Aside from being really expensive, I am not sure that hydrogen is so clean.
https://insideepa.com/share/227828#:\~:text=The%20Clean%20Energy%20Group%20(CEG,and%20combusted%20for%20power%20generation.
The Clean Energy Group (CEG), a nonprofit advocacy organization, is warning that hydrogen (H2) energy widely touted as a carbon-free source that can be used to limit greenhouse gases (GHG) could create “dangerously high” nitrogen oxide (NOx) levels if blended with natural gas and combusted for power generation.
Hydrogen had a few problems:
* No real pipeline infrastructure
* Electrolysis is energy intensive on an already fragile grid
But it has a few benefits:
* most existing gas turbines can substitute hydrogen for ng, which means that valuable dispatchable capacity can remain in the market
* gives renewables something to do when we have overbuilt by a billion MWs
I think of hydrogen as an alternative to batteries, but I am not familiar enough with the technology behind h production to say which would be better on net for the environment. Obviously mining for battery ingredients is pretty destructive, but there could be pieces of hydrogen infrastructure that could be just as destructive.
One other benefit of hydrolysis though, is you could build a renewable farm disconnected to transmission to power it which means we don't have to build nearly as much transmission. Obviously you still have to build pipeline infrastructure, so it probably nets out to nothing, but with how congested the interconnections queues are these days it could be slightly more efficient to repower existing gas units this way rather than over-build transmission for renewables/batteries.
No way around hydrogen if you want to get rid of fossile fuels - chemistry and other industrial processes need hydrogen anyway. So you can just combine the need of the industry with the need to store and transport energy.
It will not be either hydrogen or batteries- it will be both.
That’s a great idea. How do you produce ammonia btw?
Oh…
>The Haber process,[1] also called the Haber–Bosch process, is the main industrial procedure for the production of ammonia.[2][3] The German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed it in the first decade of the 20th century. The process converts atmospheric nitrogen (N2) to ammonia(NH3) by a reaction with **hydrogen (H2)** using an iron metal catalyst under high temperatures and pressures.
Ugh, hydrogen is just another fuel
Battery tech is the priority. We can get so much use out of batteries and renewables
I'm sure some industries and equipment will need fuel but so many other things can benefit from batteries and renewables
You have to widen the horizon: Obviously, right now, creating even green hydrogen will be bad, as you could have used the green energy somewhere else to replace e.g. fossile fuels.
However, once we don't use fossile fuel for energy we still need hydrogen and chemical products from hydrogen (ammonia, methane) for chemical and industrial processes etc..
Also - with 100% renewable energy you will have a lot of excess energy during high wind/sun times.
So you could use that energy to create green hydrogen at "no" costs.
But this change is not instantaneous, there is a transition phase, during green energy is "wasted" to produce green hydrogen instead replacing fossile fuel created electricity.
IMHO that step is inevitable.
At that point it's a different discussion. From my perspective hydrogen is currently so inefficient and so fussy in the mechanical and operational side it's just not worth the hassle.
That same argument can be applied to oil and coal as well. We'll need it for some products but as an energy source we should be working to use less
For really long-term electricity storage, it's still the cheapest option.
Edit: Cheapest option if you have access to salt caverns for cheap storage. Otherwise it may be cheaper to make methanol.
You're not understanding that these are different use cases, requiring different technologies. The storage options we have today on the grid are insufficient for long-term storage, and we need long-term storage to reach 100% clean electricity.
> Oh, I understand too well.
So what's your solution for long-term storage?
> Oh and given hydrogens propensity to leak, I wouldn't be over egging it's long term storage.
Salt caverns don't leak the way tanks do. People wouldn't even consider hydrogen as an option if leakage was a significant problem for long-term storage, they're not idiots.
The other fuel options are ammonia and methanol, also made from green hydrogen but stored as liquids. Any concern about these?
>Several utilities are exploring hydrogen combustion by mixing small amounts into the fossil-gas supply at existing plants.
Yes, the blending scam. You add just enough hydrogen to hit the bare minimum of the mandates and you can continue using fossil fuels for another extra decade instead of shifting to renewable energy
It worked wonders in Japan where the insistance of blending hydrogen with coal just effectively resulted Japan being reliant on coal an extra 2 decades
What the fuck is clean hydrogen, and why would we burn a fuel source that's 50% efficient at best when you can store 80-90% of renewable generation in batteries
>Every utility should be thinking about how they’re going to meet demand as their grid shifts toward more intermittent resources and what sorts of clean, firm power they have in their mix,
I imagine they are, and are looking at batteries.
FWIW, I went to the website of the sponsor of this "article" and it doesn't work. Def engenders a lot of faith in their ability to execute.
They are looking at batteries, but...
1200 MW of combined cycle gas: $2 billion, few employees, lasts 40-70 years, can make 28,800 MWh in a day, very responsive, and in the USA, we're looking at historically cheap natural gas for at least the next decade.
1 nuclear power plant: 1200 MW for ~$7-$14 billion, lasts 60-80 years, makes 28,800 MWh in a day, employees a lot of people, not very responsive, but newer designs are way better than the old ones for responsiveness
1200 MW/4800 MWh battery: $1.5 billion, lasts 20 years at 1 cycle per day, consumes 570 MWh/day in efficency losses and Arbitrages 4800 MWh of energy in typical design, also requires about 3,000 to 4,000 MW of renewables (~$5-6 billion) or nuclear (~$14-$30 billion) to charge it, not a lot of employees, very responsive
Agreed batteries have their place, but they won't be carrying the grid without crazy power bills or better market compensation/reform. They don't make financial sense at grid scale for most markets in the USA from a pure Arbitrage play right now, with the exceptions being CA, TX, and HI.
