[88e282102ae2e5b]

> So the input for this technology is imaginary.

They proposed one use, which would be to use it as storage for solar/wind power. Perhaps their plan is that when there's excess output from renewables, they'll use electrolysis to generate hydrogen gas from water?

[manicdee]

That is exactly the plan. With renewables you have to deploy far more than you need due to capacity factor, so to average 100kW on solar you need to deploy between 300kW and 400kW of capacity. So during the course of the day you will be generating significantly more or significantly less power than required.

Batteries and hydro will help for short term storage of excess power (ie: overnight, during cloud passage) but for long term storage (eg for transport by sea) you need something with higher energy density. For export especially you need high energy density since shipping charged batteries across the planet is going to be extremely inefficient.

The breakthrough this membrane represents is an increase in the “well to wheels” efficiency of the hydrogen economy (which is lower overall than the “pure electric” economy involving BEVs). Having said that, the “well to wheels” efficiency of H2 using Ammonia as a transport medium is under 20%, so it’s really only useful when there is plentiful cheap energy which nobody else has a better use for.

Other uses for plentiful cheap electricity could be (for example) chilling or heating large volumes of water or other thermal mass for air conditioning and industrial processes. If you have large tanks of water you can spend energy chilling (or heating) them when electricity is cheap, then use the chilled water to cool whatever it is you have that is getting too hot (and vice versa for hot water storage).

But if people are willing to pay enough for hydrogen at point of use, there will be an economic case for producing ammonia in Australia to be converted to hydrogen in Japan resulting in 1kWh in Japan costing about the same as 4kWh in Australia.