The interesting thing with projections like this is that the further out they are, the less likely they are to factor in ongoing changes in the market. 2028 is close enough that this is probably ballpark right. But I would not be surprised if this is still off by a couple of tens of percents.
A lot of this stuff is cost driven. The reason solar keeps out pacing projections historically is that this cost keeps going down. As it does, demand keeps going up and manufacturers step up to fill that demand. Current projections are based on current levels of cost and investment. Some of these projections maybe take a little bit of learning effects into account but it's hard to speculate on this and model it correctly.
Right now it's worthwhile to put solar on your roof but it's a big investment, a lot of hassle, and only attractive with subsidies and tax incentives. True for home owners and companies. The vast majority don't yet have solar on their roofs.
What happens if the price drops by 10x? That won't happen overnight obviously. But if you look a the research in this area, a 10x cost reduction is long term not unreasonable to expect. And it might happen a lot sooner than some people seem to expect. For example, there are already organic processes that don't involve things like expensive ovens, precisely machined silicon wafers, etc. Those are things that make production really expensive. A 10x price drop makes solar an absolute no-brainer. You'd have to incentivize people to not buy solar to prevent them from wanting that on their roofs and any other surface you can think of.
And that's just solar. As people will no doubt bring this up, we need lots of storage as well. And the good news there is that there are a lot of battery chemistries and other storage technologies either already proven and in production (e.g. sodium ion) or otherwise extremely likely to result in 10x cost reductions.
We're heading for a future where energy is going to be dirt cheap, clean, and plentiful. IMHO this is going to transition us slowly to post scarcity society. A lot of stuff is bottle necked on energy.
> We're heading for a future where energy is going to be dirt cheap, clean, and plentiful.
You're confusing an s-curve with a hockey stick curve here. It's understandable as long as you're in the first half of the curve, but there is always an inflection at some point.
New built renewables cost the same as the operations and maintenance of existing fossil and nuclear power generation. The world will become an interesting place when renewables start being paid off since their marginal cost is pretty much zero.
It's always an s-curve eventually. The question is, how far off is the point where it quits being exponential? If it's far enough off, "it's an s-curve eventually" doesn't matter - or at least doesn't matter now.
It's an assertion. With power becoming cheaper and cheaper, incentive to invest in innovation gradually tapers off, and a technology becomes stable and mature.
Another aspect within the power industry, as renewable production becomes less and less of a bottleneck and other problems such as grid management and storage become the key challenge to being able to enjoy stable power, investment will be redirected to these aspects of providing electricity. In Europe, we see countries reaching half their production in renewables, and already this creates challenges on the current electricity market structure.
10 years from now, at the current pace, pioneering countries will be past the point where production is the problem they need to solve. Countries coming after them will still drive some innovation, sure. We may also see faster-than-expected electrification.
So in this horizon, hockeystick predictions might still hold. But the combination of these mechanism basically defeats the prospect of power becoming "too cheap to meter", or dirt-cheap.
AFAIK the cost of a new solar installation is already dominated by installation, inverter, and other expenses that don't follow the reduction in cost of solar cells.
The cost of a home solar installation is dominated by regulatory costs in the US -- you can put solar on your roof in Australia for about a third of the price in the US.
Industrial solar plants will follow that cost curve a lot better than roof installations. As an example, panels are cheap enough that it's now cheaper to use more panels and less mounting hardware and just lay them flat on the ground: https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...
Panel cost is still pretty significant though. It's not cheap
There are also solutions for people with balconies or small apartments that are very easy to install and use that don't require any specialized services because they don't mess with your existing infrastructure. Just hang some panels from your balcony, plug them into some standalone battery and plug whatever you want powered into that.
There's room for quite a bit of innovation in this space.
10x drop in panels is concievable, although by that point the transportation cost starts to dominate. But the balance-of-system costs (permitting, working on roof, inverter) are harder to make big dents in.
> What happens if the price drops by 10x? That won't happen overnight obviously.
That won’t happen at all, at least not in the foreseeable future.
https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...: “The average cost to install solar panels per watt is between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt for the materials and an additional 25% for the labor. This means you’ll spend anywhere between $1.10 and $1.90 per watt in total.“, so even if all hardware became free, we’re ‘only’ looking at a price drop of 80%.
Because a lot of the hardware cost isn’t the solar cells proper, I think predicting a price drop of 50% already is fairly optimistic.
> We're heading for a future where energy is going to be dirt cheap, clean, and plentiful.
> Because a lot of the hardware cost isn’t the solar cells proper, I think predicting a price drop of 50% already is fairly optimistic.
Perhaps optimistic, perhaps pessimistic.
Things can change on a dime if the politicians can make a campaign pledge along the lines of:
"I went to Europe the other day. Know what I saw in the budget supermarket? Solar. Complete system people can put on their apartment balconies for about a dollar per watt. Standard unit costs about the same as a family's weekly shop, and then they get free energy for the next 25 years."
(The 150W balcony units Lidl sell for €219 are in the middle of your price range; this is just to demonstrate that it's possible to cut out the middle-man).
Home roof installations are going to be a rounding error compared to industrial solar installations, and the price of those will follow the price drop of panels a lot more closely.
There are a couple of good reasons to invest as a homeowner:
- increase the value of your house - this is often overlooked and e.g. banks don't necessarily value this enough. But the effect is very real when you sell a house in a tight market.
- Lowering your bills and benefit from tax incentives or even profit from selling energy back to the grid. This is pretty obvious. Not a lot not to like here. Of course you need financing and some rough idea of how long it takes to earn back your money.
- Energy independence is nice to have; especially if you are in a place where local energy suppliers are not that reliable. And even if that isn't the case, the additional safety can be nice.
- Reduce the impact you have on climate. For some people this is the primary motivation and some early adopters paid a steep price for this even.
Depending on your goals, you'd start with different things.
It should be said that electrek.co is likely biased, and the report cited as well, by Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). It doesn't have to be "wrong", but the reliability of the prognosis would be improved by corroboration by other sources.
That said, renowned institutions like the International Energy Agency (IEA) has notoriously been underestimating the trajectory of solar, always predicting it would level out, instead of recognizing the accelerated growth it has shown (with no sign of slowing down). [0]
The SEIA report is likely closer to the truth than anything IEA has to say at least.
Everyone is biased. Some of other popular sources that people like to cite are biased through their financing of which the fossil fuel industry and other special interest groups (e.g. the automotive industry) are providing a lot of.
I think with electrek.co, their bias is pretty obvious and they are pretty open about where they stand. But I must say that I find them mostly very informative and factual. There's actually very little need for them to spin optimistic stories when the day to day news is basically very positive already. Just a constant stream of records being broken on investment, clean energy production, new breakthroughs, new products getting to market. There's no need for them to invent or spin any of that.
You find the lies and deceit more on the other side where people try to spin myths, twist facts, etc. in order to convince people to keep on buying their oil, ice cars, dirty energy, and all the other stuff that they are peddling. Some of that stuff is blatantly obvious; desperate even.
The IEA for example is indeed notable for having made a lot of projections over time that were more than a little wrong. And probably intentionally so.
It's been known essentially since the beginning that new infrastructure around these technologies will have to be built out. The article is completely pointless too since it basically says the same thing:
> The reason there are so few facilities for recycling solar panels is because there has not been much waste to process and reuse until recently.
OK great, so first gen solar panels are starting to be decommissioned and recycling centres are starting to be built.
Post-consumer recycling is a lot harder than post-industrial recycling.
And everybody brings out the plastic recycling boogeyman instead of the myriad recycling programs that are working well, like steel, aluminum, paper and lead acid batteries, among others.
All the examples you cite are where they are because recycling is competitive with initial extraction. People bring up the plastic boogeyman to show that's not always true. And yes, asking that question early is valuable [1].
I get very frustrated when I see posts on TikTok about nuclear being the magic bullet. They talk about Germany, and they refer to nuclear as the only alternative to fossil fuels. When you mention renewables, they talk to you like you are an idiot, that renewable technologies are just infeasible, are harmful to the environment or they are too expensive. The same people that would have said that electric cars are impossible, or that climate change is not real 7 years ago, are now environmentalists and are very concerned about lithium battery production. Just endless nonsense. You then have to go on to point out that 50% of Germany's energy mix is from renewables now. And as this article points out, the price of solar just keeps falling, because it can be mass produced and improved at a pace similar to semi-conductors.
I tire of what seems to be very opinionated right wing men, not putting together how things work, and after they are proven wrong, say that they have always said that, or that is obvious.
There is definitely a use case for nuclear, but the discussion absolutely should not be renewables vs. nuclear, but renewables and nuclear vs. fossile fuels. Nuclear advocates should celebrate every advance in renewables and vice versa.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FF industry was driving this narrative, but I can also see it happening organically. A lot of the "green" people, especially in Germany are fanatically anti-nuclear. At the same time, the right-wing populists seem to have adopted the position that climate change can only be countered with nuclear power. I'm not sure why that is, probably because it's an easy answer and positions them against the green parties - after all, they cannot agree with their perceived enemies.
I think the German "green" case (to a degree) comes from the Chernobyl meltdown happening relatively nearby. It is in living memory for those power so it's understandable that they shy away from it.
I should add that meaningful advances have been made in nuclear power station design. But unfortunately these advances can't withstand other problems e.g. Russia putting operational power stations at risk as they invade Ukraine.
The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. They compete for the slice that is the cheapest and most inflexible, both requiring dispatchable power to fill the gaps. Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average.
Yep, and that's what we are currently seeing unfold. However, there must be use cases for nuclear as base load or some kind of supplementary power with mini reactors. I only hope these options get considered as viable alternative, rather than being dismissed ideologically.
The ideological perspective would not exist if nuclear was economic. It is simply an easy boogeyman to blame.
