Solving renewable energy’s sticky storage problem
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Isn't the only benefit of hydrogen as an energy storage medium that you can transport it? Like, if Egypt has an excess of energy they can store it in hydrogen and sell it to Germany.
Throwing some DC cables between Egypt and the European grid would probably be more efficient in the long term.
EDIT: It's 400 miles between Egypt and mainland Greece. I don't know of Crete is connected to the main EU grid or not. But that could be a side benefit of this.
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This is a nonsensical argument. You're underwriting the cost of an expensive infrastructure project by only a few weeks of annual usage. Systems that aren't to be used all the time need to be low-cost in terms of infrastructure. They can afford to be expensive to operate, but not to build.
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A 'benefit' of hydrogen is you can store it in natural gas reservoirs, which are currently used to provide storage of gas today. They're currently sized to provide a good chunk of a winter's gas requirement in eg the North Sea, and so there's a pathway there to do the same, just with hydrogen. (yes, the oil companies would say that)
When you start stringing DC cables too far afield you end up relying on places of dubious political stability, which is a problem of oil and gas it would be good not to repeat. Not to say we shouldn't do it, but we shouldn't wholly rely on them.
Edit: quick back of the envelope. The Rough storage field in the North Sea can store 100bn cu.ft of natural gas. At 20C that's 2.372E+8 kg of hydrogen which by my calculations works out to be 7827 GWh. At a current average 30GW that would power the UK for 10.8 days. A typical UK winter dunkelflaute might be about 2 weeks, so that's roughly enough - although perhaps not with increased use of electric heating. I'm no doubt skating over some differences with compressing methane v hydrogen here, so take those numbers with a heap of salt.
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Why no commentary on using excess power to create biofuels to feed the existing power plants? It seems that if you've already got a massive infrastructure for boilers and power generation that converting them to operate on bio-derived fuels is a much lower infrastructure option than any of the ones mentioned.
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We've had the answer to non-fossil fuel based energy and non-greenhouse gas emitting energy for 70 years: nuclear power. The modern environmental movement has done immense damage to their own cause by their irrational hatred of nuclear power
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There are two connections planned in that area: Israel-Cyprus-Crete-mainland Greece and Egypt-Cyprus-Crete-mainland Greece. The one to Israel has funding approved from the EU's Connecting Europe Facility.
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Also, the argument that you can waste 2/3 of the energy that you put into the battery, can also be used to justify, flow batteries, iron-air, flywheels and all the other methods listed in the article that aren't Li-ion
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Not again. One of these hang wringing articles about the dreaded battery storage issue. Look, California is getting it done and the world is watching. Plunging battery prices are seeing to it it’s the go-to investment for those needs. The latest increases came during both the restricted working era of Covid and one of supply problems. Imagine the uptake when the latter completely goes away. Total storage is now at +14 GWh, as more and more gets added almost every day.
10,000 MW storage barrier crossed
Single 680 MW battery project online late 2024
10,000 Megawatts installed and going
10,000 MW storage barrier crossed
Single 680 MW battery project online late 2024
10,000 Megawatts installed and going
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Thermal plants are about ~35% efficient and the process to create bio fuels(you are thinking synthetic hydrocarbons probably, not bio process corn) is quite lossy already. Depending on how long you would want to store it just storing the energy as liquid salt is probably more efficient.
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The article clearly addresses the CA storage projects. It also points out that the time scale for storage for such systems isn't nearly long enough to cover the expected doldrums in other locations around the world. Germany may have very different expected power generation expectations than California so it's not unreasonable that Germany may need different storage investments than California.
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Isn't that one of the arguments of hydrogen, that you can burn it in gas plants?
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That was addressed in the article. That only works well in mountainous areas. With droughts expected to be more common in the future, one cannot expect to use the massive volumes of water for energy storage that would be required without a large elevation change.
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I'm not so sure that would work. H2 is a much smaller molecule than the hydrocarbons in natural gas. This means it doesn't take a very big hole to leak a lot of hydrogen.