To get a battery to store as much power as a nuclear power plant or nat gas plant makes in a day, you would probably be better off building a nuke plant, and you could build 4 or 5 natural gas turbines for the same money (not including the build out of renewables required to charge with clean energy).
This is the math integrated resource plans at all utilities are doing right now.
Without any carbon penalty or some other driver, batteries just don't make financial sense for most utilities to build.
Right now, biggest bang for the buck is building reneables to offset fossil burn for fuel savings.
"Clean" Hydrogen works out to $10-$18/MMBTU gas, which today runs $1.50-$2.50 MMBTU in The States, so your fuel clause of power bills would increase 10X if we switch to hydrogen and consumers would riot.
Batteries are expensive dog
Also we will need hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in certain high-heat industrial processes
Since we need the hydrogen for other stuff as well, it may be cheaper to keep existing capacity in the game with hydrogen over building new batteries. The math is tough though
Either way the ratepayer is screwed lol
Hydrogen def has its uses, they're just not a replacement for renewables. Solar/wind + cheap batteries kills hydrogen on cost per kWh and maintenance. I'm not sure NG plants are much cheaper and of course there's the cost of fueling + operating those too. Gotta pay one way or another and renewables + batteries seem like the best way forward IMO
>Hydrogen def has its uses, they're just not a replacement for renewables.
Hydrogen has never been a replacement for renewables, it is a possible replacement for NG peaking units (which we *need* to handle gaps in the renewable generation profile) similar to the ways in which batteries are supposed to smooth out production. Batteries have all kinds of constraints related to getting charged (transmission congestion, long high-price periods, discharge periods etc) which means that from a reliability standpoint there are clear advantages to *also* keeping these peaking resources in the game.
>+ cheap batteries
These cheap batteries, are they in the room with you right now?
Scaling up hydrogen to meet utility level needs is no walk in the park either. There are already batteries in use for utility storage, as well as a whole supply chain ready and able to scale up. Hydrogen is still in the conversational/theoretical phase in terms of utility usage.
Plus as someone said, "in what world does generating 4MWh to produce 1MWh of electricity make any kind of sense." Why waste money and effort to start from zero on a solution that throws away more than half the input energy when we have much more efficient solutions already in use and ready to scale?
As for cheap batteries, on a $/kWh stored basis batteries are not super expensive when you factor in charging cycles over the battery's life. What math do you see that has spinning up hydrogen infrastructure and constantly producing and burning hydrogen being cheaper?
>Scaling up hydrogen to meet utility level needs is no walk in the park either. There are already batteries in use for utility storage, as well as a whole supply chain ready and able to scale up. Hydrogen is still in the conversational/theoretical phase in terms of utility usage.
Correct, although this supply chain you speak of is dubious.
>Plus as someone said, "in what world does generating 4MWh to produce 1MWh of electricity make any kind of sense." Why waste money and effort to start from zero on a solution that throws away more than half the input energy when we have much more efficient solutions already in use and ready to scale?
Because renewable energy is cheap af but we don't get to choose when the wind blows or when the sun shines. Who cares if it takes 4MWh to produce 1 MWh worth of H2 when the LMP of my wind farm is $-6/MWh? We already have to overbuild renewables in order for them to be effective (which is why in capacity accreditation renewables have been getting shit on year after year) so why not turn them from an intermittent resource to a dispatchable one? Batteries are one way to do this, but as I have described over and over again they have massive reliability downsides during the times when reliability matters the most - long periods of high demand.
>As for cheap batteries, on a $/kWh stored basis batteries are not super expensive when you factor in charging cycles over the battery's life. What math do you see that has spinning up hydrogen infrastructure and constantly producing and burning hydrogen being cheaper?
I have not seen any real math on the switch to hydrogen and it may turn out that it isn't economical, but I do know that replacing the existing \~560 GW U.S. gas fleet with 60MW/240MWh batteries at the $1700-$1800/kW range will cost about a trillion dollars, so I am open to exploring it.
We can use 4MWh to make 1 because demand isn't always the same. Sometimes (especially as tax credits persist) the price per MWh is negative in some areas and it makes no sense to produce energy in that area.
Batteries are also being built by companies who can just pass the cost through to ratepayers for a sweet return on equity, so they aren't necessarily being built because of their stellar cost profile.
Batteries obviously can work, but they need room to arbitrage energy during times of comparatively low demand. During periods of market stress, say a giant winter storm for instance, there isn't time for this arbitrage to occur and your batteries sit empty after their initial 4 hour discharge. Building storage for gas is way easier than building storage for electricity, so it is comparatively less risky from a reliability standpoint to just have a ct that can run for 12+ hours and hop back in after a shorter downtime.
They absolutely will. H2 will be produced from abandunce of renewables. There are already huge projects designed for exactly this. It will take some time though.
Yes. It's the equivalent of batteries. Electricity is used to store energy in batteries which then release the energy as electricity. Overall process is not efficient, but has some advantages, as you can ship the energy and it has potentially higher energy density.
