[HN Gopher] Electrolyser development: 200 times less iridium needed
___________________________________________________________________
Electrolyser development: 200 times less iridium needed
Author : FrankyHollywood
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-10-29 12:17 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tno.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tno.nl)
| [deleted]
| pfdietz wrote:
| The important metric for electrolysers now is not so much
| efficiency (although that's nice), it's capital cost. For use
| with intermittently available power capital cost becomes more
| important. This is different from the old notion of a hydrogen
| economy, using relatively expensive nuclear power to drive
| electrolysers 24/7.
|
| It may also be nice if the electrolysers were reversible, so they
| could also act as fuel cells.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Have we solved the hydrogen storage issue yet? This seems like
| pumped hydro storage except the dam has a not-so-slow leak.
|
| People keep the o2 as well right? Even in fuel cell mode you
| could use air as the oxidizer and keep the purified o2.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Hydrogen can be stored in underground reservoirs, like
| solution mined cavities in salt domes and spent natural gas
| fields. The cost is as little as $1 per kWh of storage
| capacity. This is the great advantage of hydrogen over many
| other storage schemes, which have a much higher cost per unit
| of energy storage capacity.
|
| There is also the per-power cost of charging and discharging
| equipment, but that's independent of per-energy capacity
| cost.
|
| I don't believe the oxygen is kept. Even if it were, O2 is
| very cheap. Liquid oxygen is the second cheapest industrial
| liquid, after water. Maybe it would make sense to store O2
| underground as compressed gas also, for use in Allam cycle
| turbines (which would prevent NOx formation and even recover
| the water of combustion for reuse.)
|
| In fuel cell mode you're consuming oxygen, not purifying it.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| What is the source on the price of liquid o2? That seems
| insane that it would be so cheap, don't you have to either
| chill the air until it condenses, or use a selective
| absorber to separate it from air?
|
| My point was why waste purified o2 on the fuel cell when
| you could use air and then sell the o2?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, you chill the air. You get to recover the "cold"
| from the nitrogen (by using the cold separated nitrogen
| to chill the incoming air via countercurrent heat
| exchange), so you're actually only chilling (without
| recovery) the oxygen.
|
| Cryogenic air separation is done on a vast scale to get
| gaseous oxygen for the basic oxygen steelmaking process.
| LOX can be obtained by tapping off some of that rather
| than also using to chill the incoming air.
| daveguy wrote:
| Liquid oxygen is definitely not the cheapest industrial
| liquid after water. Just the temperature required to
| maintain liquid oxygen makes this false on its face. Even
| oxygen gas isn't the cheapest gas.
| pfdietz wrote:
| NASA in 2001 paid $0.67/gallon for liquid oxygen. What
| industrial liquid aside from water (or things dissolved
| in water) is that cheap?
| tuatoru wrote:
| Just recently methanol was $378/ton in small amounts. In
| 2019 it was between $200/ton and $300/ton. I'm too lazy
| to do the price deflation--and I wouldn't know what
| deflator to use--but that seems like it would have been
| at least comparable.
|
| Fuel oil may have been similar.
|
| Sulfuric acid $170/ton in 2022.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Liquid oxygen is about $100/tonne in large quantities,
| and the price can be even lower if you pay for large
| scale, on-site generation.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Liquid oxygen pricing is mostly the electricity
| pricing... Equipment cost is small in comparison.
|
| Which means it varies widely depending on where in the
| world you're wanting it. It isn't valuable enough to ship
| far.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Our existing natural gas pipelines can handle storing up to
| 10% added hydrogen gas. If we were to start ramping up biogas
| production from waste streams we could produce some, if not
| all of the methane that goes along hydrogen in natural gas.
| This would utilize existing infrastructure, and help with
| energy production at night (think heating) when solar is
| unavailable.
|
| Hydrogen is only difficult to store if it is pressurized, at
| low pressures there are low losses due to adiabatic
| expansion. Embrittlement is only a concern when you're
| holding back high pressures, and isn't a big concern for
| pipelines which can conceivably hold a large amount of
| reserve fuel.
|
| I think the purified oxygen is an overlooked resource, as it
| can be used at, or near, the electrolizer as a method of
| producing pure syngas from waste organic matter using
| gasification. Normally woodgas or producer gas isn't
| desirable because it is made from atmospheric air as the
| oxidizer which contains a large amount of inert nitrogen
| which takes up space and produces nitric oxides at high
| temperatures. By using pure oxygen one can produce higher
| temperatures in the gasification reactor, and a purer syngas.
