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Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

ammoniaenergy.org

131–133 of 133 posts

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#131
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and if you read the first paragraph, you’d see it’s meant to increase and decrease power consumption based on demand. How are they gonna turn up the damn wind, WJW? Is this a plant that shuts down every time there’s a calm day? Is it a plant for funsies or meant to be a reliable station? Either this is a gigantic art project, or it has hydrocarbon inputs for running on days when the wind is calm.

My brother! This too is literally addressed in the article already! "In order to somehow absorb the fluctuations in wind availability, you need to have a significant storage of hydrogen to be able to absorb these fluctuations, which is very costly. On the other hand, if you allow the plant to operate dynamically, you minimize the demand for storing hydrogen or storing power and hence, you can have a much tighter desi…

> You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects.

Buddy, they literally built a factory that does not work without one of the dirtiest technologies we can build (batteries), which are still incredibly primitive in general, and which like… 9 industries are banking on a magical breakthrough in the next ten years. It’s definitely for funsies.

It’s almost exclusively true for research projects. 99.9% of them, including this, are purely for funsies. Nobody is gonna build a million of these. Nobody is going to rely on these. Maybe some nation will build a couple as a fun project, but if you’re trying to reduce your reliance on other nations (why?? The whole point of the global economy is not to produce everything at home, it’s to trade what you’ve got for what you need, and we already have more than enough supplies to grow enough food for all with plenty of surplus) for a very specific fertilizer input, a factory with variable inputs and outputs that you don’t actively control is a fun project at best and worthless at worst.

Of all the green energies, wind is by far the most baffling to try and expand. Solar at least predictably gets a Sun for half of every day, clouds notwithstanding, and people don’t generally farm at night.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#132
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother! This too is literally addressed in the article already! "In order to somehow absorb the fluctuations in wind availability, you need to have a significant storage of hydrogen to be able to absorb these fluctuations, which is very costly. On the other hand, if you allow the plant to operate dynamically, you minimize the demand for storing hydrogen or storing power and hence, you can have a much tighter desi…

> You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects. Buddy, they literally built a factory that does not work without one of the dirtiest technologies we can build (batteries), which are still incredibly primitive in general, and which like… 9 industries are ban…

If you insist on still not reading the article I can't help you further. The plant also has no batteries, so whether batteries are dirty or not is completely besides the point. It just scales up and down the electrolysers as power is more or less available.

Wind is actually one of the easiest green energy technologies to understand. In windy locations like Minnesota, the wind blows well over half of the time. Over 25% of the state's electricity was from electricity back in 2023 already. It will have increased further by now.

And anyone asking "why reduce your reliance on other nations" surely has not paying a lot of attention in 2026. Most of the world is scrambling to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels after the Straight of Hormuz closed. Reducing reliance on on other imported critical resources like chips and rare earths is near the top of the priority list of all the major policy blocks in the world. The assumption that you can always import enough ammonia from elsewhere is a risky gamble.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#133
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects. Buddy, they literally built a factory that does not work without one of the dirtiest technologies we can build (batteries), which are still incredibly primitive in general, and which like… 9 industries are ban…

If you insist on still not reading the article I can't help you further. The plant also has no batteries , so whether batteries are dirty or not is completely besides the point. It just scales up and down the electrolysers as power is more or less available. Wind is actually one of the easiest green energy technologies to understand. In windy locations like Minnesota, the wind blows well over half of the time. Over 2…

Y-yeah, that’s my point. The fact that there are no batteries means that instead of considering how it operates with a dirty battery (the only other option here), we consider how it works without any reliability.

Of course wind is green. It’s one of the simplest techs out there. It’s just mostly worthless if you don’t live in a wind tunnel. Even then, it’s unreliable. At best, as I said, this is a funsie project so Minnesota doesn’t have to buy from, say, Texas. I don’t think Minnesota is avoiding any international conflicts here, but maybe I’ve missed something. How would an unreliable fertilizer station get you away from conflicts anyways? “Well Tuesday was windy so we didn’t need to go to war for it, but today it’s dead so let’s bomb Iran” lol.

If you think the strait of Hormuz conflict is some reason for every nation to leave behind globalism, I don’t think you understand the whole idea behind globalism. It’s not that there will never be issues. It’s that we face them together.

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