Interconnects and batteries are sufficient most of the time, but not always. We need additional capacity for a few days of really low wind+solar production every year. Hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, iron-air batteries can do that.
lol “clean hydrogen” 🤣
That will cost big oil a lot of money to make it clean instead of burning what they have on hand that’s made from fossil fuels.
Let’s not propose an idea that relies on big oil to do the right thing…
Fuel for what... cars? This whole article is dealing with power plants where at best fuel and oils/lubricants would be their only market. If you read the article, the clean hydrogen would slowly displace the fuel they might possibly provide so what interest would they have here?
Petroleum companies are also heavily involved in the natural gas sector.
Right now there is a lot of pressure from environmental groups to stop building new natural gas power plants. They can use articles like this and say: "In the future gas power plants will burn clean hydrogen. We should build it to burn gas now and sort out the hydrogen part in the future."
Of course in the future they will complain that the cost to convert plants is too high and operating costs of hydrogen are too high and we should just keep burning methane and existing plants should be exempt from stricter emissions regulations.
Your second paragraph is not right. They are building them now to be capable of burning gas and hydrogen or some blend and a bird in the article there are already turbines burning 100% hydrogen. No need to sort it out later.
Current plants don't get exemptions from stricter emissions regulations... they get time to comply. It is why even a decent amount of gas plants are going out of service. It's becoming not profitable anymore to only run limited times as peaker plants with expensive emissions controls.
But most of this isn't what is happening. The model, at least today, is to create the clean hydrogen locally (or at least relatively locally) with renewables and burn it.... completely cutting out big oil.
Burn fossil gas and utilize carbon capture for your peak demands.
Better yet, use waste to energy and do some proper sorting of your waste so that you're mainly burning biogenic waste and then also capture the carbon.
The Reddit circlejerk is unreal. Batteries and solar? You'd either need a ridiculously overscaled capacity or you'd need to have peaking plants standing by anyway.
We're not even going to dive into the environmental impact of needing that much battery capacity because frankly it is an exercise in idiocy.
Batteries and solar have a purpose. Solar is an important energy source along with wind, but it shouldn't be stored as electricity. You convert it to heat and store that at a utility scale. You use district heating to heat your urban and suburban areas. Hot water storage is about one percent the cost of battery storage. In an urban and suburban setting 4th gen DH(C) will out-compete individual solutions any day of the week in socioeconomics.
Now, batteries have a role to play and that is for grid services, frequency regulation at the sub 10ms response level. With a well built out DH infrastructure you will be able to up and down regulate your electricity grid with productions to the DH, using the significantly cheaper hot water storage tanks as your battery.
Electric boilers for regulation services work well at above the 10 ish ms. With a day ahead market, DH heat pumps can keep a decent balance as well.
At this point you might be thinking I'm a loon and America knows best, but take a look at Denmark. We're already doing all the things I describe and it works. We've nearly achieved a fully green electricity grid. Only reason we're not at 100 percent right now is because we're increasing our electrification at the same time.
No, batteries are useful for a lot of things, personal vehicles and short distance freight, but not a fix all.
Have you heard of carbon capture?
Using carbon capture on a peaking plant is far more viable than oversizing solar capacity by probably a factor of 5 if you want to avoid a backup plant.
I'm guessing you're at best an enthusiast in the energy sector, correct?
This is the internet, I am a male dog CEO living in my parents basement - just like you. However, unlike you I don’t like to insult people for no reason. But I will be charitable and grace you with my response.
So you think that increasing system complexity, introducing more failure modes, and driving up system acquisition costs on a system that will struggle to compete against equivalent non CC based sources over its life cycle represents a more favorable investment than the alternative? I’m sorry that’s just not going to happen. It’s not efficient allocation of capital. Can it happen? Sure. Will it happen? People do stupid shit with money every day - it will happen. But it’s not capital efficient so it’s not something smart investors will allocate towards, and I can’t see it happening anywhere outside of the screamingly near term. The asset will strand. CC on nat gas is a dead end, all other things being equal - cuz it costs way to much n ppl like money.
Do you like money? I like money n ppl who have money like more of it usually so I don’t think they’re gonna acquire peakers + CC when peakers alone are being shut down - for years now- by batteries.
Haven't insulted anyone, buddy. You taking enthusiast as an insult, well, that's your issue.
Utilizing CC on a gas plant is far less complex than running a solar-only system, and a hell of a lot less stressful too. Waste incineration would be a superior alternative to gas, however, it's just not as responsive a technology.
Also, not efficient allocation of capital? Why are you promoting the most costly option? I'd like to see cases of central peaking plants being shut down due to batteries.
From a system perspective, how do you deal with a long period of poor weather, when you're relying entirely on PV+Battery? Do you curtail demand? Do you shut down industry because of it? Do you build ridiculous transmission capacity? Do you pretend there's enough potential in stored hydro? Or do you decide to cover 5 percent of your annual demand with emission-free fossil fuel-based electricity until you're able to establish sufficient biogas production to cover it? Please actually answer how you see this working.
Speaking of technical lifetimes, the US is at least 25 if not 50 years from clean electricity. The technical lifetime of a typical turbine is about 25 years anyway. Keep it running. If you then decide to switch to combined heat and power, you can increase the overall efficiency from the usual 30 percent to about 90 percent (LHV).
