Grid-scale batteries: They’re not just lithium

When size and weight don't matter, lots of other battery chemistries can work.

See full article...

 

[Walker On Earth]

In any case, I will also respond to Ddopson here because it is relevant:



Solar/wind and battery storage (the very subject of this fine article) already exist, are far cheaper, and don't rely on a non existent pipeline of green hydrogen to make it not add CO2.

I don't consider this hand-waiving.

Edit: added comment about electrolysis VS steam reforming facilities.

 

[Walker On Earth]

I saw your earlier history with this poster. A few points:

a) I saw nothing 'straw maning', as Ddopson put it. And just making the accusation doesn't fly; specific instances must be noted along with reasons why these objections are a strawman.

b) The burden of proof is on the one making the claim, not on anyone else. Saying that you've got to show why hydrogen storage in infeasible is, at best, showing a profound misunderstanding of how this works. At best.

c) Twiddling the knobs on a model of costs isn't proof of the underlying feasibility of the technology in question. This one is bonkers insane. How anyone could think this is beyond crazy talk. If anyone truly believes this, I've got a a little model for the various costs of nuclear fusion, want to buy some shares I happen to have handy? I trust my point is made. The fact that it had to be made is deeply depressing, considering that posters here fancy themselves more tech-savvy than most, God help us all.

There are several more points I could have made, but I want these three, especially the last one to sink in.

 

[Walker On Earth]

I don't see much, if any, discussion on the technological hurdles to be overcome. These are -- or should be -- well known. For those who can't be arsed to research the subject, here's the hasenpfeffer lady giving a capsule summary. For anyone pushing alternative energy who denounces the awl companies as being pure evil while at the same time being on about the wonders of hydrogen, well, let me say they seem awfully gullible. Seeing how as a lot of that hydrogen hype is being pushed those self same companies and is widely denounced as yet another attempt at greenwashing.

 

[Walker On Earth]

APG isn't really relevant. Renewables are replacing other generation means because they are cheaper, which means they are only going to become more prevalent over time. Grid storage is a natural outgrowth because renewables benefit from time-shifting between generation and use.

So you don't believe that APG is an existential crisis and that we don't need to be throwing anything and everything at the problem. Good to know.

 

[Walker On Earth]

I assume APG is some weird synonym for "climate change", but I have no idea what it stands for.

Empirically, we aren't "throwing anything and everything" at the problem, because most of our population isn't willing to pay what I've estimated would be a 10% cost premium for true zero-emissions electricity. Nor is there political consensus to pass a basic carbon tax. We've effectively set a price of $0 on carbon pollution, willing to take lower pollution solutions ONLY when they also save us money. Plus various cosmetic greenwashing efforts to assuage anxieties over the problems we're unwilling to solve directly.

In reality, it's more like we are throwing exactly nothing at the problem, and we are damned lucky that the march of technology is making progress on the problem in our absence.

The idea that society would be willing to pay a 400% premium for electricity in order to deploy your favorite technology is ... implausible.

Oh dear Lord:

a) I didn't say 'we', I said 'you'. Don't go off on a tangent concerning something I didn't say.

b) That 'last 10%' is the difference between surviving the winter or freezing in the dark. Don't play with other people's lives.

c) Stop declaring something is so by fiat. You still haven't shown that hydrogen storage is feasible, preferring to double down and demand other people prove that it isn't. If that's the standard you want to go by, just skip to nuclear fusion; it's demonstrated a net energy positive and so it must be feasible.

d) I don't have a 'favorite technology'.

e) I suggest you dial down the combativeness and address the points ... particularly point c). That's the one you've been ducking. The rest is just so much squid ink: 'My favorite technology'? I can't imagine why you think this advances the discussion.

 

[Walker On Earth]

Thanks with providing us with a textbook example of a Straw Man argument. I discussed a priority ordering for decarbonization and then you swapped what I actually said for some crazy-pants argument about shutting off the power to people's homes during periods of dangerous cold, allowing you, the heroic virtue-signaling knight, to step in and thoroughly demolish that straw man position.

My my my. Histrionic little git, ain't you? Meanwhile, don't think we didn't notice your refusal to address point c), to whit, your claim that hydrogen storage is feasible. So, let's see your evidence for this assertion.

I also want to see an apology for your very rude behaviour, or rather, I want to see you deny that you owe me one.

 

[Walker On Earth]

Indeed, I've started poking around in their fancier model, which includes some transmission grid modeling. In particular, I'm curious to better understand the dynamics driving their balance between onshore vs offshore wind.

However, what you've posted is broadly consistent with the results from the toy model. The cheapest grid gets most of its power from renewables, backed by a few hours of batteries and a significant number of gas peakers that operate on a modestly low duty-cycle. As you put an increasingly higher cost on carbon emissions, the number of gas peaker hours drops, initially due to mild over-provisioning of the renewables, later due to the inclusion of hydrogen for energy storage to further reduce peaker hours towards zero.

