Posted on 06/14/2022 4:38:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem that electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and sun can’t keep an electrical grid operating without some method of storing energy to meet customer demand in times of low production. These times of low production from wind and sun occur regularly — for example, calm nights — and can persist for as long as a week or more in the case of heavily overcast and calm periods in the winter.
If the plan is to power the entire United States by wind and solar facilities, and if we assume that wind and solar facilities will be built sufficient to generate energy equal to usage over the course of a year, we then need to do a calculation of how much storage would be required to balance the times of excess production against those of insufficient production in order to get through the year without blackouts. The challenge of getting through an entire year could require far more storage than merely getting through a week-long wind/sun drought, because both wind and sun are seasonal, producing much more in some seasons than others.
Previous posts on this blog have cited to several competent calculations of the amount of storage needed for different jurisdictions to get through a full year with only wind and sun to generate the electricity. For the case of the entire United States, this post from January 2022 describes work of Ken Gregory, who calculates a storage requirement, based on the current level of electricity consumption, of approximately 250,000 GWH to get through a year. If you then assume as part of the decarbonization project the electrification of all currently non-electrified sectors of the economy (transportation, home heat, industry, agriculture, etc.), the storage requirement would approximately triple, to 750,000 GWH. If that storage requirement is to be met by batteries, and we price the amount of storage needed at the price of the best currently-available batteries (Tesla-type lithium ion batteries), we get an upfront capital cost in the range of hundreds of trillions of dollars. That cost alone would be a large multiple of the entire U.S. GDP, and obviously would render the entire decarbonization project impossible. In addition, lithium-ion type batteries (and all other currently-available batteries) do not have the ability to store power for months on end, as from the summer to the winter, without dissipation, and then discharge over the course of additional months. In other words, the fantasy of a fully wind/solar energy economy backed up only by batteries is doomed to quickly run into an impenetrable wall.
So is there another approach to decarbonization that could work? With nuclear blocked by the same environmentalists who oppose all use of fossil fuels, the options are few. The most plausible would be to use hydrogen as the means of storage to balance the random swings of wind and solar electricity generation.
It’s not like nobody has thought of this up to now. Indeed, to politicians and activists who can freely pontificate about theoretical solutions without having to worry about practical obstacles or costs, hydrogen seems like it couldn’t be easier. With hydrogen, you can just completely cut carbon out of the energy cycle: make the hydrogen from water, store it until you need it, and then when the need arises burn it to produce energy with only water as the by-product.
Back in 2003, then-President George W. Bush proposed exactly such a system in his State of the Union address:
In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush launched his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to work in partnership with the private sector to accelerate the research and development required for a hydrogen economy. The President’s Hydrogen Fuel Initiative and the FreedomCAR Partnership are providing nearly $1.72 billion to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cells, hydrogen infrastructure technologies, and advanced automobile technologies. The President’s Initiative will enable the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles in the 2020 timeframe.
Fuel cell (that is, hydrogen-fueled) cars by 2020. Nothing to it!
Perhaps you haven’t noticed any large number of hydrogen-fueled cars on the roads here in 2022. How’s it going with the project to produce the hydrogen by a carbon-free process of electrolysis from water (sometimes known as “green hydrogen”)? This is from the JP Morgan Wealth Management 2022 Annual Energy Paper (page 39):
Current green hydrogen production is negligible. . . .
The solution seems so terribly obvious, and yet nobody is doing it. What is wrong with everybody?
The summary of the answer is that hydrogen in the form of a free gas is much more expensive to produce than good old natural gas (aka methane or CH4), and once you have it, it is inferior in every respect to natural gas as a fuel for running the energy system (other than the issue of carbon emissions, if you think those are a problem). Hydrogen is far more difficult and costly than natural gas to transport, to store and to handle. It is much more dangerous and subject to exploding. It is much less dense by volume, which makes it particularly less useful for transportation applications like cars and airplanes.
And of course there is no demonstration project at large scale to show how a hydrogen-based power system would work or how much it would cost after including all of the extras and current unknowns not just for producing it but also for transporting it and handling it safely.
Here are just a few of the issues that arise in consideration of hydrogen as the way to decarbonize:
-Cost of “green” hydrogen versus natural gas. In recent years, prior to the last few months, natural gas prices have ranged between about $2 and $6 per million BTUs in the U.S. The price spike of the past few months has taken the price of natural gas to about $9/MMBTUs. Meanwhile, according to this December 2020 piece at Seeking Alpha, the price for “green” hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water is in the range of $4 to $6 per kg, which translates, according to Seeking Alpha, to $32 to $48 per MMBTU. In other words, even with the very dramatic recent rise in the price of natural gas, it is still 3 to 5 times cheaper to obtain than “green” hydrogen. There are some who predict dramatic future price declines for “green” hydrogen, and also continued price increases for natural gas. Maybe. But with prices where they are now, or anywhere close, nobody is going to make major purchases of “green” hydrogen as the backup fuel for intermittent renewables; and without buyers, nobody will produce large amounts of the stuff.
