This is the major reason that despite 30 years of underdelivery, hydrogen still garners considerable interest. Mediocre round trip efficiency doesn’t look as problematic when the price of natural gas triples.
That and the fact it’s the existing petroleum companies who are at the head of Hydrogen technology. They get to shape the discussion far more than independent experts do.
It’s the idea of using spare elec to electrolyse a gas that you then convert back to electricity in a fuel cell / 17th century steam engine. Not exactly efficient. Must be a better way. Massive flywheels and compressed air work in theory but we lost that engineering skill 300 years ago. Ironic I guess.
I would not really agree with that, until very recently. If you went to a hydrogen conference 6 years ago, you would not have seen many big oil types. The industry has really been carried onward by smaller, usually VC backed technology companies (Ballard being a prime example), some of whom would indeed have some capital from the likes of a Shell or a BP. The giants have been the Japanese car companies.
The electrolysis process just consumes too much energy. Hard to be genuinely efficient when you have used about 30-35% of total energy right out of the gate. The fuel cell conversion process has improved significantly, but when the starting point for the loss calculation is a 65% cap on efficiency, it just isn’t going to be good. However, with PV and wind now being the two cheapest generation forms in the world, at some point the input energy matters less.
Flywheels are used extensively, in particular in conjunction with highly intermittent generation like wind in some areas. Flywheels have fantastic response time, and excellent power density. Where they are limited is energy density, which means they just cannot sustain output. But for stabilizing grid output and frequency for the 10 seconds it takes a CCGT system to spin up, flywheels are in wide use.
Compressed air can work, but finding the spaces is challenging. Hydrostor has these enormous balloons in Lake Ontario (use the water mass to maintain the compression), just off Toronto Island airport. I would guess not 1 in a 1000 Torontonians know they are there.
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Isn’t the argument pretty much that you can overbuild capacity and then store whatever excess production during the day for deployment in the night? In that sense, doing it badly is better than not doing it at all.
That’s fair. As an outsider who pays only passing attention to alternative energy through layman material (podcasts and blogs) hydrogen seems to have ticked up recently in response to a shifting energy landscape. What I am seeing there is most of that is being propped up by existing energy companies we are far less interested in finding a solution to the problem and more interested in making sure that the conversation goes in a direction that better enables them to maintain their hegemonic positions in whatever the next gen energy landscape will be. Even if that means a subpar solution for society
The wrinkle added in the past two years is using a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure for hydrogen - using hydrogen for home heating with existing natural gas T&D for example. I would say probably 90% of the established hydrogen industry think that is unworkable nonsense. At least one conference had that added as a topic as a condition of a ‘platinum sponsorship’
But that design, construction, maintenance etc MIGHT consume more energy and $$$ than it’s worth. Pretty sure there’s a solar plant somewhere that doesn’t run because it’s too expensive. Vaguely heard about it on a podcast falling asleep recently. Hang on….
Granted it’s not PV.
Absolutely, how do we make the most money. Always look for the $$$ not the altruism.
Concentrator technology looked like a pathway when PV cells were made with leftover microconductor grade silicon. Then somebody woke up and realized around 2/3rds of the earth’s crust is made of the stuff.
I have no problem with big companies pivoting to help them stay relevant and keep making money. My issue is how the big ones exert their influence to inhibit the public debate on how society can move away from the ills these companies cause, and once you start seeing that inhibition release you dig in and see it’s because they’ve accepted the inevitable and are now directing the debate in the direction most beneficial to what they can pivot to, not what is the best solution. And everyone eats it up.
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Same with windmills or whatever they call them these days.
They need to be part of the solution. There’s a lot of wishcasting Re renewables. The transition has been extremely poorly thought. It will eventually lead to a spike in oil prices, perhaps to $1000/bbl
Do you have any source on that or is that a number you just made up?
I have no idea what it’s going to spike to. No one knows. But we have not been drilling enough. And demand is not going down. So when demand goes up and supply goes down, you can get violent price spikes like what you saw in the European gas market this year. That’s eventually going to happen in the oil market.
Demand is not going down because we’re not doing enough in renewables, and have never been. That’s the main reason. For decades governments have been in the pockets of fossil fuel extractors, even when it made absolutely no sense.
The Atlantic powers once had the technology to be market leaders in renewables, but now they’re slaves to China. I wonder why?
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I’m slowly becoming convinced we’re moving towards a wet season, dry season type climate now.
Super dry summer by anyone’s standards, by North Wales standards it was beyond belief. Now autumn is late but bugger me has it rained over the last few weeks. There have been dry moments but someone somewhere has definitely turned the tap on.
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Technically not directly related to the climate catastrophe but no idea where else to put it.
Hurray the world is gonna be saved! Ironic that they protest affordable food scarcity by wasting food on protesting. Necessary evil huh.
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