| This could be stored, and then used along with the hydrogen
| to produce heat and electricity in existing natural gas
| turbines when it is needed.
| hinkley wrote:
| And in a world where meth heads are climbing under cars to
| steal catalytic converters we have a problem with small
| portable boxes full of precious metals getting up and walking
| away when nobody is looking.
|
| Particularly in some rural areas which might be good for power
| generation.
| beckingz wrote:
| This is exciting because it could reduce the capital expenditure
| needed for hydrogen production. The biggest reason we don't use
| intermittent electricity generation (wind, solar) for hydrogen
| production or desalination is that a significant fraction (~30%)
| of the total cost is capex.
|
| The efficiency here is lower by a factor of 2 or 3 for electrical
| consumption (for now in the lab), but if you can get electricity
| at near zero cost for a few hours a day this could make
| economical sense.
| prox wrote:
| Had to look capex up : _business, finance CAPitalEXpense or
| CAPitalEXpenditure; A financial term for the initial costs of a
| business, in contrast to operational expenditure._
| HPsquared wrote:
| Commonly used along with OPEX (operating expenditure).
| ajross wrote:
| So... this is a fuel-cell-adjacent technology, and as such you
| need to read announcements like this with a somewhat cynical eye.
| I have no reason to doubt the science here. It probably works, or
| certainly is no less likely to fail than any other new
| technology.
|
| But here's the thing: PEM electrolysis promises to reach hydrogen
| production efficiencies of... 80% or so, using exotic materials
| and entirely new chemistries. _Regular DC electrical
| electrolysis_ (literally the "stick a wire in water to make
| bubbles" experiment we all did as kids) is starting out around
| the 65-70% mark. This just isn't that much better.
|
| And doubly so when you realize that the most efficient
| reconversion of that hydrogen to electricity is going to lose
| another 20%.
|
| This is better, but it's only incrementally better. 30% cheaper
| hydrogen would be nice, I guess, but it's not going to change any
| fundamentals of the energy economy.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I'm no expert on this but it certainly seems conceivable that a
| 30% cost reduction can be the difference between "not
| profitable" and "profitable".
|
| In regards to the efficiency argument against hydrogen:
| Sometimes that is an issue but sometimes it's just not an issue
| at all. Fossil fuel efficiency is abominable but they're still
| used.
| snek_case wrote:
| 80% isn't amazing, it's not ideal for an electric car, but it's
| not terrible either. IMO, to switch to 100% renewables, we're
| going to need grid-scale batteries, but it might also help if
| we had a mechanism to achieve seasonal energy storage.
|
| I know hydrogen is hard to store, so I think it would be best
| if we could somehow use electricity to produce ethanol directly
| from CO2 and water (is that feasible with reasonable
| efficiency?). But just imagine if we could, in the summer, we
| could turn excess solar power into ethanol and stockpile it for
| the winter. We could also use that fuel to power jet airplanes
| and cargo ships without using any fossil fuels.
| snewman wrote:
| CO2 to hydrocarbon fuels (not ethanol, but methane and
| potentially liquid hydrocarbons as well) is exactly what
| Terraform Industries is planning to do.
|
| https://terraformindustries.com/
| snek_case wrote:
| Do you know what kind of efficiencies they get and how
| close to practical or not this is?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I've always worried about the energy density of batteries.
| They're explosive enough as it is, imagine if it was 10x
| worse. I've always hoped that we'd transition to synthetic
| fuel - fuel like diesel is surprisingly stable and safe.
| ajross wrote:
| Fuel infrastructure burns all the time, though. It's like
| every month there's a video of some tanker overturned on
| the highway, or a refinery fire, or a gas explosion. I
| don't have statistics in front of me but I'm all but
| certain that lithium batteries as deployed today are
| _safer_ by pretty much any metric you want to pick.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| the batteries explode because of the materials in them, not
| because of the stored electrical energy. An full lithium
| battery wouldn't explode much more violently than an empty
| one.
| VygmraMGVl wrote:
| Lithium Ion batteries do burn much more readily when
| fully charged than when discharged -- this is because
| they self-discharge rapidly at elevated temperatures,
| which provokes an even greater reaction of the materials
| inside of them. Specifically, if the cathode of NMC/NCA
| batteries gets hot enough, it will decompose into oxygen
| and really kick off the graphite + electrolye burning.
