EU Hydrogen economy/power scam

[nctnico]

It has long been established that for energy storage lasting for more than a couple of hours, hydrogen is cheaper compared to a battery.

For HVAC, which is the majority of residential load in most areas, even cheaper would be thermal storage. Just need some incentives to build it.

And how are you going to power the pumps??? And please don't say hamsters or cats 

[schmitt trigger]

“ Communication that sets out a vision for a roadmap to create a framework for an alliance that will develop an agenda”

Newspeak, anyone?

[TimFox]

Pumped water storage is great, if there is a suitable loaction. However these are limited. We will want more of it, but for most countries (maybe except Norway and New Zeeland) it wou't be enough capacity. If you have to build the mountain or use cranes it gets too expensive.

Experts disagree, and claim there is a great excess of hydro storage potential:
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.

Going 100% on anything is straw man stuff, future energy storage will most likely be a broad mix of technologies exploiting their specific capabilities/suitabilities. Hydrogen will be part of that even if very little hydrogen is used raw at point of load, as it's a building block for all sorts of useful/practical "fuels".

Your comment about "going 100% on anything" is very important.
"Monocultures" or reliance on a single technology is not a stable long-term solution.

[zilp]

I have a "green" solution for the planet...
How about we gradually reduce the human population back to 2 billion (no need to kill people or start a war - just let it happen over the course of 100 years by limiting the number of children).

Abolish interest on money - this is the reason economies have to "grow". It is actually a pyramid scheme on a finite size planet. Doomed to fail. Get rid of interest rates and there is no longer a need to grow the economy.

Can you explain how this works? As in, why we no longer need to grow the economy if we "get rid of interest rates"? Or why we need to grow the economy if we don't "get rid of interest rates", for that matter? Also, what do you even mean by "getting rid of interest rates"?

Educate people so that they behave rational. People's retirement plan must consist in saving the exact amount of money you will need once you stop work. The current generational systems are, again, a pyramid scheme!

So, you think we should also get rid of insurance against old age? What would be the advantage of that?

[zilp]

For seasonal, you'd better build nuclear power plants instead of caving to idiot activists and destroy them, including forging documents in the process, then building natural gas power plants instead  . Then wonder about deindustrialization. Germany in a nutshell.

Could you provide a source for your claim of the forging of documents, please? If you think that one of your links is a source that substantiates this claim, could you please specify which one and where it supports this claim (possibly just quote the relevant section)?

And try spreading that cancer over the rest of EU.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-002175_EN.html

Can you explain who the source of this text is, and why you think that this source is a reliable source of information?

[tszaboo]

Just another random Youtube video showing a person rambling on about a subject  Yeah, the truth is out there on Youtube 

Just face it: hydrogen is going to be the new oil. It has long been established that for energy storage lasting for more than a couple of hours, hydrogen is cheaper compared to a battery. And the reason is really easy to understand: a battery is 100% filled with materials. A hydrogen storage vessel OTOH is empty (bonus points for storage in salt caverns).

AFAIK it's only been established as a waste of money and pollutant (steam methane reforming) when it comes to anything when it's used as energy source/storage.

hydrogen is cheaper compared to a battery.

Wasting 70% of energy is not cheap by any means.

It is cheaper. You have to look at total system cost.
Round trip efficiency is above 70% with CHP. (not 30% as you suggested)
If you want to achieve a minimal carbon footprint, you have to store energy, because your summer and winter energy usage differs by 90% and solar generation also differs easily by 90%. Now, go ahead and calculate the cost and efficiency of battery storage for 6 months, and compare that to P2G. A battery large enough to store all your energy needs for a winter. Probably going to cost more than your house. Meanwhile the same energy can be stored in a steel tank somewhere far away together with other millions of households.  Probably not as hydrogen, that's a bad idea, but as LNG or CHG. Just like we do it right now. As a plus, everyone doesn't have to replace every single heating systems, build new houses, and quadruple our electricity grid capacity (if only).