-How much overbuild of sun/wind generation capacity would be required to produce the “green” hydrogen? Truly breathtaking amounts of incremental solar panels and/or wind turbines would be required to make enough “green” hydrogen to become a meaningful factor in backing up a grid mainly powered by the sun and wind. The Seeking Alpha piece has calculations of how much nameplate solar panel capacity it would take to produce enough “green” hydrogen to power just one small size (288 MW) GE turbine generator. The answer is, the solar nameplate capacity to do the job would be close to ten times the capacity of the plant that would use the hydrogen: “Consider the widely deployed GE 9F.04 gas turbine, which produces 288 MW of power. With 100% hydrogen fuel, GE states that this turbine would use about 9.3 million CF or 22,400 kg of hydrogen per hour. With an 80% efficient electrolysis energy cost of 49.3 kWh/kg, producing that one hour supply of hydrogen would require 1,104 MWh of power for electrolysis. To generate the hydrogen to run the turbine for 12 hours (~ dusk to dawn) would require 12 x 1,104 MWh, or 13.2 GWh. Given a typical 20% solar capacity factor, that would require about 2.6 GW of solar nameplate capacity dedicated to generating the hydrogen to fuel this 288 MW generator overnight.” Given the tremendous losses in the process of making the hydrogen and then converting it back into electricity, it is almost impossible to conceive that this process could ever be cost competitive with just burning natural gas.
-Making enough “green” hydrogen to power the country means electrolyzing the ocean. The ocean is effectively infinite as a source of water, but fresh water supplies are limited. If you electrolyze salt water, you get large amounts of highly toxic chlorine. There are people working on solutions to this gigantic problem, but as of now it is all in the laboratory stage. Incremental costs of getting your “green” hydrogen from the ocean are a complete wild card.
-Hydrogen is much less energy dense than gasoline by volume. For many purposes, and particularly for the purpose of transportation fuel, it is highly relevant that hydrogen is much less dense than gasoline by volume. Even liquid hydrogen has an energy density by volume that is only one-quarter that of gasoline (8 MJ/L versus 32 MJ/L), meaning that much larger a fuel tank; and liquid hydrogen needs to be kept at the ridiculously cold temperature of -253 deg C. Alternatively, you can compress the gas, but then you are talking more like a 10 times energy density disadvantage. Either compressing the gas or converting to liquid will require large amounts of additional energy, which is an additional cost not yet figured into the calculations.
-Hydrogen makes steel pipelines more brittle. Hydrogen is much more difficult than natural gas to transport and handle. Most existing gas pipelines are made of steel, and hydrogen has an effect on steel known as “embrittlement,” that makes the pipes develop cracks and leaks over time. Cracks and leaks can lead to explosions. Also, because of the volumetric energy density issue, existing natural gas pipelines can carry far less energy if used to carry hydrogen.
I don’t know how much extra our energy would cost if we forcibly got rid of all hydrocarbons and shifted to wind and solar backed up by “green” hydrogen — and neither does anybody else. An educated guess would be that the all-in cost of energy would get multiplied by something in the range of five to ten. Yes, that would probably be a big improvement over trying to accomplish the same thing with batteries. But it would still be an enormous impoverishment of the American people in the pointless quest to possibly shave a few hundredths of a degree off world average temperatures a hundred years from now.
I don’t pretend to be an expert (or maybe I do), but cost is probably the big issue. The old 50’s promise of “too cheap to meter” met up with the reality of “why should we charge less than coal?” The same applies in reverse. If it costs more than coal, they’ll just use coal.
I always thought they should build reactors or store waste at a subduction zone and let plate tectonics take the whole thing down to melt. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust and all.
>> What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem <<
This is how you know your source is an unserious, muck-racking no-nothing. Your utility companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on this issue. It’s problematic to say it’s well in hand, since lithium is a big issue in global politics because it sure as HELL is NOT an UNRECOGNIZED problem, but there’s no mystery about how this shakes out, so it’s not anything that needs vastly more attention than it’s getting. And newer technologies are already ensuring that we’ll replace the need for lithium long before it runs out.
Only “fossil” fuels and/or nuclear can supply the needs of an industrialized economy. We know that the left wants to destroy our industrialized economy. So the quickest way to do that is to eliminate production of petroleum products, which they are now doing.
The clam that hydrogen can pass through steel walls got my curiosity up. Turns out that’s not exactly true: It passes into but not through the walls. But that process, steel embrittlement, is a pretty funky phenomenon.
First thing I thought of.lol
“Hydrogen Is Unlikely Ever To Be A Viable Solution To The Energy Storage Conundrum”
Duh..... that’s because it has to be designed as an on-board on-demand system to be viable.
too expensive.
I don’t know why they don’t create city-size nuke generators like those used in nuke powered subs and aircraft carriers.
Those COULD be buried for security
AOC has a new Perpetual Motion Machine to power the world , Her Mouth
Better solution - face the truth that there is no such thing as man man climate change, ignore all environmentalist, and go back to what works.
Coal burning power plants and build more dams for Hydro electric power.
Low cost energy is the road to wealth for a nation.
The reality is that we shall be relying on hydrocarbon fuels for decades, if not centuries, into the future. As a storage medium for energy, it is hard to beat.