SMR are not looking that hot either, looks like the prevalent truth from the 70 years of nuclear construction: that bigger is better due to the large fixed costs, stays true even in 2023.
That sounds very reasonable. However, where I've seen this ideological aspect is for example in Finland where the permits for nuclear plants are very difficult to obtain. So once a permit is granted, they want to make as massive plants as possible, leading to big risks in construction (see Olkiluoto 3 for example, one of the most expensive constructions in history).
> see Olkiluoto 3 for example, one of the most expensive constructions in history
Dimensioning of Olkiluoto 3 is unrelated to Finnish regulation, the reactor was designed by France and Germany based on economies of scales, not specifically for a local project.
I can't say and can't even guess where to find that information. However, I believe if there was a concentrated effort to develop and build small-scale reactors, there would be use for them. But if the permission process is heavily regulated and political, who will invest in such reactors?
I still remember when Olkiluoto 3 was approved, the Green party left the government out of protest. And in 2014 they threatened to leave the government again if they approve some change in another plant's permit. That's the level of ideological opposition we're talking about.
Luckily, the tide is turning, but it's highly annoying that this needs to be an issue.
The nuclear solution is framed as non economic because of decades of ideologically-driven sabotage; when nuclear plants were build en masse they were cheap. Now every reactor is apparently it's own research project since practical expertise in this field became scarce.
EPR's debacle is good example here.
Meanwhile, Koreans have been steadily building new plants without giant cost overruns and delays.
Meanwhile in South Korea, is this the method you propose to get "cheap nuclear"?
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[25] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[26] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[25][27]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[28] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[29] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[30]
Nuclear power plants were never cheap. Sometimes they appeared that way if you offloaded most of your costs onto the taxpayer, like decomissioining expenses.
And in the West they never enjoyed economies of scale either. France's nuclear plants kept getting more expensive, even in the heyday when they were building lots of them.
> Sometimes they appeared that way if you offloaded most of your costs onto the taxpayer, like decomissioining expenses.
On the other hand you can offload most of your cost to customers if you just stop providing electricity.
The point of stable power generation system is not to haggle over 10% more or less, it's to stop price graphs looking like that: https://i.imgur.com/iJslMUa.png
Periodical gigantic deficiencies in case of just bad weather in December are much higher problem than relatively small costs spread over decades.
Nuclear is an ideal green solution for the fossil fuel industry. Why? Well, building a power station is super hard because: it's expensive, takes years and no one wants a power station in their backyard.
I can imagine fossil fuel execs recognising that the energy grid is going green despite all of their lobbying. So the game then becomes to delay the inevitable as long as you can, so that you can extract as much money as you can from fossil fuels.
And you might as well frame the debate as "nuclear rules, renewables suck" while you're at it, for extra delay from infighting between environmentalists.
> Nuclear is an ideal green solution for the fossil fuel industry.
Nuclear proponents use the same claim against the renewable industry.
There isn't much to learn about it, besides the fact that the fossil fuel industry is a bogeyman for both.
It's not a great point, especially when, rather than donning your tinfoil, you can just look at where funds go.
Sorry, I really don't follow. The claim by GP was:
> Nuclear is an ideal green solution for the fossil fuel industry. Why? Well, building a power station is super hard because: it's expensive, takes years and no one wants a power station in their backyard.
This is not the case for renewables. How does pointing to what fossil fuel companies are investing in change that? Shell investing in solar means that suddenly I can't cheaply install solar in my backyard?
My point is that the fossil industry is pushing renewables as a solution, as evidenced by these examples, never nuclear. That kind of defeats the claim that nuclear is fossil industry's recommendation.
This has no relation to what you should or should not build in your backyard.
They publicly push renewables as a solution because public opinion is aligned to that, it's PR for them to be saying that out loud publicly and showing projects around it. They might as well be subverting renewables at large (as another PR move) through support for dissenting voices pushing nuclear over renewables, as a way to delay adoption until they are well-positioned in that market.
The fossil fuel industry could as well (tin foil hat on) be pushing the nuclear talking points to delay public opinion on the benefits of renewables until they are well aligned to take over the renewable industry. They are fighting to still be relevant as profit-making companies in a world where renewables take over, they are invested in renewables because they know the writing on the wall but they are late on their plans to be major players in the renewables industry and would definitely play public opinion to delay advancements in an area where they lack expertise, at least until they can build said expertise and take over the renewables market to keep being energy behemoths.
> The fossil fuel industry could as well be pushing the nuclear talking points to delay public opinion on the benefits of renewables
> They are fighting to still be relevant as profit-making companies in a world where renewables take over
So basically, if the fossil industry promotes nuclear, it's to sabotage the only viable option in order to sell more oil, but if they promote renewable, it's because they know it's the only path forward and they want to save their skin. Your theory is not falsifiable, that's a problem.
20 years ago nuclear was the best, quickest & cheapest path to decarbonization, so the fossil fuel industry would be anti-nuclear.
Today renewables are the best, quickest & cheapest path to decarbonization, so the fossil fuel industry would be anti-renewable.
And in neither decade is hydrogen the best path, so the fossil fuel industry is pro-hydrogen. Especially since hydrogen uses many of the same techs as fossil fuels and you can ramp up hydrogen with fossil fuel derived "grey hydrogen".
Hydrogen is the best path regardless of whether you accept nuclear or renewable. In fact, it is the only path, as nothing else will delivery anything like zero emissions. People forget about industrial emissions entirely and how this fully requires green hydrogen production. And in the case of renewables, hydrogen is even more paramount because of the need for energy storage.
So, where do I buy a home hydrogen storage system to store excess solar energy for later use?
Right, I can't because hydrogen in any practical density is too dangerous or expensive. Despite decades of research. It might be made and used on the spot for an industrial process but that's it.
The link does not mention price. I searched on youtube whether someone installed it at home and talks about practical experience, all I got were promotional vids. Despite it's apparently already 2 years on market.
This does not inspire confidence, you know. It's not the "anti-hydrogen" campaign, it's lack of hydrogen industry honesty about price, features and limitations.
> But of course, given the enormous anti-hydrogen campaign of the last decade, everything is currently at an immature level.
You cannot go from zero to 100% instantly. There needs to be a period of scaling up, which has not been granted yet. This will come down in price drastically in the future. The main advantage is the lack of raw materials needed compared to a battery solution, only needing some tanks plus some electrical equipment not much bigger than what home solar people deal with.
I'm pretty sure the PR campaign in the US comes from the nuclear military industrial complex (which relies on civilian nuclear power) combined with the nuclear industry itself.
They know the economics are horrendous. They need to manufacture consent from the public for lavish subsidies to compete with unsubsidized solar/wind/storage solutions.
Hence the "nuclear is the green jesus" tiktok videos and the disingenuous but endlessly repeated talking points, e.g.
I'd be curious to know how the points about pumped storage and more generally the lack of effort in solving grid-level storage issues are disingenuous.
To date, the rebuttal to these points has been weak, and there is little investment in solving them, compared to investment in renewable production.
> to compete with unsubsidized solar/wind/storage solutions.
In Europe, there is no electricity production that isn't subsidized. That's pretty justified, since energy is the lifeblood of a modern society, and energy sectors can't be allowed to fail. I don't know as much about the US, but it seems to be the same [1].
To claim that any actor in this sector is not subsidized just shows that you don't understand the way electricity is funded.
>To date, the rebuttal to these points has been weak,
About once a week I have to post a link to the scientific study that demonstrated that the geography for pumped storage is very plentiful.
For some reason when people complain that it's not (which happens constantly), they "heard it somewhere" or cite what is essentially pro-nuke/carbon-lobby propaganda.
i.e. another anti environmentalist meme, a highbrow version of all the "global warming is a myth" stuff.
You want to have some form of manufactured scarcity.
If you have a single point of energy generation, that is expensive, and specialised, and relies on an element mined from the ground, it is great for the fossil fuel industry.
If you have a distributed form of energy generation, that is inexpensive, not specialised and is made from sand, it is not so great for the fossil fuel industry.
It's already "too late" for any such solution. We are already at the point where geoengineering is necessary. But of course, environmentalists oppose that too.
I would check out some videos of the Kivu cobalt mines where children work to mine for our cobalt. There are north american mines that are shut in because we chose to instead use child labor in incredibly dangerous mines that frequently have landslides because it’s cheaper. It seems that many only care enough about climate change to greenwash and not think about anything else. There are hopefully new battery compounds on the way but it should be allowed to criticize elements on the energy transition if there are problems. How else do we get nice things without encouraging open discussion? Perhaps it’s an american thing to associate these views with certain labels but I don’t see how it’s related to any political affiliation or gender to have these concerns.
The solution is to switch to hydrogen cars and avoid all resource intensive materials. Not to mention that LFP comes with major compromises and most US Teslas do not use them.
How is that working out for Toyota? Hydrogen, or synthetic fuels, has a place where energy density, chemical properties, or ease of storage are fundamental requirements. In other words use cases like: long distance shipping, aviation, fertilizer and seasonal energy storage.
For all other applications hydrogen is a lost cause pushed by the fossil industry.
In reality, hydrogen is guaranteed to win this. BEVs are unsustainable and the whole conversation is based on the delusion of people who have invested too much on that side.
Imagine accepting that hydrogen is fundamental to aviation or shipping, but somehow believing that it is an elaborate conspiracy by the oil companies to push it in cars. That is beyond ludicrous. It is painfully obvious that BEV fans have gone off the deep end and are failing to realize that technology is moving beyond batteries.
And it is just a repeat of diesel cars taking off in sales when BEVs where just getting started.
Again, more BEV propaganda and more promotion of unsustainably dumb ideas. A completely waste of time and ultimate missing the point: It is about stopping climate change, not about sales numbers. A point that Tesla fanboys consistently fail to grasp.