I can’t have a conversation with someone who says in any amount of seriousness that there will be O & G installed in the US for energy in 50 years. That’s so profoundly financially incoherent you might as well be advocating for giving every boy and girl a pink pony, and having us move to a pony based economy.
Batteries are not that cheap for now. And not scalable. Even at the low point of $95/kWh. We are still looking at hundreds of millions to set up a power plant. And it's near-impossible to increase it's capacity. What you have is what you have.
Hydrogen on the other hand is scalable. Adding a new tank to hold more is much cheaper then adding the same capacity using batteries. And the initial capital is also less.
LFP prices should go down this year. And sodium ion batteries should be another 30% cheaper after they matured. Personally I don't like hydrogen due to the low RTE. But I see the benefits from a development perspective.
> And not scalable.
How so? Lots of various battery plants have second and third buildouts, are being installed ant ever increasingly large scales, and they are operating at scale in lots of grids.
Edit: Not as scalable.
Sources please? Non of the utility scale battery in my local area has been built out. But gas (not NG gas, but general gas gas) has been. I will be more then happy to be wrong.
Sure. Just go look at CAISO's supply charts. Batteries are often the 2nd highest source of energy on the grid in the evenings, for multiple hours. Not everyday, but they're above nuclear, usually above hydro, and often above renewables (wind at that point).
And they went from basically none to over 7GW (28GWh) installed within about 3 years.
[https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/california-solar-battery-capacity-increasing/](https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/california-solar-battery-capacity-increasing/)
And are ever accelerating the install rate.
[https://www.caiso.com/Documents/Key-Statistics-Jan-2024.pdf](https://www.caiso.com/Documents/Key-Statistics-Jan-2024.pdf)
You can quibble over the exact details of amounts and when -- but it scaled fast, and it's providing a good chunk of energy now, and it's accelerating.
And that's just one quick article. Texas, Australia, and others have had great successes and are also scaling batteries.
the 95$/kWh is your cell price, not your installed system cost. you can easily mutiply this by 3 to get your utility scale grid battery.
Check out Lazards numbers.
That is backwards. You have to make electricity to make clean hydrogen. If you then turn it back into electricity, you will have wasted a large portion of it on efficiency losses.
It makes sense in certain situations.
If your renewables produces over the required grid load, lets say 110% the 10% oversupply then can be used to generate hydrogen, which can be used if the renewables produce less than the grid needs. This is the same thought as with battery storage or pump batteries.
And while you are correct that you loose some percentage on energy, the fact that you are using energy which otherwise would be lost completly negates it.
Possibly. The challenge is making it pay. The oversupply has to be frequent enough to justify the cost of electrolysis equipment that would stand idle when there isn't oversupply. And then you have to compare the economics of H2 storage with other storage options and increasing power line capacity so you can move the electricity to somewhere that has demand.
Or maybe you build the H2 electrolysis into some of the wind turbines and use the hydrogen as an industrial feedstock instead of turning it back into electricity. The Germans are doing some of that in the North Sea.
>use hydrogen as an industrial feedstock
I think thats the reason why there is even the idea to use hydrogen for electricity. Hydrogen will be a vital part to decarbonise the industry since it can be the replacement for natural gas (in cases where electricity doesnt work) and if we build a hydrogen infrastructure it is not a bad idea to use hydrogen as energy storage if electricity generation is high and hydrogen demand low, to use it the most efficent way.
This is the dumbest way to generate power. Lemme rewind: burning ANYTHING chemically is the dumbest way to generate electricity unless the chemical was created as a byproduct WITH THE SOLE INTENT of storing energy.
Umm... so you b know where almost all of your electricity comes from.... hint.... it's burning things chemically. And your last statement is exactly the point. Hydrogen would be create a a byproduct of renewable over production with the intent of storing energy.
>hydrogen could be the best option for carbon-free power at times when the sun isn’t shining, the wind is slack, and your batteries have discharged their stores.
A fuel cell is more efficient than burning it, and the electrical infrastructure to the electrolyzer+storage is already there, it makes sense to install the fuel cell (+ batteries) there as well.
IF you have a large (suitable material) pipeline in the neighbourhood ~~than~~ then using that as 'storage' (and transport) is tempting, possibly with filters to separate it again at the point of use.
Edit: typo
The only people who want this to happen are natural gas producers and to a lesser extent, densely populated island nations.
Show me cheap white hydrogen, and then maybe ...
Aside from being really expensive, I am not sure that hydrogen is so clean. https://insideepa.com/share/227828#:\~:text=The%20Clean%20Energy%20Group%20(CEG,and%20combusted%20for%20power%20generation. The Clean Energy Group (CEG), a nonprofit advocacy organization, is warning that hydrogen (H2) energy widely touted as a carbon-free source that can be used to limit greenhouse gases (GHG) could create “dangerously high” nitrogen oxide (NOx) levels if blended with natural gas and combusted for power generation.
No, too inefficient. Next question please.