| Discharged batteries are tougher to get to burn since
| it's harder to heat the cathode to that point externally
| so oxygen has to come from the environment.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I fly FPV so I deal with exploding batteries from time to
| time. Fully charged batteries explode much more violently
| than discharged batteries which tend to smolder instead.
| I suspect the additional electric discharge is adding
| 'fuel to the fire.'
| snek_case wrote:
| Interestingly, a discharged lithium ion battery still has
| electric potential in it, it's just that we stop
| discharging it after it hits a cutoff voltage to protect
| the battery's lifespan.
|
| I wonder if a truly 100% discharged battery (down to zero
| volts) would actually be basically inert, and not even
| smolder if you poked it.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But it should be noted, this is how progress usually happens,
| right? Little incremental gains in efficiency, added together
| over time.
|
| Although that does make it hard to judge the significance of
| any one breakthrough.
| ajross wrote:
| Yes. But you don't plan on an entirely new organization of
| the energy economy on the basis of that. To pick other
| examples: VLSI scaling happened first, _then_ the software
| industry explosion. Lithium batteries arrived first, _then_
| people started developing mobile devices (and eventually
| cars).
|
| Planning on this great new "hydrogen economy" thing when even
| the best-case theoretical technologies represent only a mild
| improvement over what we have isn't responsible punditry,
| it's just playing "What if George Jetson had a Jetpack?"
| games.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Hydrogen doesn't suddenly appear to create a new kind of
| market, like sudden availability of jetpacks would.
|
| Burning remainders of dinosaurs is on the decline. It is
| frowned upon by many due to CO2, it is not always readily
| available (see current war), and finally supply is limited.
| This leads to a decrease of availability, and at continuing
| demand an increase in price. Unavoidable.
|
| Prduction of electrical power from renewables is the
| cheapest form available already today. Also, it can scale
| without any practical limit. Power just isn't always
| available when needed, with surplus production at other
| times. Any improvement in storage cost (mainly device cost,
| much less efficiency) decreases the price of power from
| storage.
|
| At some point, the price of power from storage will drop
| below the price of power from fossil fuels. No magic step
| will be needed, simply increasing/decreasing prices will
| meet at some point.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| > Yes. But you don't plan on an entirely new organization
| of the energy economy on the basis of that.
|
| These kind of breakthroughs change the economics and
| composition of the new energy economy. They are not a
| challenge to the fact that harmful, limited, fossil energy
| is a very cheap and simple way to run an economy for a
| century or so.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just to be clear. The one change everybody is waiting for
| is excess renewables capacity at peak times, not
| improvement on storage technologies.
|
| Of course, improvement at storage will always be good. It's
| just not the bottleneck right now.
|
| So, yeah, the article is great news. And it won't change
| the electricity paradigm at all. Both at the same time.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > The one change everybody is waiting for is excess
| renewables capacity at peak times
|
| That's already the case in the northern parts of Germany.
| On windy days feeding excessive electricity to all
| neighbors, and still shutting down some wind turbines.
| The local energy company is planning 320 MW hydrogen
| production [0].
|
| [0] https://www.ewe.com/de/media-
| center/pressemitteilungen/2022/...
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "And doubly so when you realize that the most efficient
| reconversion of that hydrogen to electricity is going to lose
| another 20%."
|
| I think the real value of water-sourced hydrogen is going to be
| in three fields: synthesis of ammonia (atmospheric N2 + H2 ->
| NH3), direct reduction of iron ore to sponge iron (FeO + H2 ->
| Fe), and synthesis of methane and jet fuel (Sabatier and
| Fischer-Tropsch processes, respectively).
| legulere wrote:
| It's important to note, that that methane will be used by the
| chemical industry and not get burned, it's more efficient to
| burn H2 directly.
|
| In Germany there's also plans to repurpose gas plants to burn
| H2 during Dunkelflaute. I'm curious if that will pan out.
| legulere wrote:
| You can also increase efficiency by using waste heat.
| comicjk wrote:
| Only if you have something nearby that needs low-grade heat,
| like warming buildings. Waste heat is a diffuse source of
| energy that's not worth the infrastructure cost of
| transporting more than a few miles.