So what are you proposing, exactly? Hydrogen storage remains an extremely tough problem, liquid, compressed, hydrides etc etc are all both expensive and offer poor energy density. Likewise fuel cells after decades of research remain expensive.
Batteries, meanwhile, are rapidly advancing, and while they are heavy they offer good economics through very high grid-to-wheel efficiency.
The "proposal" is simply pointing out that those claims are simply false. Hydrogen storage is a solved problem. BEV fanatics are just lying about it. In reality, the whole thing is a disruptive technology to BEVs since it fundamentally solves the weaknesses of BEVs. It is entirely a matter of when it displaces BEVs, not if. This will become more obvious when hydrogen cars become no more expensive than ICE cars.
> The "proposal" is simply pointing out that those claims are simply false.
Then you can surely point out some peer-reviewed articles detailing this. Merely confidently stating something doesn't make it true.
> Hydrogen storage is a solved problem.
Awesome, I'm happy to hear about these recent breakthroughs I must have missed. Can you provide references please?
> In reality, the whole thing is a disruptive technology to BEVs since it fundamentally solves the weaknesses of BEVs. It is entirely a matter of when it displaces BEVs, not if.
If we could figure out how to store hydrogen cheaply with decent energy density, and cheap high efficiency electrolyzers and fuel cells, hydrogen would be an obvious winner. But so far it seems we haven't figured out answers to these questions, despite decades of research. But maybe you can provide references to research breakthroughs I have missed?
> This will become more obvious when hydrogen cars become no more expensive than ICE cars.
Sure. In the meantime it seems BEV's are on track to become cheaper than ICE cars within a decade or so, so while we wait for the hydrogen revolution we can at least decarbonize large parts of road transport.
You’re using a gish gallop style list of random claims. There is not one science article that pushes back on every one of your points.
The main thing to note is that fuel cell cars already exist. They already are cars that can be bought now and already drive like real cars. That alone debunks a vast number of supposedly unsolved problems.
The most you can say is that BEVs are a solution for right now. Even then it's a pretty bad one since PHEVs exist and arguably far more practical. But hydrogen will displace it in the future.
> You’re using a gish gallop style list of random claims.
Am I? Looking back at my posts above it seems my main claims are:
- Hydrogen storage isn't a solved problem, unless there's some recent breakthrough I'm not aware of.
- Fuel cells remain expensive, and don't have particularly high efficiency.
- Electrolyzers still need to come down in cost and increase in efficiency.
AFAIU this is largely the consensus position of people who research the energy transition professionally. You're the one with outrageous claims, thus you're the one who needs to provide evidence for those claims in order to be taken seriously.
> There is not one science article that pushes back on every one of your points.
If you read my posts above you'll see that I never demanded everything should be published in one single articles. Multiple articles are fine, you're free to provide references to multiple articles corroborating your claims!
> The main thing to note is that fuel cell cars already exist.
So far it seems they are outrageously expensive. Not a very convincing alternative to BEV's so far. Which might be why several orders of magnitudes more BEV's are taken into use every year than the total number of FCEV's on the planet (I vaguelly remember figures like 70k FCEV's globally vs. 1.4M BEV's sold per year, but I'm too lazy to dig up the exact numbers).
> That alone debunks a vast number of supposedly unsolved problems.
I don't think anyone has claimed that FCEV's would be impossible to make. Just that they're much inferior to BEV's, barring some major breakthroughs that you claim have been done but for some reason refuse to share with us.
Of course, this is a lab result. Hope they manage to scale it up. And one might note that even if FCEV's are a failure, there's certainly a lot of use for low cost green hydrogen in decarbonizing ammonia and steel production as well as other industrial processes.
1) Hydrogen storage is a solved problem. We have no issue storing it in pressurized tanks, or cryo tanks if necessary. We already have cars that work on both ideas, especially cars that you can buy and drive like normal cars. There are no serious issues found. No one is aware of any unsolved problems.
2) No. They are rapidly falling in price and are quickly become a cost effective solution. Fuel cells are not expensive anymore.
3) Same story as above. Also, we are seeing nearly 100% efficient electrolyzers now. This is also a solved problem for the most part.
That consensus is not real; it contains many people who have a vested interest in not seeing hydrogen succeed. This is analogue to the rise of wind and solar power, where many "analysts" systemically demonized the technology. This continue even after they reached large-scale production and low cost.
You can come up with a list of rebuttals to most of that. The reader needs to be able to parse the data and recognize how it debunks most of the gish-gallop style attacks, although not every single thing can be refuted:
The fundamental advantage with fuel cell cars is that they do not have the huge raw material needs of BEVs. As a result, they should be much cheaper. In fact, they should cost no more than ICE cars. In reality, hydrogen is the much cheaper and more practical solution. And since it refuels so fast, it is inevitable that millions of people will have to buy a hydrogen car and not a BEV.
That last part should be self-evident. But we live in a world of BEV propaganda, and people regularly show up with their brains filled with gish-gallop style nonsense arguments. It is simpler to just point out that they were lied to and have a total misunderstanding of the situation, rather than debunk multiple and sometimes dozens of ridiculous unfounded assertions. People do not have infinite time to do this.
Currently the vast majority of hydrogen produced for industrial purposes is from natural gas, and the resulting CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. Until that changes it's not a "green" fuel.
Do you seriously want me to list all of the hundreds of different projects all going up right now? There are a huge range of figures too, and not everything is announced in detail yet.
FYI, the figures are well into the hundreds of billions of dollars of total investment. It is a repeat of wind and solar, and the naysayers are just concern trolling or even outright denying its existence.
No, but we want you to list some of them. You're making the claim; back it up.
The more it's happening, the easier that request should be.
(And, after being told that "troll" is not a valid argument, immediately returning to "troll" is not a good look. It makes it appear that you don't have anything else.)
The facts are so far into the realm of "it's already happening now" that what you're asking is akin to demanding proof that Russia is at war with Ukraine right now.
> Vassilenko cited the data that in 2022 the global green hydrogen market was valued at $4.02 billion
Second:
> Originating out of a reference economic model of the Green Kochi Hydrogen Hub (GKH2), the plan was prepared as a 50:50 public-private Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) with a 150 megawatt (MW) electrolyser capacity, storage and evacuation infrastructure, renewable energy inputs, green ammonia production plants and off-take by industrial and mobility users, with a $468m CAPEX outlay over a 20-year project period.
Third said this, but there's a "but" coming:
> In 2022, over $240 billion was invested in more than 680 global hydrogen projects, marking a 50 per cent increase in investments compared to the previous year.
The document it linked to actually starts with:
> 680 large-scale project proposals worth USD 240 billion have been put forward, but only about 10% (USD 22 billion) have reached final investment decision (FID). While Europe leads in proposed investments (~30%), China is slightly ahead on actual deployment of electrolyzers (200 MW), while Japan and South Korea are leading in fuel cells (more than half of the world's 11 GW manufacturing capacity).
These would be a great start if not for the fact that we've been hearing about how hydrogen cars will replace ICE since before Tesla became newsworthy.
I want this to succeed, I really do — even if it only works for planes and some chemistry, that's fantastic! — but this isn't like Russia being at war, it's like pointing to the continuing existence of Cuba and saying "Look! Communism works!"
I'm curious as to how you can read an article describing tens of billions of dollars of investments that have reached the final investment stage, and that it is growing 50% YOY, and then conclude that this is the same level of success as Communism in Cuba.
This is exactly the example of denial I am referring to. You are literally reading an article that describes exactly what I am saying, and yet somehow your conclusion that this is all imaginary. It is a near perfect parallel to those anti-solar people, who continuously denied the rapid growth of solar power even after witnessing years of it first hand.
My impression from you is that's rhetorical, not sincere. Is my impression correct?
If not, if you're really curious: Cuba's GDP is $107 bn, making it about x5 global green hydrogen.
(Edit: had previously said $250 bn, that's PPP not nominal)
> and yet somehow your conclusion that this is all imaginary
That's not what I said. I am denying it's "at scale" which is not at all synonymous with claiming "it's imaginary", it would have to grow by a factor of a thousand — three orders of magnitude — for me to say "Yay, finally! What took y'all so long?"
Your rhetoric is utterly non-sincere. The idea that something needs to be greater than $100B, something very few things are, to be significant is utter bullshit. Not even getting into the part about 50% YOY growth.
Even PV, which is also growing fast and is much larger than your headlines for new investments ($22bn, and they won't all happen, and those which do are not all in the same year), is only about 6% of global electricity.
And worse, the quantities that matter are energy and power, which are again "that's an interesting proof of concept" level, not "wow, fantastic, this has really changed things" (much as I want it to).
What you have with hydrogen — and remember, I like hydrogen, and have made some myself even back when I was a single-digit age — is still smaller than the current annual production of just batteries, which you dismiss.
If the batteries were bad for the reasons you gave in some of your other comments, hydrogen would be a joke. I don't think hydrogen is a joke, but the evidence is that it's still niche rather than a general solution with all current tech.
You need look into the mirror here. Why are you like this? Do you understand what exponent growth even is? At 50% YOY growth, it will catch up to everything else in a handful of years. And this is your source, not mine. You are basically rejecting the conclusion of the source you found.
PV is doing the same. It is also growing exponentially. There was a time when investment in PVs was also in the single-digit billions. Now it is a lot more. If something grows rapidly enough, it will quickly catch up to the competition.
Ironic given you keep parroting phrases from everyone you reply to with the same tone on your part.
And yes, the real meaning of the word irony.
> At 50% YOY growth, it will catch up to everything else in a handful of years. And this is your source, not mine. You are basically rejecting the conclusion of the source you found.
Nah, you're the origin of the string "50% YOY" as far as I can tell. (Or did you misread the bit where the 240 bn, which is the closest I got, was from a news story that did not correctly quote its own linked source document?)