Even on the toy model with constant demand, the plot is similar:View attachment 91147

It's not surprising that hydrogen mostly discharges during the morning/evening net demand peaks; when a day needs a hydrogen withdrawal, might as well take it at the most useful time, subject only to the limitation that we don't want to over-spend on the discharge infrastructure (ie, there should be some days where the hydrogen discharge runs continuously, or we've paid for too many turbines). But hydrogen's core role is still in shifting power between days. There are a few days where hydrogen charges during the solar and discharges that same night, but those same-day energy transfers only explain a small fraction of the hydrogen discharge -- it happens on days where the diurnal shifting opportunity exceeds available battery capacity, and these days must be relatively rare, otherwise it would be profitable to add more batteries. Most of the hydrogen that gets consumed was put into storage much further in advance, on the order of weeks and months.

Thermal storage is promising on paper, but can be surprisingly tricky to deploy. It's a site by site problem, which makes scaling very challenging. At the margins we could get some consumer A/C units to over-cool during the afternoons, and in sufficiently well-insulated buildings that might pay out if the incentives were aligned and the coordination problems solved. But installing an actual thermal reservoir is challenging. My house has a water-based HVAC system, with a 50 gallon tank in the basement as a thermal reservoir, but that's only enough capacity to cover something like ~30 minutes. I'd need to fill a third of my basement with tankage to be able to buffer overnight. The capex for me to do that was too high (labor cost is offensively expensive) and my power company doesn't offer any time-of-use incentives under my current billing model. With a water-based HVAC, I'm a near ideal case, yet I can't get the project to make financial sense. For someone who has a more standard mini-split system, the conversion cost is prohibitive. And I wouldn't recommend my water-based system to anyone who has a choice: 200+ hours of debugging / maintenance effort and counting.

Or my office building has an industrial-scale ice-based thermal reservoir, and I strongly suspect that buying solar panels would have been a cheaper way to reduce daytime loads. Using ice's phase change instead of cooling liquid water improves the thermal capacity by almost an order-of-magnitude, but then instead of being able to reuse the same air conditioners that you still need to maintain in parallel, you also need to provision an entirely separate chiller system that can cool glycol to well below the freezing point of water, so right there, you've more than doubled your A/C plant's capex. Then the storage tanks are designed by a contract engineering firm that's known to have generous margins, and it took several iterations to fix all the leaks. This sort of thing adds up very quickly, and then you're also buying more than one kWhr at night per kWhr that you've shifted away from the daytime. Which, btw, is the opposite direction of what most grids need, but Manhattan has a lot of daytime loads, so that's what their priority was at the time this project was done (it was related to an anticipated power plant closure).

In my post right before this one (probably written in parallel), I gave their cost assumptions per kWhr of discharged electricity:
* Lithium-ion: €160
* Stainless Hydrogen Tanks: €22
* Geologic Hydrogen: €0.25
* Methane: even cheaper (eg, Germany has 255 TWhrs of storage capacity, which is more than 6 months of their electricity usage and exceeds by a large margin the entire global inventory of Lithium-ion)

Lithium-ion is certainly going to continue getting cheaper, and the model's 2030 price assumption is arguably too pessimistic for even 2024, but the gap to even the most expensive hydrogen storage option is huge and unlikely to be closed anytime soon. If we get Lithium-ion for €22/kWhr, it's all but game-over. The lowest-cost grid becomes 2/3rds solar dominated with 4% gas peakers and zero-emissions is only 106% with geologic hydrogen storage or 109% without, and all three of those prices are less than today's polluting price.

Really? And after you said in an earlier post that you don't do models as proof of feasibility? Need I say what I think of people like you who believe these sorts of practices, this bald-faced lying is okay? But the burden of proof in on me to show that you're wrong, sigh. You're prescientific.

BTW, here's yet another source saying you're wrong about the feasibility of hydrogen storage.

Look, I get it, this is your dream scenario. But it's patently obvious that you don't have the chops to pull this sort of thing off in front of a rightly-skeptical audience.

 

[Walker On Earth]

You linked article states:

“The standout use for clean hydrogen here is for long-term storage,” Liebreich wrote. His green-hydrogen ladder ranks this use case near the top of his scale, along with shipping, steelmaking and chemical production.

In this case, “long-term” means storing hydrogen for months at a time. A handful of large-scale clean hydrogen projects, such as the ACES Delta project in Utah, are targeting this “seasonal” energy storage application. But the ACES project is paired with enormous underground salt caverns that can store massive amounts of hydrogen. FPL’s project uses above ground storage tanks, which are a far more costly way to store large volumes of hydrogen.