[Marco]

Hydrogen is the most realistic seasonal storage medium for renewable energy. Even for fuel where batteries lack the energy density (aviation and shipping) it's not bad compared to scaleable alternatives (biomass fuel does not scale).

Anything which requires CO2 for synthesis will become likely become far more expensive (PV and membraneless electrolysis are likely to get very cheap, CO2 capture not so much). Nitrogen is a little easier to get, but ammonia isn't a great substance to work with either.

Nuclear can obviate the need for large scale storage, but it does little for fuel.

[zilp]

Round trip efficiency is above 70% with CHP. (not 30% as you suggested)
If you want to achieve a minimal carbon footprint, you have to store energy, because your summer and winter energy usage differs by 90%

Could you clarify which direction those 90% are supposed to be in? Winter is 90% more than summer (factor 1.9) or summer 90% less than winter (factor 10)?

and solar generation also differs easily by 90%. Now, go ahead and calculate the cost and efficiency of battery storage for 6 months, and compare that to P2G. A battery large enough to store all your energy needs for a winter.

Why would you store any significant amount of energy for 6 months? Like, are you suggesting that we would or should only use solar generation (i.e. PV?) for electricity supply during winter?

As a plus, everyone doesn't have to replace every single heating systems, build new houses, and quadruple our electricity grid capacity (if only).

Do I understand this correctly that you think that homes should be heated by burning gases synthesized using electricity from renewable sources in heating systems in those homes?

Why do you think that that would be preferable over, for example, switching to primarily heat pumps, especially considering the rather large difference in efficiency and the correspondingly much larger storage capacities that would be needed to store the much larger amount of energy needed with the significantly lower efficiency of that approach?

[Conrad Hoffman]

The late Don Lancaster had some things to say about hydrogen if you read down a bit- https://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf

IMO, hydrogen is only desirable if you're a researcher pursuing government science grants.

[artag]

This thread isn't 'general technical' it's politics.
Can we have a 'blowhard' board for topics that generate more heat than light, please ?

[jonovid]

forget the whole renewable virtue signalling thing & let nature take its course.
as mixing politics & science as a religion outside the lab can be dangerous!
petroleum is still king

[Marco]

The late Don Lancaster had some things to say about hydrogen if you read down a bit- https://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf

IMO, hydrogen is only desirable if you're a researcher pursuing government science grants.

For someone so concerned with how hard it is to get H2 in the first place, he sure did easily gloss over how hard it is to get CO2 when it's not a waste stream from fossil fuel.

[nctnico]

The late Don Lancaster had some things to say about hydrogen if you read down a bit- https://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf

Well, take whatever Don Lancaster claims with a large truckload of salt. At some point he claimed he had the best photos on Ebay for the items he was selling. Reality check: the photos where piss poor.

[nctnico]

Round trip efficiency is above 70% with CHP. (not 30% as you suggested)
If you want to achieve a minimal carbon footprint, you have to store energy, because your summer and winter energy usage differs by 90%

Could you clarify which direction those 90% are supposed to be in? Winter is 90% more than summer (factor 1.9) or summer 90% less than winter (factor 10)?

and solar generation also differs easily by 90%. Now, go ahead and calculate the cost and efficiency of battery storage for 6 months, and compare that to P2G. A battery large enough to store all your energy needs for a winter.

Why would you store any significant amount of energy for 6 months? Like, are you suggesting that we would or should only use solar generation (i.e. PV?) for electricity supply during winter?

The reality is that hydrogen will need to be shipped / piped to countries with seasonal insolation year round with local storage to store excess electricity from PV during the sunny days and for buffering during the winter.  Most European countries buy gas in the summer for use during the winter to keep prices constant. This is common practise for decades already so the idea of storing energy for 6 months is not that outlandish.

Nuclear power plants won't be able to replace coal and gas plants due to a limited reserve of Uranium (as Kleinstein has pointed out in a previous discussion; you can easely fact check this yourself). IF you want the phase out fossil fuels, the only technology for large scale generation which is available today, are solar panels and wind turbines. Nuclear power plants which don't use/need uranium are at least 30 years away from being practical. Those are not going to make a difference before 2050.