My link, I just searched it, has this to say about 50%:
> Lithium-focused companies increased their spending by 50% to record highs.
I want hydrogen growth to sustain that rate. I don't see any reason to expect this to be sustained, but I want it to.
> Finally, you’ve picked a source that is fairly conservative on all this. I mean, Japan alone is exceeding that
(1) Over 15 years, (2) reaching 15 million tons per year, which is 1% of their average primary energy usage.
Again, this is like using Cuba as an example of how Communism will take over real soon now: not a good one.
My tone is consistent because the people I'm talking to are fucking stupid and repeat the same lies over and over again.
This is from your previous post:
> In 2022, over $240 billion was invested in more than 680 global hydrogen projects, marking a 50 per cent increase in investments compared to the previous year.
Hence 50% YOY growth.
And if you understand exponential growth, you'd know that this is extremely fast and it can quickly catch up to whatever target you're dreaming of.
That is about one country's policy. And it was literally announced days ago, meaning that this is a regular occurrence globally. You are intentionally missing the point I was making. Like I said, this is a major current event and guys like you are demanding proof of a massive global event that everyone should be aware of.
Just so you're aware, you never gave a link to your source. I am just going off your quotes.
And YOY means year-over-year, so if it's 50% over last year, then it's 50% YOY. You can interpretate that as exponential growth unless you are expecting growth to stall.
I don't see anywhere in that article that suggests this is just 1% of Japan's energy need. It should be a very significant portion.
Again, this is a major current event. You expect people to be aware of it, or can do the most basic of googling. A lot of people here apparently either are profoundly ignorant or totally in denial that it is happening.
I think we should start talking about the possible climate impact of waste heat from nuclear thermal power plants too.
I'm definitely pro-nuclear, wherever it makes sense, in the short term. As long as it's never at the expensive of building renewables too. But many nuclear proponents talk as if nuclear is the end-goal for power generation. That we should just replace everything with nuclear. But if we do, it's going to get harder to bring the Earths climate back to equilibrium, since a world on 100% nuclear power would add a lot of heat to planet. Not as bad as greenhouse gases, but significant enough to make reversal harder.
I think focusing on solar and energy storage will always be a good bet. It will probably be the absolute dominant way to get energy in 100 years, along with geothermal in colder climates. We're just one generational improvement from that being inevitable, and those improvements are arguably already out of the lab and in trial production stage. Given how important solar+storage will be, the amount of R&D flowing into it will be staggering in the coming decades.
When we've completed the transition to sustainable solutions (which right now is requiring a lot of mining and energy intensive metal processing, which will mostly be recycled in the future) and the population growth flattens and then reverses, I'd hope that the amount of energy needed for industry will fall dramatically.
Edit: I'm also hoping Helions approach to fusion works out. If it's combined with panels that radiate the waste heat to space (there should be much less heat per MWh of electricity generated compared to fission, perhaps so little that radiate cooling is feasible), there should basically be zero downsides to their power plant.
> The same people that would have said that electric cars are impossible, or that climate change is not real 7 years ago, are now environmentalists and are very concerned about lithium battery production. Just endless nonsense.
It is incredibly frustrating, but the realization behind it is infuriatingly simple: they just want to be contrarian. They just want to be right, and to know better than everyone else. The more people have opposite beliefs the better, because it means they are smarter than all of them. This fundamental disposition makes them soak up all of the propaganda, which fossil fuel companies are more than happy to provide. You can challenge them on facts all you want, they will not budge from their positions.
This is also why you will never hear them say "honestly, I don't know".
The problem ultimately isn't about renewables vs. nuclear, it is that countries like Germany tore down their nuclear power plants and replaced them with coal power plants.
If we had just old right-wing men as the opponents, then there wouldn't be much of a problem at all. The real issue is that young left-wing men are just as stupid, and this part is completely unacknowledged.
.. in the context of Germany already having been swept over by one power plant failure, Chernobyl, and a second large scale one having just happened in Japan.
The risk of CO2 is high (almost a certainty) but over a long period.
The risk of nuclear is low, but if a "black swan" failure happens then it potentially wipes out agriculture in a large area for years.
(There's also the proliferation risk; is everyone OK with Iran building a lot of reactors to displace their oil usage?)
Which are entirely troll arguments. Chernobyl is the worst case scenario imaginable and not possible with any Western designed reactor. Fukushima killed zero people for all practical purposes. Not to mention the lack of earthquakes in Germany. Adopting nuclear is an extremely safe solution for Germany.
Speaking personally, I'm fine with nuclear power near me as a part of a grid — even despite the high monetary cost — because I'm satisfied of the safety and I think supply diversity is worth paying more.
But nuclear is a boogieman, and that means the reactors are slow and expensive to build.
The geopolitical risks also mean other countries may look at your reactors as an existential threat — this is also a thing the governments need to care about no matter how sure they are that they're the goodies and everyone else is being silly when raising such concerns.
And while an earthquake was the ultimate cause of the Fukushima incident, it wasn't the proximal cause: Germany does get floods from time to time.
Of course, if I get to ignore politics then my favourite is a global power grid energised by PV — the maths says that would be great, though it would take a while to build.
Not in this case I'm not — I'm saying here that "nuclear won't save it", which is different, especially as there are many other solutions.
You yourself elsewhere on this post are promoting hydrogen storage (I wish all the luck to whoever is working on that); I'm personally in favour of a global power grid; there's a bunch of fusion startups that may or may not get past the political hurdles plaguing fission even if/when they succeed at net power; genetically engineered bio-oils are also a possibility (as feedstock not just as fuel!); geothermal and tidal are also renewable but not seasonal.
But on the other hand, I am worried about non-aligned AI, about biodiversity loss, about peak phosphorus, and a whole bunch of other things.
Only because of the politics (if Texas can't get out of its own way, what chance international coordination?), and in that regard the comparison is "why not nuclear when it works?"
The tech is already known, the boring standard models of HVDC cable are good enough, the time it would take to build that capacity of cables is large but not ridiculously so.
You do realize that hydrogen storage is also already known? The boring method of storing hydrogen in underground salt domes and caverns is well understood. This is all way more practical than crisscrossing the oceans with HVDC lines. And it completely evades all of the political showstoppers that a global grid would run into.
Hydrogen leaks, damages storage vessels and pipes, cryo more so.
> The boring method of storing hydrogen in underground salt domes and caverns is well understood. This is all way more practical than crisscrossing the oceans with HVDC lines
Ah, no. Salt caverns aren't available everywhere. Getting the hydrogen around isn't easier than getting the electricity the hydrogen makes around.
Also storage is normally my pro-hydrogen talking point when I'm facing a hydrogen skeptic and saying why it's not the totemic bad thing you're acting like you think I'm saying it is — but grid storage is however the not the actual core issue the non-totemic skeptics in this thread actually have, they're talking about other things.
(That said, props for linking to a home h2 storage solution in that other thread).
Heck, when people say hydrogen can't be stored, I point at the 4 GWh hypersonic storage tube that the US government regularly built for single use.
But that's not the substantive sticking point for rolling to doubt.
Because AFAICT, they're mainly found in the same places as oil reserves, which is definitely not everywhere.
(PWh isn't remotely surprising for me, let alone insane; it is however necessary scale for any such storage system).
> AD VAN WIJK: By pipeline. That’s the interesting thing: It is about 10 times cheaper to transport energy by a hydrogen pipeline than by an electric cable. That makes it possible to transport electricity very cheaply from somewhere like North Africa to the demand centers in Europe, for example.
And no, they are not the same as oil reserves. And it is the only technology that can realistically scale to PWh. Which is why it is the best and arguably only viable solution to the problem.
Your sense of scale needs recalibration; overly that with a population density map, that's showing more than half the world population is nowhere near those.
> And it is the only technology that can realistically scale to PWh
It's one of many.
I really don't know why you are so willing to limit yourself at this stage to the best possible forecast for one of the least developed possibilities, while dismissing the ones which have both a large install base and long-term growth trends to extrapolate from.
I'm not going to put all my eggs (investments, small though they are) into one basket, regarding which I expect to "win". Nothing you said caused that, because it's usually me defending H2 from people who think it "can't ever lead" when the evidence is "hasn't been leading recently". You're making just as significant error but by dismissing everything except H2.
I'm reminded of the late 90s, when headlines proclaimed Wicca was the fastest growing religion, and my dad pointed out to me that going from 1 to 2 is a 100% growth rate.
Most of the world has not had any geographic surveying of them. It's likely that there are everywhere. Look only at the US or Europe for proper maps.
There is an alternative to this: It's called nuclear power. But of course, renewable energy nutcases reject that too.
This is why I insult you people and think you are really stupid. Environmentalists regularly come around and demand radical action on climate change, only to undermine the solution at every step of the way and ultimately make the problem worse. They are as bad as climate change deniers.
There's a key difference between the current - mostly chemicals (coal, oil, uranium) based - system of providing people/machines/devices all over the world with energy and some proposed system where most energy is delivered in the form of electricity, generated from renewable sources.
Using chemicals to transport energy immediately leads to greater resilience because these chemicals always have a buffering effect, so they can buffer shorter and longer disruptions.
Many people appear to not have this in mind, when they propose a global electrical grid to power almost everything. An electrical grid is much more fragile than a chemicals based transportation system.
As soon as we see the first big tankers transporting green ammonia all over the world, say from Namibia or Australia or wherever, each one of these will contain weeks worth of ammonia (for some industrial site or whatever), which will mean added resilience since there's no one pipeline that can be damaged. Ships can flexibly go from any one to any other port.
But not only that. Due to the high energy density of chemicals, the chemical transportation system also has a much higher capacity than HVDC. Several ships can go from one place to another at the same time, and queue up at the point of arrival, while electricity from two sources to one destination would add up at some point in the grid.
