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Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

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Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#81
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate, but it will take a long time to bring up the infrastructure for it. Expect it to appear first on select freight routes. Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclose…

Why do you believe it will be freight first? Historically, the new aircraft go to pax service, then get converted after 20 or 30 years.

That tendency will delay the transition. But the big economic benefit arises from being able to carry 40% more cargo because the fuel is lighter. Passenger aircraft capacity is maxed out when the seats are full, now that carrying freight in the same aircraft is not allowed. Also, it will take a long time for safety worries to be satisfied.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#82
post #38

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. Th…

I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.

I think hydrogen for aviation is probably a dead end. I suspect the long term solution for aviation, at least long haul, is biofuels. Battery tech is edging into the realm where it could be used for short haul flights, but we have quite a ways to go before you'll be able to fly across the Pacific, or even Atlantic, on a single charge with reasonable passenger comfort.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#83
The sweet spot for electrolysers will, instead, be cheapest possible inefficient units, because the power to drive them will have "marginal cost zero", i.e. be free, coming from production in massively over-provisioned solar farms in excess of immediate demand. Capital cost dominates because of intermittent utilization.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#84
post #38

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. Th…

I favor nuclear. It is clean, reliable, and surprisingly safe, especially with all the regulations on the sector. But it was never, and will never be "cheap". Also not all places might be suitable for nuclear, for various reasons. Hydrogen might be a good option.

nuclear isn't cheap if you are thinking about the cost to build out a new plant under current design.

but the per kw cost is relatively low as i understand it since the fuel is so efficient and its getting cheaper as new reactor designs get cheaper and safer

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#85
post #38

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. Th…

I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.

flying machines and hydrogen has an spotless history without any tragedies whatsoever

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#86
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I’ve been rooting for nuclear, I think the ship has sailed. If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it. Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula. Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s…

>If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it. Because it can work rain or shine. Wind or no wind. What happens if we have no wind and have a lot of clouds for a few weeks in an area? The storage is limited and nuclear can still produce. Yes, I understand other areas can likely pick up the slack, but nuclear doesn't…

Not entirely free of operational problems. France has repeatedly had to dial down their reactors when the river cooling water was too warm.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#87
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't AI change the energy market? Once GPU production is fully ramped up, I would expect AI to become energy bound. Can we install enough renewable energy and nuclear power plants to fulfill the demand to the point that energy will be ridiculously cheap?

What’s all that AI going to be doing all day to become energy-bound?

AI as currently modeled can pretty much never get enough data, so mostly data processing, and model generation.

when a query is asked of an AI it has to generate a response from all of that data and the query and response themselves become data

running an LLM on local consumer hardware can take upwards of 20 minutes for a single query, so an AI service that may be responding to up millions of requests a day would need a massive hyper-parallelized server infrastructure

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#88
post #38

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. Th…

Hydrogen can be generated on-site (and in quite a few cases, that's preferable over filling up elsewhere).

So if the efficiency of generating hydrogen is increased, that's a win for endusers no matter if they do it themselves or pump it somewhere from 3rd party.

You are correct about the subscription model though.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#89
post #77
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s hardly a “scam” though. The use cases are simply different. Batteries are good. Transportable fuel is also good.

I didn't call it a scam; I just explained why the grandparent comment did.

Explaining the logic of someone else’s claim with no further commentary feels to me like an implicit claim of its legitimacy.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.

flying machines and hydrogen has an spotless history without any tragedies whatsoever

A catch is that hydrogen does become much safer in high-pressure tanks, because, when such tanks are breached, hydrogen escapes so fast that it can't react with oxygen fast enough to burst into flame. To prove this, Toyota literally shot their hydrogen tank with .50 cal[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVeagFmmwA0

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