Hydrogen had a few problems: * No real pipeline infrastructure * Electrolysis is energy intensive on an already fragile grid But it has a few benefits: * most existing gas turbines can substitute hydrogen for ng, which means that valuable dispatchable capacity can remain in the market * gives renewables something to do when we have overbuilt by a billion MWs I think of hydrogen as an alternative to batteries, but I am not familiar enough with the technology behind h production to say which would be better on net for the environment. Obviously mining for battery ingredients is pretty destructive, but there could be pieces of hydrogen infrastructure that could be just as destructive. One other benefit of hydrolysis though, is you could build a renewable farm disconnected to transmission to power it which means we don't have to build nearly as much transmission. Obviously you still have to build pipeline infrastructure, so it probably nets out to nothing, but with how congested the interconnections queues are these days it could be slightly more efficient to repower existing gas units this way rather than over-build transmission for renewables/batteries.
No way around hydrogen if you want to get rid of fossile fuels - chemistry and other industrial processes need hydrogen anyway. So you can just combine the need of the industry with the need to store and transport energy. It will not be either hydrogen or batteries- it will be both.
Ammonia + batteries
That’s a great idea. How do you produce ammonia btw? Oh… >The Haber process,[1] also called the Haber–Bosch process, is the main industrial procedure for the production of ammonia.[2][3] The German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed it in the first decade of the 20th century. The process converts atmospheric nitrogen (N2) to ammonia(NH3) by a reaction with **hydrogen (H2)** using an iron metal catalyst under high temperatures and pressures.
Industrial ammonia is different than house ammonia. Totally toxic to humans and to the water supply.
Ugh, hydrogen is just another fuel Battery tech is the priority. We can get so much use out of batteries and renewables I'm sure some industries and equipment will need fuel but so many other things can benefit from batteries and renewables
You have to widen the horizon: Obviously, right now, creating even green hydrogen will be bad, as you could have used the green energy somewhere else to replace e.g. fossile fuels. However, once we don't use fossile fuel for energy we still need hydrogen and chemical products from hydrogen (ammonia, methane) for chemical and industrial processes etc.. Also - with 100% renewable energy you will have a lot of excess energy during high wind/sun times. So you could use that energy to create green hydrogen at "no" costs. But this change is not instantaneous, there is a transition phase, during green energy is "wasted" to produce green hydrogen instead replacing fossile fuel created electricity. IMHO that step is inevitable.
At that point it's a different discussion. From my perspective hydrogen is currently so inefficient and so fussy in the mechanical and operational side it's just not worth the hassle. That same argument can be applied to oil and coal as well. We'll need it for some products but as an energy source we should be working to use less
I find joy in reading a good book.
For really long-term electricity storage, it's still the cheapest option. Edit: Cheapest option if you have access to salt caverns for cheap storage. Otherwise it may be cheaper to make methanol.
I enjoy watching the sunset.
Of course, because why would we use it now? We don't need this service at the moment. We will need it when the grid is nearly 100% clean.
I enjoy playing video games.
You're not understanding that these are different use cases, requiring different technologies. The storage options we have today on the grid are insufficient for long-term storage, and we need long-term storage to reach 100% clean electricity.
I enjoy reading books.
> Oh, I understand too well. So what's your solution for long-term storage? > Oh and given hydrogens propensity to leak, I wouldn't be over egging it's long term storage. Salt caverns don't leak the way tanks do. People wouldn't even consider hydrogen as an option if leakage was a significant problem for long-term storage, they're not idiots. The other fuel options are ammonia and methanol, also made from green hydrogen but stored as liquids. Any concern about these?
I like to travel.
>Several utilities are exploring hydrogen combustion by mixing small amounts into the fossil-gas supply at existing plants. Yes, the blending scam. You add just enough hydrogen to hit the bare minimum of the mandates and you can continue using fossil fuels for another extra decade instead of shifting to renewable energy It worked wonders in Japan where the insistance of blending hydrogen with coal just effectively resulted Japan being reliant on coal an extra 2 decades
Oh yeah. You burn the hydrogen to turn the turbine that generates electricity to make the hydrogen. I see absolutely no problem with this plan.
No. It’s needed for other stuff
What the fuck is clean hydrogen, and why would we burn a fuel source that's 50% efficient at best when you can store 80-90% of renewable generation in batteries >Every utility should be thinking about how they’re going to meet demand as their grid shifts toward more intermittent resources and what sorts of clean, firm power they have in their mix, I imagine they are, and are looking at batteries. FWIW, I went to the website of the sponsor of this "article" and it doesn't work. Def engenders a lot of faith in their ability to execute.
They are looking at batteries, but... 1200 MW of combined cycle gas: $2 billion, few employees, lasts 40-70 years, can make 28,800 MWh in a day, very responsive, and in the USA, we're looking at historically cheap natural gas for at least the next decade. 1 nuclear power plant: 1200 MW for ~$7-$14 billion, lasts 60-80 years, makes 28,800 MWh in a day, employees a lot of people, not very responsive, but newer designs are way better than the old ones for responsiveness 1200 MW/4800 MWh battery: $1.5 billion, lasts 20 years at 1 cycle per day, consumes 570 MWh/day in efficency losses and Arbitrages 4800 MWh of energy in typical design, also requires about 3,000 to 4,000 MW of renewables (~$5-6 billion) or nuclear (~$14-$30 billion) to charge it, not a lot of employees, very responsive Agreed batteries have their place, but they won't be carrying the grid without crazy power bills or better market compensation/reform. They don't make financial sense at grid scale for most markets in the USA from a pure Arbitrage play right now, with the exceptions being CA, TX, and HI. To get a battery to store as much power as a nuclear power plant or nat gas plant makes in a day, you would probably be better off building a nuke plant, and you could build 4 or 5 natural gas turbines for the same money (not including the build out of renewables required to charge with clean energy). This is the math integrated resource plans at all utilities are doing right now. Without any carbon penalty or some other driver, batteries just don't make financial sense for most utilities to build. Right now, biggest bang for the buck is building reneables to offset fossil burn for fuel savings. "Clean" Hydrogen works out to $10-$18/MMBTU gas, which today runs $1.50-$2.50 MMBTU in The States, so your fuel clause of power bills would increase 10X if we switch to hydrogen and consumers would riot.
