huh, i thought only japan was betting on hydrogen. i hadn’t heard of expansion here. although that’s more likely because everything we get about germany is how it’s their fault that our electric bill has gone up.
Fun fact: the other big investor in hydrogen pipeline projects is your neighbour to the east… planned to go all the way through the Baltic Sea to Germany.
Also the French energy concept (see: RTE’s (French grid provider) study about energy by 2050) is at its core entirely based on nuclear base load in a renewable/storage system making electrolysis more economical because on top of producing hydrogen with excess renewable power during the day, you then also have a steady production of excess electricity throughout low demand night times.
Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It’s not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve “boil water and run a turbine”).
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn’t work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
for peaker plants i’ve always assumed we’d do fuel cells. just plumbing it in to existing gas infra (aka just fucking boiling water again) seems like it doesn’t really solve the problem.
but yeah for applications that require heat rather than electricity it’s a good idea. i think having generators on site is probably the more likely solution there.
huh, i thought only japan was betting on hydrogen. i hadn’t heard of expansion here. although that’s more likely because everything we get about germany is how it’s their fault that our electric bill has gone up.
Fun fact: the other big investor in hydrogen pipeline projects is your neighbour to the east… planned to go all the way through the Baltic Sea to Germany.
Also the French energy concept (see: RTE’s (French grid provider) study about energy by 2050) is at its core entirely based on nuclear base load in a renewable/storage system making electrolysis more economical because on top of producing hydrogen with excess renewable power during the day, you then also have a steady production of excess electricity throughout low demand night times.
i still find it strange to build out a technology with such a low efficiency. but with CHP plants it could probably be more economical.
Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It’s not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve “boil water and run a turbine”).
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn’t work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
for peaker plants i’ve always assumed we’d do fuel cells. just plumbing it in to existing gas infra (aka just fucking boiling water again) seems like it doesn’t really solve the problem.
but yeah for applications that require heat rather than electricity it’s a good idea. i think having generators on site is probably the more likely solution there.