Example:
> .. the vessels could carry about 58,000 tonnes of ammonia .. [1]
Assuming a power generation efficiency of 0.4 (-> 145 GWh electricity), this is roughly equivalent to a 1 GW powerplant delivering power for 6 days.
Imagine trying to transport 145 GWh from Australia to Europe, or even just from windy Greece to Germany with HVDC. You'd need the 100 % capacity of a 2 GW HVDC line (1500 km long) over 3 days to transmit it all, during which this line could not be used for any other transmission purpose.
This problem can be solved by making hydrogen. So there is a way to power society with renewables if you are willing accept the need for baseload power. Of course, renewable energy fanatics do not accept this fact, and often are ideologically opposed to hydrogen. This is in spite of the fact that only hydrogen can save renewables from this problem.
Again, nobody seems to be making hydrogen from renewable energy at scale yet despite there being a real industrial market for it. Including steel reduction, which would be a great use-case! But it's not happening because water cracking to hydrogen has a really high capital cost.
Again, you are simply unaware of what is happening. It is very similar to how anti-solar analysts simply failed to recognize the widespread deployment of PV panels around a decade ago.
So this is a pet peeve of mine. I can google that as easily as you can. But:
1. You made the claim. It's appropriate that you do the work to back it up.
2. A post is read more times than it is written. If you (the author) do the work, the work gets done once. If we, the readers, do the work, it's done multiple times.
So both efficiency and "burden of proof" say that you should do that search. In fact, you should have done it about 10 or 20 posts earlier.
We're about 3 orders of magnitude away from green hydrogen being reasonably described as "at scale" at this point. It's roughly where PV was 15-25 years ago: nice to see the effort going on, but not at scale.
I would like to see some home system that makes and stores H2 with excess PV — such a thing certainly feels like it should be possible, given how easy hydrogen is to make, but I'm not a chemist or a civil engineer, so I'll leave that to those who know what can go wrong and how to fix it.
Maybe in California, weather does not look uniform in the rest of the world. December is literally less than 30 hours of sun here, and wind is weak - we're literally smog capital of Europe due to it in the winter.
"good interconnections" on the other way sound like surrendering any energy security - good luck with that after russian invasion.
I'd be comfortable with that as long as we can have 3-10x overbuild and a week of storage.
I'm not pro-nuclear, but Germany's electric generation carbon intensity has gotten very bad with their switch back to coal from Russian gas. It is so horrible the weapons guys pushed uranium fuel over what the Manhattan Project guys recommended in the 1950s, which was Thorium.
Maybe someone knowledgeable can chime in. I heard that if energy inputs required to produce photovoltaics (in China, most likely) are taken into account, they are not efficient enough and long-lasting enough to be net-producers of energy in parts of the world that are not absolutely bathed in sunlight. Basically, many places in the world just don't get enough sunlight. Photovoltaics might make sense financially (at least in the short term), but not ecologically, in many places. Anyone has informed insight?
The energy required to create solar panels is considerable. It does however not supersede the energy output over the panel lifetimes anymore [0]; depending on location, angle and type e.t.c. the energy needed for production and operation may be as low as 5% or as high as 50% of the lifetime output, with approximately 25% currently being the norm. This ratio is constantly improving with more efficient solar panels and more efficient manufacturing methods.
The phrase you're looking for is "embodied energy", and the answer is first, that solar generates a net return on energy investment in under 10 years, and often in much much less than that, with a panel lifetime of over 30 years. But more importantly, it's even more favorable when you compare it to the embodied energy of non-renewable resources:
A rude and perhaps unflattering question; I'll understand eventual downvotes; but does anyone happen to know a few company names (or relevant capital funds) to invest in?
153 comments
[ 85.2 ms ] story [ 3547 ms ] threadA lot of this stuff is cost driven. The reason solar keeps out pacing projections historically is that this cost keeps going down. As it does, demand keeps going up and manufacturers step up to fill that demand. Current projections are based on current levels of cost and investment. Some of these projections maybe take a little bit of learning effects into account but it's hard to speculate on this and model it correctly.
Right now it's worthwhile to put solar on your roof but it's a big investment, a lot of hassle, and only attractive with subsidies and tax incentives. True for home owners and companies. The vast majority don't yet have solar on their roofs.
What happens if the price drops by 10x? That won't happen overnight obviously. But if you look a the research in this area, a 10x cost reduction is long term not unreasonable to expect. And it might happen a lot sooner than some people seem to expect. For example, there are already organic processes that don't involve things like expensive ovens, precisely machined silicon wafers, etc. Those are things that make production really expensive. A 10x price drop makes solar an absolute no-brainer. You'd have to incentivize people to not buy solar to prevent them from wanting that on their roofs and any other surface you can think of.
And that's just solar. As people will no doubt bring this up, we need lots of storage as well. And the good news there is that there are a lot of battery chemistries and other storage technologies either already proven and in production (e.g. sodium ion) or otherwise extremely likely to result in 10x cost reductions.
We're heading for a future where energy is going to be dirt cheap, clean, and plentiful. IMHO this is going to transition us slowly to post scarcity society. A lot of stuff is bottle necked on energy.
They're predicting a 200% increase in 5 years. Being only a couple of tens of percents off would be quite remarkable IMHO.
You're confusing an s-curve with a hockey stick curve here. It's understandable as long as you're in the first half of the curve, but there is always an inflection at some point.
Another aspect within the power industry, as renewable production becomes less and less of a bottleneck and other problems such as grid management and storage become the key challenge to being able to enjoy stable power, investment will be redirected to these aspects of providing electricity. In Europe, we see countries reaching half their production in renewables, and already this creates challenges on the current electricity market structure.
10 years from now, at the current pace, pioneering countries will be past the point where production is the problem they need to solve. Countries coming after them will still drive some innovation, sure. We may also see faster-than-expected electrification.
So in this horizon, hockeystick predictions might still hold. But the combination of these mechanism basically defeats the prospect of power becoming "too cheap to meter", or dirt-cheap.
In this case we're fairly confident that the inflection is at least a decade away given the innovations currently in labs.
Industrial solar plants will follow that cost curve a lot better than roof installations. As an example, panels are cheap enough that it's now cheaper to use more panels and less mounting hardware and just lay them flat on the ground: https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...
There are also solutions for people with balconies or small apartments that are very easy to install and use that don't require any specialized services because they don't mess with your existing infrastructure. Just hang some panels from your balcony, plug them into some standalone battery and plug whatever you want powered into that.
There's room for quite a bit of innovation in this space.
That won’t happen at all, at least not in the foreseeable future.
https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...: “The average cost to install solar panels per watt is between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt for the materials and an additional 25% for the labor. This means you’ll spend anywhere between $1.10 and $1.90 per watt in total.“, so even if all hardware became free, we’re ‘only’ looking at a price drop of 80%.
Because a lot of the hardware cost isn’t the solar cells proper, I think predicting a price drop of 50% already is fairly optimistic.
> We're heading for a future where energy is going to be dirt cheap, clean, and plentiful.
That, I think is true.
Perhaps optimistic, perhaps pessimistic.
Things can change on a dime if the politicians can make a campaign pledge along the lines of:
"I went to Europe the other day. Know what I saw in the budget supermarket? Solar. Complete system people can put on their apartment balconies for about a dollar per watt. Standard unit costs about the same as a family's weekly shop, and then they get free energy for the next 25 years."
(The 150W balcony units Lidl sell for €219 are in the middle of your price range; this is just to demonstrate that it's possible to cut out the middle-man).
1. Insulation
2. Heat pump
3. Solar panels (more the better)
Depending on your location, this will be amortized in ~7 years, which is like 14%/year return rate. Excellent investment!
With some added benefits:
- Better climate control (less cold in winter, less hot in summer)
- Charge the car/bike for free
- Some green washing points to brag about ;-)
- increase the value of your house - this is often overlooked and e.g. banks don't necessarily value this enough. But the effect is very real when you sell a house in a tight market.
- Lowering your bills and benefit from tax incentives or even profit from selling energy back to the grid. This is pretty obvious. Not a lot not to like here. Of course you need financing and some rough idea of how long it takes to earn back your money.
- Energy independence is nice to have; especially if you are in a place where local energy suppliers are not that reliable. And even if that isn't the case, the additional safety can be nice.
- Reduce the impact you have on climate. For some people this is the primary motivation and some early adopters paid a steep price for this even.
Depending on your goals, you'd start with different things.
That said, renowned institutions like the International Energy Agency (IEA) has notoriously been underestimating the trajectory of solar, always predicting it would level out, instead of recognizing the accelerated growth it has shown (with no sign of slowing down). [0]
The SEIA report is likely closer to the truth than anything IEA has to say at least.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic...
I think with electrek.co, their bias is pretty obvious and they are pretty open about where they stand. But I must say that I find them mostly very informative and factual. There's actually very little need for them to spin optimistic stories when the day to day news is basically very positive already. Just a constant stream of records being broken on investment, clean energy production, new breakthroughs, new products getting to market. There's no need for them to invent or spin any of that.
You find the lies and deceit more on the other side where people try to spin myths, twist facts, etc. in order to convince people to keep on buying their oil, ice cars, dirty energy, and all the other stuff that they are peddling. Some of that stuff is blatantly obvious; desperate even.
The IEA for example is indeed notable for having made a lot of projections over time that were more than a little wrong. And probably intentionally so.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519
> The reason there are so few facilities for recycling solar panels is because there has not been much waste to process and reuse until recently.
OK great, so first gen solar panels are starting to be decommissioned and recycling centres are starting to be built.
It will take special attention for these panels not to end in a landfill or in the ocean like most of the waste we're currently creating.
And everybody brings out the plastic recycling boogeyman instead of the myriad recycling programs that are working well, like steel, aluminum, paper and lead acid batteries, among others.
