DaveinOlyWA said:
Andy; showing us over capacity potential means nothing unless you can show that hydrogen has made improvements in containment, transportation and storage. THAT is the holy grail. it is that which puts hydrogen in the same ballpark as gasoline and its prime advantage over electricity.
I realize this thread has wiggled through a number of domains that include transportation and power grid storage. I also realize I've asked everyone to see relationships between energy sectors that most don't see today.
This is very important Dave and it's the reason that I've been beating on the proverbial podium about the Third Industrial Revolution plan. The people - researchers, planners, utilities, and politicians - involved in our energy transition are no longer looking at power generation, transportation, and buildings as separate 'stove pipes' or 'silos' the way most see them today. They understand that this isolated reductionist thinking is a primary reason for many of the problems we have on the planet today. It's more expensive in time, money, and materials to 'fix' three broken systems singly - and the 'repair' results in less efficient solutions if there are solutions to be had. The TIR view, the Reinventing Fire view, and others are 'whole systems' approaches to solving our energy problem. Using a whole-systems approach costs less money, uses fewer materials, takes less time to upgrade, and results in a more robust and reliable system.
Here's an example from a talk I've already linked. The speaker, Daryl Wilson, is the CEO of Hydrogenics. He was formerly CEO of two solar companies, and a former head of manufacturing at Toyota Canada. The talk was recorded in Sep, 2012. The numbers in the quote tag are the time hack in the video.
Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxidO4F8an4
12:00 said:
Our energy world today you see is highly siloed. We have transport fuel representing about 36%, electricity about 20% and natural gas for heating and industrial purposes about 35%, and these three silos have very little to do with each other in the energy systems of today. By introducing hydrogen as an energy carrier, we have the ability to migrate energy through these various sectors and most importantly use the storage and distribution assets of the natural gas system as a way to carry away the surpluses of renewable energy generation from wind and solar.
After reading this, and recalling that the architect of the plan, Jeremy Rifkin, makes clear that the goal is for locally produced energy to be used locally first, and exported/shared second, one can see that we simply do not need to waste energy moving hydrogen across the country. We have all the tech available today to do what we need. Industry's been using H2 for more than 100 years - how much more development do we need? It works.
DaveinOlyWA said:
until you can show us that, I prefer molten salt, pumped water, etc. as a way to store over capacity. neither is a great option (although molten salt does seem to have enough merit to warrant futher investment into the tech) now neither of these options are portable. they only store power onsite which greatly limits its usability.
8:40 said:
There's another important difference with hydrogen and this has been well recognized in Germany where a number of storage solutions have already been tried. On this chart which you see on the backdrop with the fluctuating line the output of the wind generation for E.On in the northern part of Germany fluctuating in just a matter of hours from zero to eight GW output. This problem continues to worsen in Germany and is the reason why there's a great deal of focus on the need for energy storage. On the right hand side of the slide is a compressed air storage plant which actually exists in Germany and is operated today. ... The conclusion of E.On is that they will never build enough compressed air storage plants to come anywhere close to meeting the needs of the problem. There's also pumped hydro facilities in Germany - this is the 'lake on the mountain trick' where you pump water up the hill at night and then recover the energy back through a turbine during the day when the energy it's required. ... The same problem of scale exists. If I take the volume of that compressed air storage plant...and instead of compressing air into the ground compress the same volume of hydrogen, I end up with 111 times more stored energy. You now see the compelling attraction of hydrogen storage in the German energy market - it simply has the scale to do the job. And it's for this reason now we have the announcement of 18 energy storage projects in Germany as their levels of renewables penetration have well exceeded 20% and in fact in the north-east of the country is rivaling 30 and 50% of the generation coming from wind and solar today.
DaveinOlyWA said:
when we can create the hydrogen by hydrolysis, pipe it 300 miles to major refueling station to put into big trucks and do it without losing half of it in the process, then we got something. so are we at that point?
Hopefully Dave you can see that this isn't actually a point at all. The end state for the transition results in local production of electricity and hydrogen. The primary long-haul mode is still electrons, though on a more efficient grid. The centralized production model is dead - distributed production eliminates long-distance transport and trucks.
DaveinOlyWA said:
keep in mind; the piping system must be robust enough to last long enough to justify its initial costs.
must be cheap enough to be able to calculate a reasonable rate of return and by reasonable; I think 25-30% is reasonable considering the massive health and ecological benefits involved.
I've already shown you examples of four business models that work today and are being rolled-out in Germany that not only work but provide an 11-15% ROI in the real world. Distributed production eliminates the need for long-haul pipelines. Shorter distribution in the existing NG pipeline system is working in the EU.
DaveinOlyWA said:
but we dont have any of that. not one single point. current containment still leaks. it is VERY expensive and uses materials that is currently in a worldwide shortage which means any significant additional demand will cause an already expensive item to sky rocket.
keep in mind; hydrogen is a great idea towards a partial solution to our transportaion needs and it will have to work in concert with plain old battery EVs so with that mind; if any of the above had been solved, seems to me that would have made just as much news as a 200 mile battery pack weighing 300 lbs would have
Hopefully you can see from what I've already presented that none of this is a factor for today's transition. Our electric grid leaks 20% at a minimum. Our ICE vehicles 'leak' more than 70% of the energy they import into their fuel tanks. Our lack of storage leaks about 75% of renewable power we're paying to generate.
Keep in mind that California's hydrogen refueling points are only a tiny piece of the puzzle and while most of the US is using a fragmented piecemeal approach, that the EU is not - and that changes both the problems and the solutions.