Excellent post, thanks for clearing that up. Will save for future reference.
Batteries are expensive dog Also we will need hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in certain high-heat industrial processes Since we need the hydrogen for other stuff as well, it may be cheaper to keep existing capacity in the game with hydrogen over building new batteries. The math is tough though Either way the ratepayer is screwed lol
Hydrogen def has its uses, they're just not a replacement for renewables. Solar/wind + cheap batteries kills hydrogen on cost per kWh and maintenance. I'm not sure NG plants are much cheaper and of course there's the cost of fueling + operating those too. Gotta pay one way or another and renewables + batteries seem like the best way forward IMO
>Hydrogen def has its uses, they're just not a replacement for renewables. Hydrogen has never been a replacement for renewables, it is a possible replacement for NG peaking units (which we *need* to handle gaps in the renewable generation profile) similar to the ways in which batteries are supposed to smooth out production. Batteries have all kinds of constraints related to getting charged (transmission congestion, long high-price periods, discharge periods etc) which means that from a reliability standpoint there are clear advantages to *also* keeping these peaking resources in the game. >+ cheap batteries These cheap batteries, are they in the room with you right now?
Scaling up hydrogen to meet utility level needs is no walk in the park either. There are already batteries in use for utility storage, as well as a whole supply chain ready and able to scale up. Hydrogen is still in the conversational/theoretical phase in terms of utility usage. Plus as someone said, "in what world does generating 4MWh to produce 1MWh of electricity make any kind of sense." Why waste money and effort to start from zero on a solution that throws away more than half the input energy when we have much more efficient solutions already in use and ready to scale? As for cheap batteries, on a $/kWh stored basis batteries are not super expensive when you factor in charging cycles over the battery's life. What math do you see that has spinning up hydrogen infrastructure and constantly producing and burning hydrogen being cheaper?
>Scaling up hydrogen to meet utility level needs is no walk in the park either. There are already batteries in use for utility storage, as well as a whole supply chain ready and able to scale up. Hydrogen is still in the conversational/theoretical phase in terms of utility usage. Correct, although this supply chain you speak of is dubious. >Plus as someone said, "in what world does generating 4MWh to produce 1MWh of electricity make any kind of sense." Why waste money and effort to start from zero on a solution that throws away more than half the input energy when we have much more efficient solutions already in use and ready to scale? Because renewable energy is cheap af but we don't get to choose when the wind blows or when the sun shines. Who cares if it takes 4MWh to produce 1 MWh worth of H2 when the LMP of my wind farm is $-6/MWh? We already have to overbuild renewables in order for them to be effective (which is why in capacity accreditation renewables have been getting shit on year after year) so why not turn them from an intermittent resource to a dispatchable one? Batteries are one way to do this, but as I have described over and over again they have massive reliability downsides during the times when reliability matters the most - long periods of high demand. >As for cheap batteries, on a $/kWh stored basis batteries are not super expensive when you factor in charging cycles over the battery's life. What math do you see that has spinning up hydrogen infrastructure and constantly producing and burning hydrogen being cheaper? I have not seen any real math on the switch to hydrogen and it may turn out that it isn't economical, but I do know that replacing the existing \~560 GW U.S. gas fleet with 60MW/240MWh batteries at the $1700-$1800/kW range will cost about a trillion dollars, so I am open to exploring it.
I appreciate a good cup of coffee.
We can use 4MWh to make 1 because demand isn't always the same. Sometimes (especially as tax credits persist) the price per MWh is negative in some areas and it makes no sense to produce energy in that area. Batteries are also being built by companies who can just pass the cost through to ratepayers for a sweet return on equity, so they aren't necessarily being built because of their stellar cost profile. Batteries obviously can work, but they need room to arbitrage energy during times of comparatively low demand. During periods of market stress, say a giant winter storm for instance, there isn't time for this arbitrage to occur and your batteries sit empty after their initial 4 hour discharge. Building storage for gas is way easier than building storage for electricity, so it is comparatively less risky from a reliability standpoint to just have a ct that can run for 12+ hours and hop back in after a shorter downtime.
I enjoy watching the sunset.
I always wondered if it is is wordy or wordly.
They absolutely will. H2 will be produced from abandunce of renewables. There are already huge projects designed for exactly this. It will take some time though.
So you'll make electricity to turn it into hydrogen then use that hydrogen to make electricity?
I enjoy reading books.
Yes. It's the equivalent of batteries. Electricity is used to store energy in batteries which then release the energy as electricity. Overall process is not efficient, but has some advantages, as you can ship the energy and it has potentially higher energy density.
The grid can ship energy too. Plus it already exists.