Unfortunately Greenpeace has done a great job using big oil's money to scare people away from nuclear and thus investments in nuclear have been way too low. The world is paying a hefty price due to health and climate effects.

In an ideal scenario we should have had nuclear power by now which is clean, cheap and can supply when there is demand. Keep in mind that with fossil fuels, generation (supply) is on par with demand. With solar and wind as energy sources, storage and transport are required because generation (supply) and demand are far apart both in time and location.

[zilp]

The reality is that hydrogen will need to be shipped / piped to countries with seasonal insolation year round with local storage to store excess electricity from PV during the sunny days and for buffering during the winter.  Most European countries buy gas in the summer for use during the winter to keep prices constant. This is common practise for decades already so the idea of storing energy for 6 months is not that outlandish.

Well, I mean, what you write is kinda true, but at the same time inaccurate in relevant and potentially misleading ways.

It is true that gas prices would vary more over the year if there were no natural gas storage with everything else unchanged, simply because the capacity of the import infrastructure wouldn't be sufficient to keep up with demand during the winter while it would be oversized during the summer. But that isn't the purpose of the storage infrastructure. The purpose of the storage infrastructure is to avoid building more import infrastructure (i.e., pipelines and LNG terminals), because storage is the cheaper solution. So the purpose is reduction of costs, the less volatile price is just a side effect.

Which also means that it indeed isn't necessarily a priori outlandish to store energy for 6 months, in the sense that it absolutely could be done if it were necessary. However, it is pretty far from current reality. The capacity might be the order of magnitude of 6 months of natural gas demand. But energy consumption is significantly higher than natural gas alone. So, storing 6 months of current total energy consumption would, while maybe not being outlandish, still require significantly more storage capacity than we currently have ... and given that current capacity really is less than 6 months of natural gas demand, it starts bordering on outlandish, and it probably crosses the border to being outlandish when the idea would be to store hydrogen, given the much lower energy density of hydrogen.

But really, the outlandish idea is that we'd need to store 6 months of energy consumption in the first place, given that there is more wind during winter, so why would we possibly want to use exclusively hydrogen (or methane or ammonia) from storage rather than wind energy directly from the generator with some energy from storage and/or import to fill gaps in renewable generation?

[nctnico]

The reality is that hydrogen will need to be shipped / piped to countries with seasonal insolation year round with local storage to store excess electricity from PV during the sunny days and for buffering during the winter.  Most European countries buy gas in the summer for use during the winter to keep prices constant. This is common practise for decades already so the idea of storing energy for 6 months is not that outlandish.

Well, I mean, what you write is kinda true, but at the same time inaccurate in relevant and potentially misleading ways.

It is true that gas prices would vary more over the year if there were no natural gas storage with everything else unchanged, simply because the capacity of the import infrastructure wouldn't be sufficient to keep up with demand during the winter while it would be oversized during the summer. But that isn't the purpose of the storage infrastructure. The purpose of the storage infrastructure is to avoid building more import infrastructure (i.e., pipelines and LNG terminals), because storage is the cheaper solution. So the purpose is reduction of costs, the less volatile price is just a side effect.

Which also means that it indeed isn't necessarily a priori outlandish to store energy for 6 months, in the sense that it absolutely could be done if it were necessary. However, it is pretty far from current reality. The capacity might be the order of magnitude of 6 months of natural gas demand. But energy consumption is significantly higher than natural gas alone. So, storing 6 months of current total energy consumption would, while maybe not being outlandish, still require significantly more storage capacity than we currently have ... and given that current capacity really is less than 6 months of natural gas demand, it starts bordering on outlandish, and it probably crosses the border to being outlandish when the idea would be to store hydrogen, given the much lower energy density of hydrogen.

But really, the outlandish idea is that we'd need to store 6 months of energy consumption in the first place, given that there is more wind during winter, so why would we possibly want to use exclusively hydrogen (or methane or ammonia) from storage rather than wind energy directly from the generator with some energy from storage and/or import to fill gaps in renewable generation?

