[HN Gopher] Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to gr...
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Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen
production
Author : based2
Score : 34 points
Date : 2020-02-02 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rechargenews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rechargenews.com)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| All analyses of hydrogen I've read from EROEI conclude that it is
| more economically and thermodynamically efficient to direct power
| to the grid and send it to batteries.
|
| It always seems anything this is advertised it is the fossil fuel
| industry trying to prop up a power generation system that will
| use fossil fuels, and window dressed/greenwashed by a small
| fraction of alt energy.
|
| "Green Hydrogen" smells like "Clean Coal" to me.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| You have other uses for hydrogen than using it to produce
| electricity: You can use it as the reducing gas in steel
| making. Right now coal is used.
| ben_w wrote:
| It might well be cheaper when starting from scratch, but it's
| also useful to be able to keep using existing equipment that
| has been built to burn gases. I don't know _how_ useful -- it's
| certainly possible it's better to build batteries than to e.g.
| make hydrogen, turn that hydrogen into methane, and use that
| methane in existing gas plants, but I can also believe the
| hydrogen route might scale up faster than batteries and
| therefore be a decent stop-gap measure while we build enough
| battery-building factories.
|
| Plus it's always a good strategic idea to not have a single
| point of failure in the event of e.g. an export ban of some
| important input to the battery manufacture from some country
| you have a trade dispute with.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| I've always assumed hydrogen would end up having a place as a
| spillover. Renewable + battery systems will need to be
| overbuilt for the worst parts of the year, so in the average
| case there's going to be an excess.
|
| You have to do something with this power, and hydrogen allows
| you to store a lot of energy very cheaply at poor efficiency,
| perhaps for heating as gas is used today. In the summer, the
| excess could be used to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| There is more to a national power system than EROEI. If
| hydrogen is more versatile and useful it will have advantages
| even if it's EROEI is lower - lets say powering remote places
| or powering equipment for which battery powered is not an
| option, but fuel cells are.
| imtringued wrote:
| You're completely right but the challenge is sending the
| electricity from the north of Germany to the south. The
| construction of new transmission lines is being delayed.
| Generating hydrogen for use in the steel industry could be one
| way to take advantage of the excess energy. Long term energy
| storage and load following could be implemented by storing the
| hydrogen and burning it in natural gas plants. This is strictly
| necessary to increase the renewable share past 80%.
| ben_bai wrote:
| Absolutely, a lot of those wind turbines in the north sea are
| still not connected to the power grid because of missing
| infrastructure. They need to be turned by diesel generators,
| to not corrode.
| https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-
| offshore... If they were connected there is still the problem
| of missing north-south transmission line.
|
| So converting wind energy into hydrogen and using it for
| industry, in cars, or blending it into the natural gas
| pipelines is a "ok" idea. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/f
| iles/2014/03/f11/blending...
| lispm wrote:
| > Absolutely, a lot of those wind turbines in the north sea
| are still not connected to the power grid because of
| missing infrastructure.
|
| The wind turbines mentioned in the linked article from 2013
| have been in 2014 connected to the grid.
| sgt101 wrote:
| It would be better if Germany focused on getting rid of the
| lignate coal in its domestic power supply. I believe 1/3 of
| German electricity is generated this way.
|
| One option would be build nuclear.
| melling wrote:
| They are shutting down their nuclear power.
| Faaak wrote:
| Exactly ! If the problem is Climate Change (and thus CO_2
| production), why would you, in your sane mind, shut down
| nuclear power ? It's the best method to produce electricity
| with the less grams of CO2 per kwh..
| lnsp wrote:
| It's way more expensive than coal, wind or solar. And since
| the German government doesn't seem to subsidize anything
| except coal, nuclear has no chance.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| An already up and running nuclear power station is not at
| all that expensive.
| the8472 wrote:
| They are uninsurable, which means if someone actually had
| to pay for the insurance their price would be
| astronomical.
| k__ wrote:
| Isn't this more about self-sufficiently powering the
| country?
|
| I mean, Germany would have to buy uranium.
| ben_bai wrote:
| We need to buy coal and gas also. Closed down all the
| coal mines, and coal is the only resource Germany has in
| its territory. We are very dependent at the moment.
|
| We are at 46% renewable energy, but without proper
| storage that's just a sad book-keeping trick.
| lispm wrote:
| Currently there is not much reason to store electricity
| in large amounts, since there is not that much surplus
| electricity in Germany. Storage will become relevant
| after 2030 or later. Means we are still in the stages of
| R&D and planning.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first.
| There is still uranium in the Ore mountains. The USSR and
| GDR were mining it.
| lispm wrote:
| > Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at
| first.
|
| The mines are closed.
|
| Germany is currently investing billions to clean up the
| Uranium mines. Wismut might have cost then around 8
| billion Euro. The technical and environmental standards
| of the USSR and the GDR were rather poor. Left is some
| Uranium, which too costly to mine and not competitive in
| any way with the world market.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Germany is a rich country. It can afford to import
| things.
| Tade0 wrote:
| If you account for waste disposal it becomes prohibitively
| expensive. In 2016 the largest German utilities agreed to
| pay EUR23.6bln so that it would be the government's problem
| to deal with the waste:
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-
| waste-d...
|
| Decommissioning all the (23) plants still active in 2016
| will eventually cost another EUR24bln.
|
| All in all EUR2bln per plant. And this is just the lower
| bound. It's hard to tell how much safely storing this waste
| will cost over the next several decades.
|
| I remember this from my German lessons in school. Managing
| radioactive waste is simply too troublesome.
| ben_bai wrote:
| Because the anti-nuclear mindset is too strong in Germany.
| We are still affected from the Chernobyl disaster (still
| can't eat wild boar, still can't eat mushrooms from certain
| areas). The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and
| extremely expensive. Then there is politics: Nuclear plants
| lifetime was extended, then Fukushima happened and
| "overnight" lots of old plants were shut down.
|
| Germany is at 14% nuclear, 30% coal (even though all
| national coal mines have closed), 10% gas, 46% renewable
| (wind, solar, bio-gas, water, all without proper energy
| storage)
| the8472 wrote:
| > even though all national coal mines have closed
|
| If only. It's just hard coal mines that were closed.
| Lignite is still being open-pit mined.
| kseistrup wrote:
| Nuclear power is too expensive compared to solar and wind power
| these days.
| [deleted]
| spenrose wrote:
| The earliest and cheapest we will get new nuclear at low-
| gigawatt scale, __according to the people building it __, is in
| 10 years at which time if everything goes right the cost will
| have fallen to $65 /MWh. Today we can deploy on-shore wind and
| solar at ~$30/MWh, and generate hydrogen with surplus per the
| article. Here is a thread citing nuclear industry advocates for
| building new nuclear power on the state of the efforts:
|
| [$65/MWh, end of thread]
| https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1224019148562321408
| [start, focusing on China's nuclear buildout]
| https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656
| unchocked wrote:
| Hydrogen producing wind farms could be located far offshore
| without having to tie into the grid. Hydrogen is a great medium
| for long-term energy storage and is mostly compatible with
| existing natural gas infrastructure.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| What are the ecological ramifications of turning seawater into
| hydrogen? Are we depleting the total amount of water on the
| planet? I realize the scale that it's happening at is probably
| relatively small, but I'm curious.
| ben_bai wrote:
| The scale is way too small for it to matter. Also burning
| hydrogen you get water as exhaust. So it's a closed loop.
| [deleted]
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