| Apologies for the confusion. You were asking for an awful lot, in way that didn't make much sense, so I thought I would chip in a bit. OP was talking about burning the hydrogen, as was I. Burning is not typically the term used with what goes on in fuel cells. A battery has a fixed capacity attached to it, it has a fixed power to energy ratio. The component that stores the energy is directly attached to the part that discharges the energy. This is what makes "cycles" make sense. With power to gas, or using fuel cells to consume energy from the process described in the article, the component that stores energy is not directly connected to the part that consumes energy. It's not necessary that they even have a fixed fuel stores attached to them, they could just be hooked up to a pipeline. The rate at which parts wear out would better be described in terms of total energy stored or consumed. That's why I mentioned the cost estimates (€0.10/kWh for hydrogen in that article), because it's perhaps the best way to compare. The rapid drop of lithium ion grid storage has put it at $250/kWh capacity with 3650 cycles, which is ~$0.07/kWh before accounting for taxes, maintenance, siting, etc., which may or may not be included in that above estimate for hydrogen. Both of these numbers blow me away by how small they are. We're in for a wild ride on tech changes over the next few years... |