You are forgetting one thing here: in general European countries can not meet their own energy demands using renewables. The required amount of land area simply is not there. For example: over 30% of homes have solar panels on the roof in the NL. And yet the generation capacity of those solar panels is like 12% of current required generation capacity (without taking into account future increase in electricity use due to phasing out fossil fuels as a whole). Import will be necessary to meet demand. So there is some kind of optimum between the amount of storage versus the re-supply cycle intervals and foreign production capacity. Given that seasonal effects last about 6 months AND possible supply chain disruptions (sabotage of gas & oil pipelines is real! and lets not forget geopolitical issues), it is not unreasonable to assume a 6 month storage period is a good starting point to aim for even though the amount of storage capacity will be huge in the end.

[.RC.]

Germany is a great example to see what happens when ideologists and communists try to rule the country.

Instead of a meritocracy you get an idiocracy, where people without knowledge try to impose their vision on others.

It got so bad in Germany that I truly wish that the Germans revolt and turn down their current government, which is extreme left, antidemocratic and corrupt.

To be fair, a lot of advanced western countries have gone the same way.   Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand etc etc (not including France or the US are they are both a bit "different") are now chock a block full of people who while "university educated" are not smart. Often you find their education is in the humanities, arts or communications sector.  Not engineering or mathematics.

You can not argue with them, they can not be reasoned with.  In their eyes they are always right and they will never stop even after their beliefs destroy everything and we are back to living in caves.

[Marco]

In an ideal scenario we should have had nuclear power by now which is clean

Would have helped if every Nuclear Engineer didn't go "Real Sodium cooling has never been tried" for decades.

Lead is to Sodium what Rust is to C :p It took a long long time for the industry to wake up from its delusions and it's a little late.

[ejeffrey]

It has long been established that for energy storage lasting for more than a couple of hours, hydrogen is cheaper compared to a battery.

Citation needed.  Not a projection or estimate or pitch deck, but show me someone willing to sell a grid scale fuel cell storage system for a specified cost per MJ that can be compared to other technologies.

Until such a number exists, it's not "long established" it's somewhere between "promising research direction" and "delusional thinking"

And the reason is really easy to understand: a battery is 100% filled with materials. A hydrogen storage vessel OTOH is empty.

That certainly sounds like "common sense" but the actual facts don't support it.

[ejeffrey]

Unfortunately Greenpeace has done a great job using big oil's money to scare people away from nuclear and thus investments in nuclear have been way too low. The world is paying a hefty price due to health and climate effects.

Greenpeace and the anti nuclear lobby is entirely not responsible for the failure 21st century nuclear plants in the US and Europe.  The nuclear industry itself is 100% to blame.  They simply cannot or will not design and build a functioning reactor in a sane time or budget despite huge subsidies.


They previously had some success lobbying to shut down old plants which is not great but the failure of the new projects in the US suffered not significant schedule delays or cost increases due to anti nuclear lobbying.

The main thing the anti nuclear lobby has succeeded in is stoping the construction of the long term storage fascillity.  But that's really not a current problem.  Nuclear plants are built to hold many decades of spent fuel.  The waste is so little volume, on site storage is totally feasible for the entire operational life of a reactor site.  Is that the best long term solution? Maybe not, but it isn't the thing stopping deployment.

[nctnico]

It has long been established that for energy storage lasting for more than a couple of hours, hydrogen is cheaper compared to a battery.

Citation needed.  Not a projection or estimate or pitch deck, but show me someone willing to sell a grid scale fuel cell storage system for a specified cost per MJ that can be compared to other technologies.

Until such a number exists, it's not "long established" it's somewhere between "promising research direction" and "delusional thinking"

And the reason is really easy to understand: a battery is 100% filled with materials. A hydrogen storage vessel OTOH is empty.

That certainly sounds like "common sense" but the actual facts don't support it.

Just use Google; the numbers are easy to find and supported by the fact that large scale hydrogen storage in salt caverns is being build (and this technology isn't new either; it is in use in the UK and USA).