I found this out the hard way when I did a shadow a professional program for a week when I was in high school. At one point the chemist I was shadowing let me ignite a hydrogen torch he was using as part of an experiment. I had used propane torches before, so I treated it as such. I opened the valve on the torch until I could hear the gas. When I triggered the striker to start it a fireball erupted in front of my face. Hydrogen, being a much smaller molecule, had come out of the torch much faster than propane would have.
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I'd be interested to hear about the demand side of the equation. Certainly all demand isn't the same, is it feasible, technically and more importantly politically, to partition the power grid in a manner that "Life Support" demand (hot water, HVAC, et cetera) is more important than non-life-support demand (TV, Playstation, Bitcoin Mining, graphic's rendering)?
Outside that, It feels like the answer is likely something like alot more "local" potential energy storage. But that just shifts the demand in time.
Outside that, It feels like the answer is likely something like alot more "local" potential energy storage. But that just shifts the demand in time.
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It's way too late for that, I mean, yes, much like that saying about trees, the best time to start building a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago, the second-best time is today. The problem is that between regular NIMBYs and fossil fuel backed "environmentalists" it would take forever to build a nuclear reactor, and the economics don't make sense anymore, solar and wind is the cheaper option now, and still on track to be even more economical in the future, expensive storage or not. Any new nuclear development would have power production as a neat side-bonus to make sense, like reactors dedicated to making nuclear medicine isotopes, reprocessing nuclear waste, or for high temperature industrial heating for thermal desalination and/or hydrogen production.
Not that I'm pro-hydrogen for grid use because of how hard it is to make green hydrogen that's remotely economical, much less trying to store it safely. Though we're going to need something to replace fossil fuels, it's hard to make anything remotely capable as a modern commercial jet without huge sacrifices running off of batteries....
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Those lines, going to Europe from Northern Africa? Guess who financed those massive North Africa desert PV installations that will be connected to them? Current oil producing countries Emirates, Saudi and Kuwait. The path to the future is pretty clear.
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I was actually thinking of agriculture-derivative biofuels. Let the sun provide most of the energy. Then use some of your excess electrical power to process the stock into something cost-competitive during doldrums.
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That used to be true. Modern combined-cycle thermal plants are over 50% efficient, and the record is 62% efficient on average.
https://www.araner.com/blog/combined-cycle-power-plant-efficiency-what-you-need-to-know
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Sure. It's a minor change to move natural gas plants that mostly burn methane to hydrogen.
But it's a lot cheaper to transport and store liquid hydrocarbons than hydrogen. And if you're using the sun to provide most of the energy for your biofuel, you're investing a lot less grid power in your feed stock.
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The main benefit is that you can store vast amounts of energy in hydrogen compared to batteries - and the large scale storage tends to be very cheap compared to any kind of existing battery.
Automotive hydrogen tanks are very costly because they need to store the hydrogen at insane pressure to keep the volume reasonable - this, combined with crash safety, calls for expensive materials and manufacturing techniques. None of that is required for grid.
I've run the numbers some time ago and my calculation was that if you wanted to store Poland's two weeks' worth of electricity consumption in typical Li-ion batteries, you'd >10% of known cobalt reserves (!). The same amount of energy can be stored in 2.5 km^3 of hydrogen at atmospheric pressure. Ramp it up to 100 bar (a rather low value for salt cavern gas storage) and you end up with 250e+6 m^3 and Poland already has much more than that. The fact that you can transport it does help - the electrolysis plant, power plant and the storage can be in different places.
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And at 62% efficient you're on-par with the round-trip performance of most of these methods.
However, since I'm advocating for keeping the existing infrastructure in place, I'll accept a much lower efficiency. But these systems are already built so the lifetime carbon emissions for construction are already there. Additionally, as I've stated in a few posts, using solar power to grow crops means that you're not executing that low efficiency on the grid power used to make the stock. It's only on the additional amount needed to finish processing.
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As battery costs become cheaper and cheaper, there’s absolutely no reason to not install a surplus 3x, 5x or more of actual on-paper needed capacity. Any situation should be readily covered.
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Another technology that the article doesn't mention is lead-acid batteries. The pros of using them for long duration energy storage is that lead is cheap, the lead in the battery is 100% recyclable (lead in batteries is the practically the closest thing that we have in the US to a closed loop for a material, beating even aluminum), and there is no risk of catastrophic fires.