| choeger wrote:
| If hydrogen would only halve the amount of usable energy, it
| would already offset the difference in a perfectly sunny
| location and one that's often cloudy. The case for wind energy
| is probably similar.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Could this be used in fuel cells also?
|
| Whatever happened with fuel cells anyway? Did we give up on them?
| comicjk wrote:
| Too expensive, too easily degraded by minor impurities in the
| fuel, not improving nearly as fast as batteries (their main
| competition). Using rare materials more efficiently would
| definitely help with the cost problem.
| ephbit wrote:
| I'd guess the one important application of fuel cell tech
| that people often appear to forget is going to be long haul
| trucks where it'll replace the diesel power train.
|
| It's a big chunk of overall land transport that IMO in the
| long-term won't have other technologically/economically
| viable options besides the fuel cell.
|
| Rail doesn't serve the last few miles to the destination.
|
| Electric trucks are viable for short distances. Trucking
| dozens of tons of cargo over distances > 500 miles isn't
| going to roll well with carrying another 3-5 tons of battery.
| And having to recharge that at 2 MW every now and then would
| require a very reliable/available and ubiquitous high power
| charging infrastructure.
| vardump wrote:
| I think about 2 ton battery is closer to truth for a truck
| that has about 400-500 mile range. Less, if you consider
| all the heavy diesel engine and transmission parts an
| electric truck is not going to need.
|
| Charging at the starting point while loading, at
| (mandatory) breaks and at the destination should be enough;
| a BEV truck done right shouldn't require extra waiting
| time.
| lazide wrote:
| That ignores all the existing infra (or lack thereof).
|
| Fossil fuels are very energy dense, and we still have
| tons of truck stops everywhere - and need them!
|
| Last mile, most dropoffs are not going to have power
| infra to allow MW+ Charging of every truck that shows up,
| at least not without a lot of time to upgrade. And many
| won't want to even try, as they're paying the logistics
| companies so they don't need to deal with stuff like
| that.
|
| Even distribution centers would struggle (capex wise), as
| we'd be talking 100s of megawatts at least of extra load,
| possibly giggawatts.
| _hypx wrote:
| There has been no more meaningful progressive in batteries in
| over a decade. The energy density of batteries today (~265
| Wh/kg) is marginally better than where it was in 2012 (~250
| Wh/kg). It's been entirely a function of cost reduction. If
| this continues, people will need to stop talking about "rapid
| advances" in batteries and instead talk about stagnation.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| This report[0] says that battery energy densities have
| almost tripled since 2010.
|
| [0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-
| lithium-io...
| _hypx wrote:
| The report is wrong. It doesn't even make sense since
| there is clearly a dot above 200 Wh/kg in 2012. Meaning
| the graph is only claiming a 40-50% improvement in the
| last decade.
|
| But regardless, the report is wrong because we most
| definitely had reached 250 Wh/kg by 2010. Panasonic mass
| produced a cell with those specs start in 2009:
| https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en091218-2
|
| Furthermore, there is no way of buying that 300 Wh/kg
| cell shown on the chart. No seems to have ever found one
| available as a commercial product. Meaning it is likely
| an experimental cell that never made it to production.
| narrator wrote:
| Asteroid mining for catalyst medals might pencil out one day.
| egeozcan wrote:
| They are decreasing by a factor of 200, which means 1/200 of the
| starting amount.
|
| English is not my native language so I was a bit confused by "200
| times less", which I (wrongly) imagined to mean starting amount
| (x) minus 200x, getting to -199x, which didn't make sense. Math
| in speech is a tricky thing.
| arantius wrote:
| I am a native English speaker, but I also despise this phrase.
| Exactly because it's so awkward that it's hard to truly know
| what the speaker means. This pattern is unfortunately common.
| In my experience when used, they mean "reduced by a factor of
| 200" but they say "200 times less" as...shorthand?
| resist_futility wrote:
| 200 * x(less) = y(previous)
| entropicgravity wrote:
| The trick is in the word "times". In english every kid learns
| the "times table" ie "3 times 5 is 15; 6 times 7 is 42" so in
| this case "200 times less" means x/200. Live and learn,
| especially in a second language :)
| FredPret wrote:
| Crazy thought: mathematical symbols like +, =, and even
| variables like x, y, etc are recent-ish innovations.
|
| Before that equations were written out in words!