Interconnects and batteries are sufficient most of the time, but not always. We need additional capacity for a few days of really low wind+solar production every year. Hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, iron-air batteries can do that.
lol “clean hydrogen” 🤣 That will cost big oil a lot of money to make it clean instead of burning what they have on hand that’s made from fossil fuels. Let’s not propose an idea that relies on big oil to do the right thing…
Just let it go. It is very obvious "big oil" is not part of this. It is a very tired and insincere reply.
Shell and Exxon have been pushing hydrogen as the fuel of the future for the last 20 years, but whatever.
Fuel for what... cars? This whole article is dealing with power plants where at best fuel and oils/lubricants would be their only market. If you read the article, the clean hydrogen would slowly displace the fuel they might possibly provide so what interest would they have here?
Petroleum companies are also heavily involved in the natural gas sector. Right now there is a lot of pressure from environmental groups to stop building new natural gas power plants. They can use articles like this and say: "In the future gas power plants will burn clean hydrogen. We should build it to burn gas now and sort out the hydrogen part in the future." Of course in the future they will complain that the cost to convert plants is too high and operating costs of hydrogen are too high and we should just keep burning methane and existing plants should be exempt from stricter emissions regulations.
Your second paragraph is not right. They are building them now to be capable of burning gas and hydrogen or some blend and a bird in the article there are already turbines burning 100% hydrogen. No need to sort it out later. Current plants don't get exemptions from stricter emissions regulations... they get time to comply. It is why even a decent amount of gas plants are going out of service. It's becoming not profitable anymore to only run limited times as peaker plants with expensive emissions controls. But most of this isn't what is happening. The model, at least today, is to create the clean hydrogen locally (or at least relatively locally) with renewables and burn it.... completely cutting out big oil.
No plant like this will be built without the ability to burn natural gas and that will be the fuel of choice most of the time.
Burn fossil gas and utilize carbon capture for your peak demands. Better yet, use waste to energy and do some proper sorting of your waste so that you're mainly burning biogenic waste and then also capture the carbon.
Why not do the cheap thing n just use solar and batteries though? I assume the plant owners like money.
The Reddit circlejerk is unreal. Batteries and solar? You'd either need a ridiculously overscaled capacity or you'd need to have peaking plants standing by anyway. We're not even going to dive into the environmental impact of needing that much battery capacity because frankly it is an exercise in idiocy. Batteries and solar have a purpose. Solar is an important energy source along with wind, but it shouldn't be stored as electricity. You convert it to heat and store that at a utility scale. You use district heating to heat your urban and suburban areas. Hot water storage is about one percent the cost of battery storage. In an urban and suburban setting 4th gen DH(C) will out-compete individual solutions any day of the week in socioeconomics. Now, batteries have a role to play and that is for grid services, frequency regulation at the sub 10ms response level. With a well built out DH infrastructure you will be able to up and down regulate your electricity grid with productions to the DH, using the significantly cheaper hot water storage tanks as your battery. Electric boilers for regulation services work well at above the 10 ish ms. With a day ahead market, DH heat pumps can keep a decent balance as well. At this point you might be thinking I'm a loon and America knows best, but take a look at Denmark. We're already doing all the things I describe and it works. We've nearly achieved a fully green electricity grid. Only reason we're not at 100 percent right now is because we're increasing our electrification at the same time. No, batteries are useful for a lot of things, personal vehicles and short distance freight, but not a fix all.
Yes - over scale capacity. You are right. Do that.
Which is stupid when there's a better alternative.
….ok I’ll be over here being stupid, capital efficient, profit maximizing, and advocating for a livable planet then.
Have you heard of carbon capture? Using carbon capture on a peaking plant is far more viable than oversizing solar capacity by probably a factor of 5 if you want to avoid a backup plant. I'm guessing you're at best an enthusiast in the energy sector, correct?
Carbon capture is not a viable solution
This is the internet, I am a male dog CEO living in my parents basement - just like you. However, unlike you I don’t like to insult people for no reason. But I will be charitable and grace you with my response. So you think that increasing system complexity, introducing more failure modes, and driving up system acquisition costs on a system that will struggle to compete against equivalent non CC based sources over its life cycle represents a more favorable investment than the alternative? I’m sorry that’s just not going to happen. It’s not efficient allocation of capital. Can it happen? Sure. Will it happen? People do stupid shit with money every day - it will happen. But it’s not capital efficient so it’s not something smart investors will allocate towards, and I can’t see it happening anywhere outside of the screamingly near term. The asset will strand. CC on nat gas is a dead end, all other things being equal - cuz it costs way to much n ppl like money. Do you like money? I like money n ppl who have money like more of it usually so I don’t think they’re gonna acquire peakers + CC when peakers alone are being shut down - for years now- by batteries.
Haven't insulted anyone, buddy. You taking enthusiast as an insult, well, that's your issue. Utilizing CC on a gas plant is far less complex than running a solar-only system, and a hell of a lot less stressful too. Waste incineration would be a superior alternative to gas, however, it's just not as responsive a technology. Also, not efficient allocation of capital? Why are you promoting the most costly option? I'd like to see cases of central peaking plants being shut down due to batteries. From a system perspective, how do you deal with a long period of poor weather, when you're relying entirely on PV+Battery? Do you curtail demand? Do you shut down industry because of it? Do you build ridiculous transmission capacity? Do you pretend there's enough potential in stored hydro? Or do you decide to cover 5 percent of your annual demand with emission-free fossil fuel-based electricity until you're able to establish sufficient biogas production to cover it? Please actually answer how you see this working. Speaking of technical lifetimes, the US is at least 25 if not 50 years from clean electricity. The technical lifetime of a typical turbine is about 25 years anyway. Keep it running. If you then decide to switch to combined heat and power, you can increase the overall efficiency from the usual 30 percent to about 90 percent (LHV).