[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/24/recycling-lead-acid-bat...
I tire of what seems to be very opinionated right wing men, not putting together how things work, and after they are proven wrong, say that they have always said that, or that is obvious.
I should add that meaningful advances have been made in nuclear power station design. But unfortunately these advances can't withstand other problems e.g. Russia putting operational power stations at risk as they invade Ukraine.
For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average.
SMR are not looking that hot either, looks like the prevalent truth from the 70 years of nuclear construction: that bigger is better due to the large fixed costs, stays true even in 2023.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants...
Dimensioning of Olkiluoto 3 is unrelated to Finnish regulation, the reactor was designed by France and Germany based on economies of scales, not specifically for a local project.
I still remember when Olkiluoto 3 was approved, the Green party left the government out of protest. And in 2014 they threatened to leave the government again if they approve some change in another plant's permit. That's the level of ideological opposition we're talking about.
Luckily, the tide is turning, but it's highly annoying that this needs to be an issue.
EPR's debacle is good example here.
Meanwhile, Koreans have been steadily building new plants without giant cost overruns and delays.
> The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Meanwhile in South Korea, is this the method you propose to get "cheap nuclear"?
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[25] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[26] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[25][27]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[28] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[29] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#H...
And in the West they never enjoyed economies of scale either. France's nuclear plants kept getting more expensive, even in the heyday when they were building lots of them.
On the other hand you can offload most of your cost to customers if you just stop providing electricity.
The point of stable power generation system is not to haggle over 10% more or less, it's to stop price graphs looking like that: https://i.imgur.com/iJslMUa.png
Periodical gigantic deficiencies in case of just bad weather in December are much higher problem than relatively small costs spread over decades.
Well, there’s your problem.
Nuclear is an ideal green solution for the fossil fuel industry. Why? Well, building a power station is super hard because: it's expensive, takes years and no one wants a power station in their backyard.
I can imagine fossil fuel execs recognising that the energy grid is going green despite all of their lobbying. So the game then becomes to delay the inevitable as long as you can, so that you can extract as much money as you can from fossil fuels.
[1]: I listened to a lot of the Drilled podcast by Amy Westervelt in the early days of the pandemic https://www.drilled.media/drilled-podcast/
Nuclear proponents use the same claim against the renewable industry. There isn't much to learn about it, besides the fact that the fossil fuel industry is a bogeyman for both.
It's not a great point, especially when, rather than donning your tinfoil, you can just look at where funds go.
But the claim doesn't make sense against the renewable industry. Just because they make the same claim doesn't make it a good claim.
I, as an individual, can deploy solar power and thus produce my own power. I cannot deploy nuclear power and thus produce my own power.
Well, my point is that you just have to see what some major fossil energy producers say and do. You don't need to believe anyone on this.
[1]: https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies.htm... [2]: https://www.chevron.com/operations/new-energies [3]: https://totalenergies.com/group/ambition/being-world-class-p... [4]: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/what-we-do/gas-and-lo...
> Nuclear is an ideal green solution for the fossil fuel industry. Why? Well, building a power station is super hard because: it's expensive, takes years and no one wants a power station in their backyard.
This is not the case for renewables. How does pointing to what fossil fuel companies are investing in change that? Shell investing in solar means that suddenly I can't cheaply install solar in my backyard?
This has no relation to what you should or should not build in your backyard.
The fossil fuel industry could as well (tin foil hat on) be pushing the nuclear talking points to delay public opinion on the benefits of renewables until they are well aligned to take over the renewable industry. They are fighting to still be relevant as profit-making companies in a world where renewables take over, they are invested in renewables because they know the writing on the wall but they are late on their plans to be major players in the renewables industry and would definitely play public opinion to delay advancements in an area where they lack expertise, at least until they can build said expertise and take over the renewables market to keep being energy behemoths.
> They are fighting to still be relevant as profit-making companies in a world where renewables take over
So basically, if the fossil industry promotes nuclear, it's to sabotage the only viable option in order to sell more oil, but if they promote renewable, it's because they know it's the only path forward and they want to save their skin. Your theory is not falsifiable, that's a problem.
20 years ago nuclear was the best, quickest & cheapest path to decarbonization, so the fossil fuel industry would be anti-nuclear.
Today renewables are the best, quickest & cheapest path to decarbonization, so the fossil fuel industry would be anti-renewable.
And in neither decade is hydrogen the best path, so the fossil fuel industry is pro-hydrogen. Especially since hydrogen uses many of the same techs as fossil fuels and you can ramp up hydrogen with fossil fuel derived "grey hydrogen".
Right, I can't because hydrogen in any practical density is too dangerous or expensive. Despite decades of research. It might be made and used on the spot for an industrial process but that's it.
But of course, given the enormous anti-hydrogen campaign of the last decade, everything is currently at an immature level.
This does not inspire confidence, you know. It's not the "anti-hydrogen" campaign, it's lack of hydrogen industry honesty about price, features and limitations.
> But of course, given the enormous anti-hydrogen campaign of the last decade, everything is currently at an immature level.
You cannot go from zero to 100% instantly. There needs to be a period of scaling up, which has not been granted yet. This will come down in price drastically in the future. The main advantage is the lack of raw materials needed compared to a battery solution, only needing some tanks plus some electrical equipment not much bigger than what home solar people deal with.
We are technical people here no need to hesitate to name the materials or link information.
Such pointless debate only benefits the fossil fuel industry.
Given how much of the conversation is manipulated by bots and paid influencers... this is really suspicious.
They know the economics are horrendous. They need to manufacture consent from the public for lavish subsidies to compete with unsubsidized solar/wind/storage solutions.
Hence the "nuclear is the green jesus" tiktok videos and the disingenuous but endlessly repeated talking points, e.g.
* "what about when the sun isnt shining?"
* pumped storage geography is scarce
* lithium will run out soon
To date, the rebuttal to these points has been weak, and there is little investment in solving them, compared to investment in renewable production.
> to compete with unsubsidized solar/wind/storage solutions.
In Europe, there is no electricity production that isn't subsidized. That's pretty justified, since energy is the lifeblood of a modern society, and energy sectors can't be allowed to fail. I don't know as much about the US, but it seems to be the same [1].
To claim that any actor in this sector is not subsidized just shows that you don't understand the way electricity is funded.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/policies-and-regulat...
About once a week I have to post a link to the scientific study that demonstrated that the geography for pumped storage is very plentiful.
For some reason when people complain that it's not (which happens constantly), they "heard it somewhere" or cite what is essentially pro-nuke/carbon-lobby propaganda.
i.e. another anti environmentalist meme, a highbrow version of all the "global warming is a myth" stuff.
You want to have some form of manufactured scarcity.
If you have a single point of energy generation, that is expensive, and specialised, and relies on an element mined from the ground, it is great for the fossil fuel industry.
If you have a distributed form of energy generation, that is inexpensive, not specialised and is made from sand, it is not so great for the fossil fuel industry.
Kyoto Climate Deal was 25 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
The United States took a pass.
Instead we kicked the can down the road. China expanded its coal power capacity enormously. So did India. Now we are going to soon reach 1.5C.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/5/17/global-warming-...
We’ve basically failed our initial goals and will need many miracles to properly address climate change.
Hopefully, our first failure will compel us to come up with something workable before it gets a lot worse.
Good luck.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-track-hit-new-...
Clean energy share continues to climb though, and they've also made huge strides in air quality.
India, on the other hand, seems to be going from bad to worse on both fronts.
At this point we need to address several problems at once. There’s no one solution and we need to be relatively quick.
Also, Coal is still the low hanging fruit because it produces 20% of emissions. It needs to go to zero as soon as possible.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/its-critical-tackle-coal-...
Maybe gone by 2040?
For all other applications hydrogen is a lost cause pushed by the fossil industry.
See the "Hydrogen Ladder" for more information.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
In reality, hydrogen is guaranteed to win this. BEVs are unsustainable and the whole conversation is based on the delusion of people who have invested too much on that side.
Imagine accepting that hydrogen is fundamental to aviation or shipping, but somehow believing that it is an elaborate conspiracy by the oil companies to push it in cars. That is beyond ludicrous. It is painfully obvious that BEV fans have gone off the deep end and are failing to realize that technology is moving beyond batteries.
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/26/tesla-model-y-overtakes-coro...
Again, more BEV propaganda and more promotion of unsustainably dumb ideas. A completely waste of time and ultimate missing the point: It is about stopping climate change, not about sales numbers. A point that Tesla fanboys consistently fail to grasp.
Batteries, meanwhile, are rapidly advancing, and while they are heavy they offer good economics through very high grid-to-wheel efficiency.
Then you can surely point out some peer-reviewed articles detailing this. Merely confidently stating something doesn't make it true.
> Hydrogen storage is a solved problem.
Awesome, I'm happy to hear about these recent breakthroughs I must have missed. Can you provide references please?
> In reality, the whole thing is a disruptive technology to BEVs since it fundamentally solves the weaknesses of BEVs. It is entirely a matter of when it displaces BEVs, not if.
If we could figure out how to store hydrogen cheaply with decent energy density, and cheap high efficiency electrolyzers and fuel cells, hydrogen would be an obvious winner. But so far it seems we haven't figured out answers to these questions, despite decades of research. But maybe you can provide references to research breakthroughs I have missed?
> This will become more obvious when hydrogen cars become no more expensive than ICE cars.
Sure. In the meantime it seems BEV's are on track to become cheaper than ICE cars within a decade or so, so while we wait for the hydrogen revolution we can at least decarbonize large parts of road transport.
The main thing to note is that fuel cell cars already exist. They already are cars that can be bought now and already drive like real cars. That alone debunks a vast number of supposedly unsolved problems.