Now if you want hydrogen, in great quantity, then beginning with coal, make coke from it by heating in a retort in the absence of oxygen. The volatiles driven off range from tar to methane, and only the carbon remains. Ignite the coke with an oxygen supply until the embers reach a steady temperature above 1,000 degrees, then introduce an atomized water spray. The temperature will dip a little, but the water in combination with the carbon of the coke forms carbon monoxide, an excellent fuel in its own right, and free hydrogen, which is much lighter than the carbon monoxide, and may be separated by perhaps some osmotic process. The remaining carbon monoxide is piped off to be burned, forming carbon dioxide, and the heat energy used to generate electricity. the whole concept behind “clean coal”.
No fly ash, no mercury, no volatiles, which were cooked off earlier.
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Town_gas
Another method, which uses waste and organic trash, is the Plasma Trash Reduction system. The trash material is shredded into very small granules, and fed into a plasma arc within a closed retort, in the absence of oxygen. The plasma torch, ignited by an outside source of electricity, then generates temperatures nearly that of the surface of the sun, some 33,000 degrees F. The waste stream is dropped into this plasma torch, stripping the external electrons of every element that falls through it, reducing the elements to their ions. Free hydrogen and carbon monoxide are the primary products of this plasma incineration, and the ions of every other element then fall to the bottom of the retort, as a white-hot slag, which is drained off on a continuous basis. The hydrogen and carbon monoxide is then used as a fuel to generate electricity on-site, about six times the amount necessary to ignite and maintain the plasma arc. Not exactly fusion energy, but certainly on a par with direct application of solar energy.
https://www.explainthatstuff.com/plasma-arc-recycling.html
As a sort of “new technology” in the 1950’s and 1960’s, uranium-fueled light water reactor power generation plants were funded and built relatively close to industry and residential user locations. These nuclear power plants could run 24/7/365 at flat-out maximum output for YEARS before needing refueling, but this meant that “spent” uranium fuel rods, which still retained about 97% of residual power, had to be removed and either reprocessed, or kept in storage for periods ranging up to something like 10,000 years before the residual radioactivity died down.
Enter several technical and engineering advances, making it possible to use thorium, a much more available and stable nuclear fuel, to build thorium-fueled molten salt nuclear reactors, which can also run 24/7/365 flat-out full maximum for years, but are inherently much safer, and also as important, can be scaled up or down in size to fit the locality. Because of the design, there is no possibility of having a meltdown that releases a large radioactive cloud, like the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disasters. And perhaps even more important than any other reason for adoption, the “spent” uranium fuel rods must be used to initiate the thorium-fueled reaction which does not start spontaneously, eventually consuming most or all of the fuel rods now in storage, so the world does not have to wait 10,000 years for them to become relatively harmless.
——wealth——
“Posessing wealth is a crime against humanity”......AOC
“If you want stored solar energy just use nuclear fission.”
Nuclear is the elephant in many rooms.
So many issues, so many questions, NO ANSWERS!!!
Anyone ever heard of a power storage facility???
The only one I can think of is what was found beneath cross country telephone microwave towers that have pretty much gone the way of the dodo bird. A building full of batteries. I believe it was to power the line if the microwave link went down. I’m not an AT&T guy so that could be bad info.
Power is produced and consumed. Storage is something else and is usually associated with self contained solar power systems in a home or RV.
Hydrogen fuel cells? That particular problem has been worked at least since I was in College back in the late fifties. Basically zero progress. It ain’t viable yet and that’s it.
The power grid is a known quantity, or was until radical stupidity came into fashion. Now it is a shadow of what it needs to be to power America. Time to get on with LIFE and stop the stupidity of the left from destroying what our forefathers built for us to enjoy and maintain.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The safest and easiest way to store hydrogen energy is in a carbon source. In doing do the carbon source, say coal, is converted to a hydrocarbon. The hydrocarbon can be easily stored with our current infrastructure. What is the hydrocarbon?,...manufacturing grade petroleum.
face the truth that there is no such thing as man man climate change
No can do. Think of the embarrassment.
The only real advantage to hydrogen is it’s in almost limitless supply.
________
Not really. There is NO free hydrogen on Earth. All hydrogen is bound in water and many other minerals.
It takes a lot energy (more than it would be delivered back) to make hydrogen.
If we had some pipeline from the Sun, that would be greet. Sun has a lot of free hydrogen.
As a matter of fact, hydrogen does not has that much energy in itself. Burning a mole of hydrogen is a lot less effective than mole of natural gas.
The only thing, which makes not so smart people loving hydrogen is that it is light!
So there is a lot of energy in a Pound of hydrogen, but only, because a pound of hydrogen is a lot of hydrogen!
If only there was away to combine Hydrogen with Carbon and make a perfect fuel that takes many forms.
Also, in the book “Skunk Works” by Ben Rich, they were developing an SR-71 replacement that would be hydrogen fueled. He went into great detail about the extreme dangers and difficulty of storing the huge amounts of hydrogen needed for just one aircraft program.
This is like looking for something besides grass for cattle in the field to eat. Use hydrocarbons.
Snicker... you’re my hero.
One word: CARBON
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