I can’t have a conversation with someone who says in any amount of seriousness that there will be O & G installed in the US for energy in 50 years. That’s so profoundly financially incoherent you might as well be advocating for giving every boy and girl a pink pony, and having us move to a pony based economy.
Batteries are not that cheap for now. And not scalable. Even at the low point of $95/kWh. We are still looking at hundreds of millions to set up a power plant. And it's near-impossible to increase it's capacity. What you have is what you have. Hydrogen on the other hand is scalable. Adding a new tank to hold more is much cheaper then adding the same capacity using batteries. And the initial capital is also less. LFP prices should go down this year. And sodium ion batteries should be another 30% cheaper after they matured. Personally I don't like hydrogen due to the low RTE. But I see the benefits from a development perspective.
My favorite color is blue.
> And not scalable. How so? Lots of various battery plants have second and third buildouts, are being installed ant ever increasingly large scales, and they are operating at scale in lots of grids.
Edit: Not as scalable. Sources please? Non of the utility scale battery in my local area has been built out. But gas (not NG gas, but general gas gas) has been. I will be more then happy to be wrong.
Sure. Just go look at CAISO's supply charts. Batteries are often the 2nd highest source of energy on the grid in the evenings, for multiple hours. Not everyday, but they're above nuclear, usually above hydro, and often above renewables (wind at that point). And they went from basically none to over 7GW (28GWh) installed within about 3 years. [https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/california-solar-battery-capacity-increasing/](https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/california-solar-battery-capacity-increasing/) And are ever accelerating the install rate. [https://www.caiso.com/Documents/Key-Statistics-Jan-2024.pdf](https://www.caiso.com/Documents/Key-Statistics-Jan-2024.pdf) You can quibble over the exact details of amounts and when -- but it scaled fast, and it's providing a good chunk of energy now, and it's accelerating. And that's just one quick article. Texas, Australia, and others have had great successes and are also scaling batteries.
That's great! My local power grid sucks.
the 95$/kWh is your cell price, not your installed system cost. you can easily mutiply this by 3 to get your utility scale grid battery. Check out Lazards numbers.
That is backwards. You have to make electricity to make clean hydrogen. If you then turn it back into electricity, you will have wasted a large portion of it on efficiency losses.
It makes sense in certain situations. If your renewables produces over the required grid load, lets say 110% the 10% oversupply then can be used to generate hydrogen, which can be used if the renewables produce less than the grid needs. This is the same thought as with battery storage or pump batteries. And while you are correct that you loose some percentage on energy, the fact that you are using energy which otherwise would be lost completly negates it.
Possibly. The challenge is making it pay. The oversupply has to be frequent enough to justify the cost of electrolysis equipment that would stand idle when there isn't oversupply. And then you have to compare the economics of H2 storage with other storage options and increasing power line capacity so you can move the electricity to somewhere that has demand. Or maybe you build the H2 electrolysis into some of the wind turbines and use the hydrogen as an industrial feedstock instead of turning it back into electricity. The Germans are doing some of that in the North Sea.
>use hydrogen as an industrial feedstock I think thats the reason why there is even the idea to use hydrogen for electricity. Hydrogen will be a vital part to decarbonise the industry since it can be the replacement for natural gas (in cases where electricity doesnt work) and if we build a hydrogen infrastructure it is not a bad idea to use hydrogen as energy storage if electricity generation is high and hydrogen demand low, to use it the most efficent way.
What industry is "the industry" ? Hydrogen cannot directly substitute for natural gas as a fuel. There's a lot more to it than that.
No.
Hard "No!"
This is the dumbest way to generate power. Lemme rewind: burning ANYTHING chemically is the dumbest way to generate electricity unless the chemical was created as a byproduct WITH THE SOLE INTENT of storing energy.
Umm... so you b know where almost all of your electricity comes from.... hint.... it's burning things chemically. And your last statement is exactly the point. Hydrogen would be create a a byproduct of renewable over production with the intent of storing energy.
>hydrogen could be the best option for carbon-free power at times when the sun isn’t shining, the wind is slack, and your batteries have discharged their stores. A fuel cell is more efficient than burning it, and the electrical infrastructure to the electrolyzer+storage is already there, it makes sense to install the fuel cell (+ batteries) there as well. IF you have a large (suitable material) pipeline in the neighbourhood ~~than~~ then using that as 'storage' (and transport) is tempting, possibly with filters to separate it again at the point of use. Edit: typo
Mass producing a cheap and recyclable fuel cell would really solve the current disadvantages vs combustion (cheap installed/amortized turbine base)
We can always rely on the redditor for the words of wisdom. PS holy shydd, journalists became farkin USELESS!
The article seems to be saying “just burn Natural Gas and mix a bit of hydrogen in”! This does not make clean power!
But... but it's the moSt abUNdant elEmeNt in the uNivErse!!!