Meanwhile, electrolysis approaches 100% efficiency: https://www.inceptivemind.com/hysatas-record-breaking-electr...
The most you can say is that BEVs are a solution for right now. Even then it's a pretty bad one since PHEVs exist and arguably far more practical. But hydrogen will displace it in the future.
Am I? Looking back at my posts above it seems my main claims are:
- Hydrogen storage isn't a solved problem, unless there's some recent breakthrough I'm not aware of.
- Fuel cells remain expensive, and don't have particularly high efficiency.
- Electrolyzers still need to come down in cost and increase in efficiency.
AFAIU this is largely the consensus position of people who research the energy transition professionally. You're the one with outrageous claims, thus you're the one who needs to provide evidence for those claims in order to be taken seriously.
> There is not one science article that pushes back on every one of your points.
If you read my posts above you'll see that I never demanded everything should be published in one single articles. Multiple articles are fine, you're free to provide references to multiple articles corroborating your claims!
> The main thing to note is that fuel cell cars already exist.
So far it seems they are outrageously expensive. Not a very convincing alternative to BEV's so far. Which might be why several orders of magnitudes more BEV's are taken into use every year than the total number of FCEV's on the planet (I vaguelly remember figures like 70k FCEV's globally vs. 1.4M BEV's sold per year, but I'm too lazy to dig up the exact numbers).
> That alone debunks a vast number of supposedly unsolved problems.
I don't think anyone has claimed that FCEV's would be impossible to make. Just that they're much inferior to BEV's, barring some major breakthroughs that you claim have been done but for some reason refuse to share with us.
> Meanwhile, electrolysis approaches 100% efficiency:
Awesome. And better, in that press release there's even a link to the actual article, which, even better, is open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28953-x
Of course, this is a lab result. Hope they manage to scale it up. And one might note that even if FCEV's are a failure, there's certainly a lot of use for low cost green hydrogen in decarbonizing ammonia and steel production as well as other industrial processes.
1) Hydrogen storage is a solved problem. We have no issue storing it in pressurized tanks, or cryo tanks if necessary. We already have cars that work on both ideas, especially cars that you can buy and drive like normal cars. There are no serious issues found. No one is aware of any unsolved problems.
2) No. They are rapidly falling in price and are quickly become a cost effective solution. Fuel cells are not expensive anymore.
3) Same story as above. Also, we are seeing nearly 100% efficient electrolyzers now. This is also a solved problem for the most part.
That consensus is not real; it contains many people who have a vested interest in not seeing hydrogen succeed. This is analogue to the rise of wind and solar power, where many "analysts" systemically demonized the technology. This continue even after they reached large-scale production and low cost.
You can come up with a list of rebuttals to most of that. The reader needs to be able to parse the data and recognize how it debunks most of the gish-gallop style attacks, although not every single thing can be refuted:
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/ac-transits-fuel-cell-program-br...
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2022/03/20220321-hysata.htm...
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/42448/bmw-is-stress-testing-it...
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge...
The fundamental advantage with fuel cell cars is that they do not have the huge raw material needs of BEVs. As a result, they should be much cheaper. In fact, they should cost no more than ICE cars. In reality, hydrogen is the much cheaper and more practical solution. And since it refuels so fast, it is inevitable that millions of people will have to buy a hydrogen car and not a BEV.
That last part should be self-evident. But we live in a world of BEV propaganda, and people regularly show up with their brains filled with gish-gallop style nonsense arguments. It is simpler to just point out that they were lied to and have a total misunderstanding of the situation, rather than debunk multiple and sometimes dozens of ridiculous unfounded assertions. People do not have infinite time to do this.
This is simply a lazy troll argument, and literally a repeat of old anti-BEV arguments.
FYI, the figures are well into the hundreds of billions of dollars of total investment. It is a repeat of wind and solar, and the naysayers are just concern trolling or even outright denying its existence.
The more it's happening, the easier that request should be.
(And, after being told that "troll" is not a valid argument, immediately returning to "troll" is not a good look. It makes it appear that you don't have anything else.)
The facts are so far into the realm of "it's already happening now" that what you're asking is akin to demanding proof that Russia is at war with Ukraine right now.
> Vassilenko cited the data that in 2022 the global green hydrogen market was valued at $4.02 billion
Second:
> Originating out of a reference economic model of the Green Kochi Hydrogen Hub (GKH2), the plan was prepared as a 50:50 public-private Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) with a 150 megawatt (MW) electrolyser capacity, storage and evacuation infrastructure, renewable energy inputs, green ammonia production plants and off-take by industrial and mobility users, with a $468m CAPEX outlay over a 20-year project period.
Third said this, but there's a "but" coming:
> In 2022, over $240 billion was invested in more than 680 global hydrogen projects, marking a 50 per cent increase in investments compared to the previous year.
The document it linked to actually starts with:
> 680 large-scale project proposals worth USD 240 billion have been put forward, but only about 10% (USD 22 billion) have reached final investment decision (FID). While Europe leads in proposed investments (~30%), China is slightly ahead on actual deployment of electrolyzers (200 MW), while Japan and South Korea are leading in fuel cells (more than half of the world's 11 GW manufacturing capacity).
These would be a great start if not for the fact that we've been hearing about how hydrogen cars will replace ICE since before Tesla became newsworthy.
I want this to succeed, I really do — even if it only works for planes and some chemistry, that's fantastic! — but this isn't like Russia being at war, it's like pointing to the continuing existence of Cuba and saying "Look! Communism works!"
This is exactly the example of denial I am referring to. You are literally reading an article that describes exactly what I am saying, and yet somehow your conclusion that this is all imaginary. It is a near perfect parallel to those anti-solar people, who continuously denied the rapid growth of solar power even after witnessing years of it first hand.
My impression from you is that's rhetorical, not sincere. Is my impression correct?
If not, if you're really curious: Cuba's GDP is $107 bn, making it about x5 global green hydrogen.
(Edit: had previously said $250 bn, that's PPP not nominal)
> and yet somehow your conclusion that this is all imaginary
That's not what I said. I am denying it's "at scale" which is not at all synonymous with claiming "it's imaginary", it would have to grow by a factor of a thousand — three orders of magnitude — for me to say "Yay, finally! What took y'all so long?"
World annual investments on energy was about 2.5 trillion last year for new stuff plus 4 trillion going to oil and gas producers[0].
Here's what that looks like:
$22bn: ■ $6.5tn:
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Even PV, which is also growing fast and is much larger than your headlines for new investments ($22bn, and they won't all happen, and those which do are not all in the same year), is only about 6% of global electricity.
And worse, the quantities that matter are energy and power, which are again "that's an interesting proof of concept" level, not "wow, fantastic, this has really changed things" (much as I want it to).
What you have with hydrogen — and remember, I like hydrogen, and have made some myself even back when I was a single-digit age — is still smaller than the current annual production of just batteries, which you dismiss.
If the batteries were bad for the reasons you gave in some of your other comments, hydrogen would be a joke. I don't think hydrogen is a joke, but the evidence is that it's still niche rather than a general solution with all current tech.
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2022/ove...
PV is doing the same. It is also growing exponentially. There was a time when investment in PVs was also in the single-digit billions. Now it is a lot more. If something grows rapidly enough, it will quickly catch up to the competition.
Finally, you’ve picked a source that is fairly conservative on all this. I mean, Japan alone is exceeding that: https://japantoday.com/category/tech/japan-earmarks-107-bill...
Other countries will follow, so you can expect global investment to be much higher.
Ironic given you keep parroting phrases from everyone you reply to with the same tone on your part.
And yes, the real meaning of the word irony.
> At 50% YOY growth, it will catch up to everything else in a handful of years. And this is your source, not mine. You are basically rejecting the conclusion of the source you found.
Nah, you're the origin of the string "50% YOY" as far as I can tell. (Or did you misread the bit where the 240 bn, which is the closest I got, was from a news story that did not correctly quote its own linked source document?)
My link, I just searched it, has this to say about 50%:
> Lithium-focused companies increased their spending by 50% to record highs.
I want hydrogen growth to sustain that rate. I don't see any reason to expect this to be sustained, but I want it to.
> Finally, you’ve picked a source that is fairly conservative on all this. I mean, Japan alone is exceeding that
(1) Over 15 years, (2) reaching 15 million tons per year, which is 1% of their average primary energy usage.
Again, this is like using Cuba as an example of how Communism will take over real soon now: not a good one.
This is from your previous post:
> In 2022, over $240 billion was invested in more than 680 global hydrogen projects, marking a 50 per cent increase in investments compared to the previous year.
Hence 50% YOY growth.
And if you understand exponential growth, you'd know that this is extremely fast and it can quickly catch up to whatever target you're dreaming of.
That is about one country's policy. And it was literally announced days ago, meaning that this is a regular occurrence globally. You are intentionally missing the point I was making. Like I said, this is a major current event and guys like you are demanding proof of a massive global event that everyone should be aware of.
And was for one specific year.
So in addition to "being false" and "you were so busy being angry you didn't bother to read", it's not even a reasonable claim to be exponential.
Normally I wouldn't mind rolling with that as a hope for what might come, but you're being everything you're accusing everyone else here of being.
> That is about one country's policy
Policy? That actually makes it worse, because it implies Japan will not meet more than 1% of its demand that way.
> Like I said, this is a major current event and guys like you are demanding proof of a massive global event that everyone should be aware of.
Which in total is next to nothing: 1% over 15 years, if everyone matches Japan's proposal.
And everyone else was telling you to actually dig up a link.
Getting the link from you was like blood from a stone.
And YOY means year-over-year, so if it's 50% over last year, then it's 50% YOY. You can interpretate that as exponential growth unless you are expecting growth to stall.
I don't see anywhere in that article that suggests this is just 1% of Japan's energy need. It should be a very significant portion.