The downsides are that the cycling does not work as well as we want It to, and that lead is very toxic when you inhale it or ingest it.
The good news is that the lead acid battery industry is finally waking up to doing some R&D on adapting this technology to energy storage as opposed to low voltage car batteries. So, who knows, maybe we will see a low-cost solution come out relatively rapidly.
The downsides are that the cycling does not work as well as we want It to, and that lead is very toxic when you inhale it or ingest it.
The good news is that the lead acid battery industry is finally waking up to doing some R&D on adapting this technology to energy storage as opposed to low voltage car batteries. So, who knows, maybe we will see a low-cost solution come out relatively rapidly.
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I'm no petroleum geologist, but the fact that there are hydrogen reserves in nature, where hydrogen has become trapped and resided for millions of years, suggests it's possible to make a hydrogen-tight geological reservoir. I'm sure you need to be extra careful at the point at which you pump gas into the reservoir, but once you have several km of rock overburden it seems unlikely that the hydrogen is going to escape through it to the surface, on human timescales anyway. Whether it will react with the reservoir rocks is another question.
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Storage is storage. Cover your needs and move on, especially as it becomes cheaper and cheaper. We don’t build water reservoirs to hold exactly our daily water needs. We build them to hold many days, weeks or months worth of supply. I foresee battery storage taking the same path.
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Is lead actually cheap, when you start needing to store GWh or TWh? Won't supply and demand raise the price when you buy that much?
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Nuclear is expensive and you’ll strain yourself looking for any investors crazy enough to put their money into a no-returns project (read money losing). Follow the money. That means ever-cheap renewables with battery backup.
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I'd like to see larger multi-region smart grids planned as part of the answer, exporting and importing from regions as their output varies. It doesn't have to be global but ... why not? The sun is almost always shining somewhere.
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I grew up somewhere with LOTS of hydro dams. I have a soft spot for them! But the reality is, building a hydro dam is a bit of an ecological disaster. Pumped storage just makes that worse, really, because it's all the downsides of expense and ecological destruction with only storage capability, none of the new power generating capacity.
As far as "somebody just has to pay," I mean, yeah. If everything were free storage would be easy.
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Storage is storage, but when you need 1000x the current capacity you start running into limits about cost, physical space and sourcing materials. If you can find something that's 10-100x cheaper then the numbers stack up somewhat better.
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We have a hard time adequately containing methane. Hydrogen, with its tiny molecules that can diffuse through glass enclosures like water through a screendoor, is going to be that much tougher to contain.
massive methane leak.
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Tony Seba, who has a good history of accurate predictions as a futurist, says the solution to the problem of renewable energy storage can mostly be extrapolated from trends. Solar keeps getting much more efficient at lower light levels - it used to be worthless when it's cloudy, now the output falls a lot but is still significant. This keeps improving. Plus solar keeps getting much cheaper, really fast. By his calculations, for most places, for most needs, large grids to send power around + massively overbuilt solar is the cheapest solution to provide enough energy all the time. Not even taking CO2 emissions into account - it will simply be the cheapest, even compared to fossil fuels. Storage only needs to be sufficient to handle nights, not long stretches of clouds.
This solution also has the upsides that if you want to build something to capitalize on intermittent massive energy excesses, you're going to have those a lot, if the system is so overbuilt as to provide for base load when you have long stretches of clouds.
I don't know if he's right, but it's interesting.
This solution also has the upsides that if you want to build something to capitalize on intermittent massive energy excesses, you're going to have those a lot, if the system is so overbuilt as to provide for base load when you have long stretches of clouds.
I don't know if he's right, but it's interesting.
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I work at a federal power company it would be simple enough for the doe to just own and operate them at cost. As for renewables wind in particular. I've watched the same wind farms down the Colombia river basin, Idaho, and Montana change hands at least 12 times in the last 7 years. Their problem is contractual power delivery. If they sign up saying we will deliver x amount of megawatts this week and the wind falls short they have to pony up huge amounts of cash for us to buy it on the market. So they turn to buying their own peaking plants as it's cheaper than being left holding the bag if we have calm week.
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