GRA
Well-known member
Sure, but as the price of variable renewables continues to drop, and there is an increasing amount of it in Canada which would otherwise have to be curtailed (i.e. wasted) when it's in excess, the ability to use those sources of power for electrolysis will only increase, just as is happening in Denmark and Norway. It's also good for car charging, but H2 should allow longer-term storage at a lower price. It'll be interesting to see if Canada opts to inject into NG pipelines for transport ala' Germany, assuming they choose to go for H2 in a big way.TonyWilliams said:I wasn't necessarily referring to natural gas for electricity production, but instead as the base material for hydrogen. As you know, hydrogen doesn't just float around us; we have to extract it from something, and it takes two things to make the happen
1) the base material that contains H2
2) the significant energy required to split the H2 from its base material, compress it and cool it
There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis; which account for 48%, 30% 18% and 4% of the world’s hydrogen production respectively (from Wikipedia).
Current (12/15) Canadian installed wind energy capacity:
and here's a map of wind resources:
Canada currently ranks 7th for installed wind capacity, and about 5% of their electricity demand is supplied by wind.
Solar resources ditto:
Installed solar:
So, two to four orders of magnitude difference between installed wind and solar.