Again, this is a major current event. You expect people to be aware of it, or can do the most basic of googling. A lot of people here apparently either are profoundly ignorant or totally in denial that it is happening.
I'm definitely pro-nuclear, wherever it makes sense, in the short term. As long as it's never at the expensive of building renewables too. But many nuclear proponents talk as if nuclear is the end-goal for power generation. That we should just replace everything with nuclear. But if we do, it's going to get harder to bring the Earths climate back to equilibrium, since a world on 100% nuclear power would add a lot of heat to planet. Not as bad as greenhouse gases, but significant enough to make reversal harder.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video covering the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
I think focusing on solar and energy storage will always be a good bet. It will probably be the absolute dominant way to get energy in 100 years, along with geothermal in colder climates. We're just one generational improvement from that being inevitable, and those improvements are arguably already out of the lab and in trial production stage. Given how important solar+storage will be, the amount of R&D flowing into it will be staggering in the coming decades.
When we've completed the transition to sustainable solutions (which right now is requiring a lot of mining and energy intensive metal processing, which will mostly be recycled in the future) and the population growth flattens and then reverses, I'd hope that the amount of energy needed for industry will fall dramatically.
Edit: I'm also hoping Helions approach to fusion works out. If it's combined with panels that radiate the waste heat to space (there should be much less heat per MWh of electricity generated compared to fission, perhaps so little that radiate cooling is feasible), there should basically be zero downsides to their power plant.
It is incredibly frustrating, but the realization behind it is infuriatingly simple: they just want to be contrarian. They just want to be right, and to know better than everyone else. The more people have opposite beliefs the better, because it means they are smarter than all of them. This fundamental disposition makes them soak up all of the propaganda, which fossil fuel companies are more than happy to provide. You can challenge them on facts all you want, they will not budge from their positions.
This is also why you will never hear them say "honestly, I don't know".
If we had just old right-wing men as the opponents, then there wouldn't be much of a problem at all. The real issue is that young left-wing men are just as stupid, and this part is completely unacknowledged.
The risk of CO2 is high (almost a certainty) but over a long period.
The risk of nuclear is low, but if a "black swan" failure happens then it potentially wipes out agriculture in a large area for years.
(There's also the proliferation risk; is everyone OK with Iran building a lot of reactors to displace their oil usage?)
Speaking personally, I'm fine with nuclear power near me as a part of a grid — even despite the high monetary cost — because I'm satisfied of the safety and I think supply diversity is worth paying more.
But nuclear is a boogieman, and that means the reactors are slow and expensive to build.
The geopolitical risks also mean other countries may look at your reactors as an existential threat — this is also a thing the governments need to care about no matter how sure they are that they're the goodies and everyone else is being silly when raising such concerns.
And while an earthquake was the ultimate cause of the Fukushima incident, it wasn't the proximal cause: Germany does get floods from time to time.
Of course, if I get to ignore politics then my favourite is a global power grid energised by PV — the maths says that would be great, though it would take a while to build.
Eventually, this will change. You cannot denial reality forever, and especially not of existential problems.
Oh yes you can.
Or at least, long enough for it to be terminal. Thinking you can't possibly fail is a common reason for failing.
The Titanic being [un]sinkable comes to mind, but it's hardly the only case of such hubris.
You yourself elsewhere on this post are promoting hydrogen storage (I wish all the luck to whoever is working on that); I'm personally in favour of a global power grid; there's a bunch of fusion startups that may or may not get past the political hurdles plaguing fission even if/when they succeed at net power; genetically engineered bio-oils are also a possibility (as feedstock not just as fuel!); geothermal and tidal are also renewable but not seasonal.
But on the other hand, I am worried about non-aligned AI, about biodiversity loss, about peak phosphorus, and a whole bunch of other things.
The tech is already known, the boring standard models of HVDC cable are good enough, the time it would take to build that capacity of cables is large but not ridiculously so.
> The boring method of storing hydrogen in underground salt domes and caverns is well understood. This is all way more practical than crisscrossing the oceans with HVDC lines
Ah, no. Salt caverns aren't available everywhere. Getting the hydrogen around isn't easier than getting the electricity the hydrogen makes around.
Also storage is normally my pro-hydrogen talking point when I'm facing a hydrogen skeptic and saying why it's not the totemic bad thing you're acting like you think I'm saying it is — but grid storage is however the not the actual core issue the non-totemic skeptics in this thread actually have, they're talking about other things.
(That said, props for linking to a home h2 storage solution in that other thread).
Heck, when people say hydrogen can't be stored, I point at the 4 GWh hypersonic storage tube that the US government regularly built for single use.
But that's not the substantive sticking point for rolling to doubt.
Salt caverns are everywhere. In fact this is how we store natural gas today.
And the capacity is truly insane. It is on the order of PWhs: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s...
Not to mention that hydrogen pipelines move energy more cheaply than cables: https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo...
Do you have a map showing this?
Because AFAICT, they're mainly found in the same places as oil reserves, which is definitely not everywhere.
(PWh isn't remotely surprising for me, let alone insane; it is however necessary scale for any such storage system).
> AD VAN WIJK: By pipeline. That’s the interesting thing: It is about 10 times cheaper to transport energy by a hydrogen pipeline than by an electric cable. That makes it possible to transport electricity very cheaply from somewhere like North Africa to the demand centers in Europe, for example.
First I've heard of that claim; thanks!
And no, they are not the same as oil reserves. And it is the only technology that can realistically scale to PWh. Which is why it is the best and arguably only viable solution to the problem.
Your sense of scale needs recalibration; overly that with a population density map, that's showing more than half the world population is nowhere near those.
> And it is the only technology that can realistically scale to PWh
It's one of many.
I really don't know why you are so willing to limit yourself at this stage to the best possible forecast for one of the least developed possibilities, while dismissing the ones which have both a large install base and long-term growth trends to extrapolate from.
I'm not going to put all my eggs (investments, small though they are) into one basket, regarding which I expect to "win". Nothing you said caused that, because it's usually me defending H2 from people who think it "can't ever lead" when the evidence is "hasn't been leading recently". You're making just as significant error but by dismissing everything except H2.
I'm reminded of the late 90s, when headlines proclaimed Wicca was the fastest growing religion, and my dad pointed out to me that going from 1 to 2 is a 100% growth rate.
There is an alternative to this: It's called nuclear power. But of course, renewable energy nutcases reject that too.
This is why I insult you people and think you are really stupid. Environmentalists regularly come around and demand radical action on climate change, only to undermine the solution at every step of the way and ultimately make the problem worse. They are as bad as climate change deniers.
Using chemicals to transport energy immediately leads to greater resilience because these chemicals always have a buffering effect, so they can buffer shorter and longer disruptions.
Many people appear to not have this in mind, when they propose a global electrical grid to power almost everything. An electrical grid is much more fragile than a chemicals based transportation system.
As soon as we see the first big tankers transporting green ammonia all over the world, say from Namibia or Australia or wherever, each one of these will contain weeks worth of ammonia (for some industrial site or whatever), which will mean added resilience since there's no one pipeline that can be damaged. Ships can flexibly go from any one to any other port.
But not only that. Due to the high energy density of chemicals, the chemical transportation system also has a much higher capacity than HVDC. Several ships can go from one place to another at the same time, and queue up at the point of arrival, while electricity from two sources to one destination would add up at some point in the grid.
Example:
> .. the vessels could carry about 58,000 tonnes of ammonia .. [1]
58,000 tonnes x 22.5 MJ/kg = 362.500.000 kWh = 362.5 GWh
Assuming a power generation efficiency of 0.4 (-> 145 GWh electricity), this is roughly equivalent to a 1 GW powerplant delivering power for 6 days.
Imagine trying to transport 145 GWh from Australia to Europe, or even just from windy Greece to Germany with HVDC. You'd need the 100 % capacity of a 2 GW HVDC line (1500 km long) over 3 days to transmit it all, during which this line could not be used for any other transmission purpose.
[1] https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2021/08/10/10672...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Generation from coal has been decreasing continuously since 2013. Until 2020, since then it _increased_ while nuclear generation decreased.
Generation from coal might have just kept on decreasing past 2020, hadn't nuclear plants been shut down.
You can produce 300% or even 3000% of need in the middle of day in June or July and it still does not mean pure renewable fantasy is feasible.
Meanwhile France's overall CO2 per capita is small fraction of Germany one and was for decades.
Again, nobody seems to be making hydrogen from renewable energy at scale yet despite there being a real industrial market for it. Including steel reduction, which would be a great use-case! But it's not happening because water cracking to hydrogen has a really high capital cost.
You'll get hundreds if not thousands of references.
1. You made the claim. It's appropriate that you do the work to back it up.
2. A post is read more times than it is written. If you (the author) do the work, the work gets done once. If we, the readers, do the work, it's done multiple times.
So both efficiency and "burden of proof" say that you should do that search. In fact, you should have done it about 10 or 20 posts earlier.
It's happening everywhere now. Like I said, this is akin to someone demanding proof that there's war in Ukraine right now.
I would like to see some home system that makes and stores H2 with excess PV — such a thing certainly feels like it should be possible, given how easy hydrogen is to make, but I'm not a chemist or a civil engineer, so I'll leave that to those who know what can go wrong and how to fix it.
I hardly think that the last 3% being horribly expensive should hold up the first 97%.
"good interconnections" on the other way sound like surrendering any energy security - good luck with that after russian invasion.
I'd be comfortable with that as long as we can have 3-10x overbuild and a week of storage.
(Some areas of Canada are well-supplied with hydroelectric power already, in which case the CO2-offsetting effect is much less worth it)
And the UK is pretty much worst case scenario for solar panels. Other locations can do it in 3 months.
And given that solar panels last >25 years...
[0] https://www.solarmelon.com/faqs/solar-panels-use-energy-manu...
https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/8317/what...