves. With hydrogen they are interested because they see potential to extend the life of their natural gas assets - and not necessarily in a "green" way.

In regard to your point that we ought not to be cynical - it is true that these organizations can do great research. For instance, they knew all about global warming in the 70s.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#270

Post by ekidd » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 11:36 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #257

ekidd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a fan of hydrogen, because I once worked with a former NASA robotics engineer. We were looking for a way to power terrestrial robots, and we asked him about hydrogen. He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems: - Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere. - Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—u…

The internet says storing hydrogen in metal hydrides is safe and offers similar kwh/kg as lithium ion batteries. It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production. Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement…

Yes, bonding the hydrogen with something could really change the tradeoffs dramatically.

For example, the main ingredient in gasoline is C8H18. It has good energy density at atmospheric pressure, and the fire risks are manageable. We already use carbon/hydrogen systems today!

I think one of the candidates for metal hydride fuel cells is MgH2? It apparently also has decent energy density. Of course, magnesium poses some risks of its own. And I personally have no idea what a complete supply chain and refueling system would look like, or what it would cost.

Still, I fully expect that any portable energy storage is going to come with tradeoffs: cost, pollution, rare materials, and always the risk of catastrophic discharge (via fire, explosion, or messy kinetic failures). We should pursue multiple alternatives and invest in basic science, because portable energy is incredibly useful.