This Canary Media article is trying to highlight, or suggest, that Florida Power and Lighting is just using government funds to expands their fossil fuel assets in the guise of fossil fuel blending with green hydrogen. If you read further in the article, Canary Media goes right down to what everyone has been discussing in this thread: green hydrogen usage for long term storage. For power applications that is.

Whether above ground storage can get cheaper than below ground, who knows. Me? Turn it in to methane, or whatever fuel that can be liquefied and call it a day.

Surely, and the implications are that so far 'green hydrogen's' primary application seems to be hydrogen- or green-washing big petroleum.

I'm not willing to accept by fiat that "we'll just do long-term storage (for the winter months) with a hydrogen network". To say its feasibility has been demonstrated (by a 'modeling tool'!) is a huge lift, and there are many, many articles/studies panning the idea. I can cite as many as you like with a simple google search.

Note that I'm not saying it's infeasible, just that feasibility has yet to be demonstrated. Do you have anything in the way of what you consider convincing evidence? Saying that we'll just adapt the old petroleum storage networks doesn't cut it. Or rather, if you want to go that route, you'll have to show me the cost schedules, what they're paying for, and how long it will take. Which, come to think of it, is what you'd have to show me in any case.

 

[Walker On Earth]

The idea that we can use geologic storage is entirely non-controversial, because we already do this at mind-boggling scale for natural gas. And there are various chemicals companies, such as Imperial Chemical Industries that stored Hydrogen underground for decades without any apparent issues. And we've found natural reservoirs of hydrogen gas that was geologically contained for millions of years. Disbelieving this reality is pure ignorance.

As my "feasibility proof" (whatever that is), I submit to you the objective reality that (most of us) live in.

Here's a map of the gas storage capacities for the EU countries:
View attachment 91199

The area of each circle is proportional to that country's gas storage capacity and hovering over a country provides the concrete numbers. For Germany, it's 255 TWhrs of gas, which is almost exactly 200 days worth of Germany's full electricity demand. The storage of gas is measured in months, almost in years, and it absolutely dwarfs the most starry-eyed projections for what Lithium-ion could deliver by 2050. Utterly vast scale of energy storage.

Hydrogen is genuinely harder to store than Methane, but so what? There's two "problems" from a storage perspective.

Sigh. Do you really not know how this works? I believe you. There's this thing called 'research' and here are just a few links on the first page of a very cursory google search:

https://www.courthousenews.com/eu-d...n-revolution-need-reality-check-auditors-say/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261923019505
https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/news/NEWS-SR-2024-11
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/pro...y-and-germany-scrapped-by-equinor/2-1-1713642
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/pro...0-at-current-rate-hydrogen-europe/2-1-1558335
https://rmi.org/insight/the-value-of-green-hydrogen-trade-for-europe/
Let me explain something to you: Research doesn't mean only find favorable articles. Like the one we're discussing now; more than one poster notes that it reads more like a PR release than an objective article. That you think otherwise is ... mind boggling.

No, don't tell me I didn't read your words properly; I've scrolled back and see that you've leveled that accusation at more than a few people. I'll also note that in a previous comment, allowing for two weeks worth of storage makes me 'a shill for nuclear power' yet you're perfectly okay (from your 'model tool', no less) that hydrogen storage has to provide 336 hours of power. !?!?!?!

Since it is impossible to have a productive discussion with you, since you get your back up at the slightest bit of criticism, I won't be reading any comments from you. PLONK!

 

[Walker On Earth]

I've got him on ignore now but I can still see his latest comments. He really doesn't know how to interpret 'hydrogen- or green-washing'? Once again I believe him and once again I see I was wise to take the action that I did: that means 'hydrogen-washing or green-washing'. Obviously.

 

[Walker On Earth]

However long distance battery electric rail of any chemistry is pointless. This problem was solved 100 years ago, with overhead wire electrification. Unlimited range. Regenerative braking back to the grid. No time spent recharging. Less mass for storage, leaving more for power or other conveniences or run lighter. Less hazard from energy storage in the event of a collision. Fewer conflict minerals.

Unfortunately American railroads hate spending on infrastructure, even when in the long term it would be much cheaper to operate.

Probably a very silly question, how vulnerable are overhead wires to illegal tapping? What would motivate such behaviour I wouldn't care to guess, but humans are strange creatures.

 

[Walker On Earth]

Residential distribution lines are, if anything, easier to tap because they're closer to buildings. And since catenary doesn't normally have side connections any taps would be pretty obvious on inspection.

Well, that answers that! Presumably the train makes connection with a bare wire; maybe not? I said it was a very silly question; it's just that I've got a thing for trains is all. Yes, I can make a logical argument for better rails, networks, etc. But I'd be lying if I said I said my underlying fondness had nothing to do with those arguments.