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's interesting, are there any famous examples?
| drivers99 wrote:
| https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/dee/dee24.html
|
| From an early/first English translation of Euclid.[1]
|
| [1] https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/dee/
| cesaref wrote:
| I'd guess Netwons Principia would be a good example, given
| it basically became the founding work of a mathematical
| approach to physics, gravity, newton's laws of motion etc.
|
| The book is written in Latin and contains diagrams and text
| to describe each lemma and law. Geometric proof seems to
| feature heavily!
|
| From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3
| %A6_Naturalis_Pri...
| Angostura wrote:
| I thought it might have just meant they needed one third of the
| amount. Thanks for doing the maths
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| I am a native English speaker and this annoys me as well. 200
| times less sounds more impressive than 99.5% less even if it's
| kind of ambiguous. Same with saying it only needs 1/200th the
| amount. They want big numbers in the headline and people will
| figure out what they meant.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The only reason to have "per cent" (%) as a concept is
| because decimal fractions weren't invented yet when per cent
| was first used; until the past few centuries arithmetic was
| almost exclusively done in terms of integers or ratios (or
| various mixed units depending on the material being
| measured). Using 1/100 as a generic unit was a work-around to
| make numbers less than one easier to compare and recognize by
| turning them into 2-digit whole numbers instead of needing to
| do a careful computation to judge between say 5/13 vs. 3/8.
|
| There's not really any particular advantage to saying 0.005
| of the amount (or 1 - 0.995 of the amount) vs. 200 times
| less. Personally I find it significantly less clear (though
| not really any more or less "impressive"), because doing
| mental decimal arithmetic takes some extra effort and leaves
| more room for confusion. That is, it is easier to reason
| about multiplying or dividing some quantity by 200 vs.
| multiplying or dividing by (1 - 0.995).
|
| But the two numbers are reciprocals; this is grade-school
| rational arithmetic, not some kind of trick.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's even more ambiguous when people say "200% faster". What
| does 50% faster mean in a world where people can say 200%
| faster with impunity?
| aordano wrote:
| 200% faster means 3x the nominal speed:
|
| You're adding speed ("going faster").
|
| You're adding a 200% of speed, which is twice the nominal
| speed (the 100%). Given the nominal speed is 1x and you're
| adding 2x, you end with triple the magnitude of the
| original nominal speed.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| You've dodged the question mark. What does 50% faster
| mean? What does 67% faster mean? What does 75% faster
| mean?
|
| I'm using the exact same terminology, so splitting hairs
| on phrasing isn't going to work for me.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Something crawls along at 1 m/s.
|
| After some clever engineering, it now runs 50% faster.
| Its speed is now 100% (baseline) + 50% (improvement) =
| 150% of 1 m/s (original speed) = 1.5 * 1 m/s = 1.5 m/s
|
| The budget option runs 20% slower than the original
| model. Its speed is 100% (baseline) - 20% (derating) =
| 80% * 1 m/s (original speed) = 0.8 m/s.
| aordano wrote:
| As sibling comments said, 50% faster means adding 50% of
| the nominal speed, so it's 1.5x the original magnitude.
| fragmede wrote:
| 50% faster means original speed plus 50%, or 1.5x
| stormbrew wrote:
| It would be nice if this were the universal meaning of
| this phrasing but people do use it to mean both "twice as
| fast" (2x) and "faster by double the original speed"
| (3x).
|
| People will rail about them using it wrong but it's
| pretty useless when you have to basically guess whether
| people subscribe to your definition of "right" before you
| can understand something.
| euroderf wrote:
| This is a horrible language hack perpetrated and perpetuated by
| people who think a form like "a/one two-hundredth" is some kind
| of fancy-pants pointy-haired intellectual nonsense that will
| lose their target audience of the mathematically and
| grammatically illiterate. Oh well.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Green hydrogen in theory is valid and a very worthy target of
| research.
|
| In practice it remains a FUD/policy distraction by petroleum
| interests to develop an energy ecosystem that is reliant on
| fossil fuels for the foreseeable (and profitable) future.
|
| This is research that falls into the former category, but it's
| presence and other "green hydrogen" headlines in the news feed is
| due to the influence of the latter.
|
| The economics of solar/wind/battery are and will be the driver of
| primary carbon reduction for the next decade, likely two decades.