[zilp]

You are forgetting one thing here: in general European countries can not meet their own energy demands using renewables. The required amount of land area simply is not there. For example: over 30% of homes have solar panels on the roof in the NL. And yet the generation capacity of those solar panels is like 12% of current required generation capacity (without taking into account future increase in electricity use). Import will be necessary to meet demand. So there is some kind of optimum between the amount of storage versus the re-supply cycle intervals and foreign production capacity. Given that seasonal effects last about 6 months AND possible supply chain disruptions (sabotage of gas & oil pipelines is real! and lets not forget geopolitical issues), it is not unreasonable to assume a 6 month storage period is a good starting point to aim for.

It's just ... I am not forgetting any of that?!

But how does it follow that because we'll have to import some amount of energy, and that seasonal effects last 6 months, that therefore, we'd need to store 6 months of total consumption? Not 6 months of import throughput, 6 months of consumption! I.e., potentially sufficient to last one to two years when combined with local production!

And that especially so given that the seasonal effect isn't that strong anyway.

[nctnico]

If you read carefully, you'll see I wrote that 6 months is a good number to start with. It all depends on how much risk a country wants to take to run out (or needing to buy energy at extremely high prices). These lessons are not coming from a very distant past. There is more than just consumption. Again: you'll need to replenish and store strategically or suffer the consequences. Your assumption doesn't include any strategic decission making. On top of that, local production will be far less than you seem to assume. I don't recall Germany has their own (significant) oil supply and yet the energy coming from that oil will need to be replaced by a different energy source at some point.

[zilp]

If you read carefully, you'll see I wrote that 6 months is a good number to start with. It all depends on how much risk a country wants to take to run out (or needing to buy energy at extremely high prices). These lessons are not coming from a very distant past. There is more than just consumption. Again: you'll need to replenish and store strategically or suffer the consequences. Your assumption doesn't include any strategic decission making.

Well, for one I want to note that you are kinda changing the topic. The context that I was responding to above was tszaboo creating the impression that we would need to store enough energy to meet demand for 6 months from storage alone just so we don't suffer blackouts because there is supposedly close to no local renewable production during the winter. So, strategic reserves were not really the topic and would be on top of that.

Also, while some strategic reserves certainly make sense, it should be noted that the problem we just experienced was a of lack of storage (because the largest storage facility in Germany had been sold to Russia, who, in preparation for the war, had let it run empty) combined with a lack of import capacity from sources other than Russia. Removing either factor should have considerably reduced the impact.

On top of that, local production will be far less than you seem to assume. I don't recall Germany has their own (significant) oil supply and yet the energy coming from that oil will need to be replaced by a different energy source at some point.

It's just ... no, it doesn't. Much of the oil supply goes to mobility, cars in particular. ICEs in cars have an efficiency of around 20%, maybe 30% (depends on how the car is being used). Electric cars have an efficiency of ~ 65 to 80% (depending on which parts of the process you include, charging losses in particular). So, about two thirds of the energy that we import in the form of oil for the use in cars does not need to be replaced, because it is currently only used to heat the environment, and we can stop doing that. Equally, energy from oil that is used for heating homes can be substituted with roughly a third of that in the form of electricity that is used to drive heat pumps, which then extract the remaining 60 to 70% from the environment to create the same amount of heat. And with some insulation, you can potentially further reduce the amount of heat energy that you need in the first place.

How much exactly we need to replace is ultimately an economic question (i.e., whether it is cheaper to insulate a home or to import hydrogen, or whatever), but we certainly don't need to replace anywhere near the energy content of the fossil fuels that we currently import with renewable sources.

(Of course, you can then argue whether a heat pump reduces the energy demand or whether it should be considered a renewable power plant ... regardless, the point stands that you don't need to replace oil or natural gas used for heating with the equivalent amount of renewable electricity.)

[NiHaoMike]

And how are you going to power the pumps??? And please don't say hamsters or cats 

Batteries, but the power use would be tiny compared to the compressor. So run the compressor from solar during the day, that's the whole point. It would require at least an order of magnitude less battery than running the compressor from the battery, a very substantial savings.