|
| Practical hydrogen has the same issue new nuclear has: what price
| target? LCOE and many other measures of solar/wind/battery have
| fallen at 10 percent or more per year for the last decade, and
| while "who knows" when that exponential curve tails off, looking
| at the scale of what's needed, forthcoming techs like perovskites
| and forthcoming production of sodium ion / LFP / LMFP and the
| prototypes of Lithium Sulfur / Solid State in batteries, there is
| likely another decade of improvement at those rates.
|
| So like "new nuclear", sure, keep up the research, and if price
| competitive applications can compete with sodium ion batteries
| (which I think will be a killer app in grid storage based on the
| materials and gravimetric densities), sure, but I think these
| techs will be kind of like magnetic RAM vs DRAM: it simply missed
| the boat of the economies of scale rampup, and now has to wait
| for that curve to stabilize before anything competitive can crop
| up.
|
| For hydrogen to be practical in any green form in large scale
| requires a huge development in generation (which this is),
| storage, transport, and infrastructure. Fundamentally that
| hydrogen creation/transport/storage/delivery infrastructure,
| which is 99.99999% unbuilt, competes with the existing power
| grid, which likely has TRILLIONS of dollars in accumulated
| investment and will receive likely another trillion or two
| globally over the next two years to adapt to dirt cheap solar and
| wind, to say nothing of what will be invested in home /
| commercial distributed solar generation and battery storage which
| hydrogen is not applicable.
|
| Big Oil had a chance when the Bush Administration was talking
| about hydrogen circa 2003. But the fat cats sat on their hats,
| and Tesla and solar/wind left them in their dust. The only ones
| really pushing hydrogen are those and Toyota, who perplexingly
| missed the EV boat despite releasing hybrids in 1997 and should
| have been providing an entire product line of PHEVs by 2005 that
| pushed the entire industry towards PHEVs for all consumer
| transport by 2015. We'd be immune to OPEC and russia if that had
| happened, and 70-80% of daily miles would be electric with no
| range anxiety.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Electrolysis at scale has to happen for green hydrogen to
| replace coking coal in iron smelting/steelmaking (~9% of global
| carbon emissions)[1] and to replace steam reformation of fossil
| methane for making ammonia, for fertilizer (~1%).
|
| Those applications don't require an elaborate transport
| infrastructure; just that the plants be located near large PV
| farms or vice versa.
|
| Why write "trillions" in capital letters? Is it supposed to be
| impressive? A trillion dollars is one percent of global GDP.
| Oil, fossil gas, and coal extraction cost 5 TRILLION dollars a
| year, and the infrastructure for their use (vehicles, boilers,
| etc.) cost TRILLIONS more. And that's just to offset
| depreciation.
|
| 1. An alternative to using hydrogen for iron smelting is direct
| electrolysis of molten iron ore, but that is at early research
| stages. It can't be rolled out globally in the next four
| decades; development will take longer than that.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Because current investment in hydrogen infrastructure is
| likely ONE MILLIONTH of that ... or more. As in it is so far
| behind that there is no feasible way to catch up.
|
| But mostly ecause numbers with lots of zeros are important to
| keep in mind.
| robocat wrote:
| Presumably the electricity network can often be used to
| transport the power, so only the hydrogen electrolysis plant
| needs to be near the industrial consumer.
|
| The possibility is very dependent on the network constraints
| to the load: there is often excess network capacity on many
| links or excess capacity at certain times of day, because the
| network is built to handle peak loads. There is also
| availability of capacity on network secondary-links that have
| reserved backup capacity (to handle failover from network
| primary-link failure).
|
| One major constraint for green power is locating it near a
| network node that can accept the power.
| patall wrote:
| Your thinking ignores that there are many other uses for
| hydrogen. There is this chart [1] that clearly states where we
| should go for clean hydrogen production first and where it may
| not be worthwhile. And what I am noticing, that is more or less
| where the industry here in europe is going: some experiments in
| different areas but focus is the chemical industry and soon
| steel. Everything else will (mostly) come later.
|
| [1]
| https://mobile.twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/143199000314453...
| wedn3sday wrote:
| > The economics of solar/wind/battery are ...
|
| Its always been my impression that the only practical use of
| hydrogen is as a pseudo battery to buffer energy from renewable
| sources. No need for expensive/dangerous transmission or
| fueling infrastructure if the hydrogen is stored in the same
| place it was generated, and then passed through a fuel cell to
| turn it back into juice when demand increases.
| kotlin2 wrote:
| You can also use green hydrogen in place of blue hydrogen,
| e.g. when making ammonia.
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