[Manfredo_1]

Hydrogen storage remains in the prototyping phase. We have no significant amount of hydrogen grid storage. Like thermal batteries or synthetic methane, hydrogen represents a potential storage solution but not one that we know will scale and be effectively deployed at the scope required.

If we actually deploy 50 GWh of hydrogen storage, and demonstrate that it can cheaply and reliability be built at scale then your point would be valid. But until then, hydrogen represents a theoretical solution not an actual solution.

[philipkglass]

Hydrogen is stored underground in Texas salt formations at Clemens Dome, Moss Bluff, and Spindletop. The largest of them, Spindletop, was completed in 2017:

https://www.airliquide.com/sites/airliquide.com/files/2017/0...

This presentation says that the Spindletop hydrogen capacity is equivalent to ~120 GWh.

https://ukccsrc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/John-Willia...

[pfdietz]

All the components of hydrogen, with the possible exception of low cost electrolyzers, don't need to be prototyped. It's existing technology. It's not like (say) molten salt reactors, in which fundamental development remains to be done.

[Manfredo_1]

Right, and what company can I call right now to install 50GWh of hydrogen storage?

It's existing technology, but it's a novel application of that technology. We haven't used hydrogen electrolysis as a form of grid storage before. And we certainly haven't used it for grid storage at the Terawatt hour scale. And that the scale we'll need to make wind and solar viable. 1 TWh isn't even 30 minutes of global electricity consumption.

[pfdietz]

50 GWh of hydrogen would fit in one salt cavern of the kind already made for natural gas. Any numbers of companies can solution mine those caverns for you; that technology is many decades old. I'd need more information about the rest of what you want, as that scales by power not by energy capacity.

[Manfredo_1]

And are we currently using any of these caverns for electrolysis and grid storage? All you said is that we have a big cavern that we could fill with hydrogen. I'm asking if anybody is actually building hydrogen grid storage at any significant scale. Are there any facilities that take in excess energy from renewables, turn it into hydrogen, and then turn that hydrogen back into electricity?

We both know the answer: there aren't any.

Back in the 1950s people thought nuclear power would be cheaper than fossil fuels. They thought it'd be effectively free. The energy density of uranium is so much better, so clearly generating electricity with it would be much cheaper. But actually deploying a technology at scale reveals more and more challenges.

Your proposal for hydrogen storage is in the same phase that nuclear power was in during the 1950s. A solution that exists on paper, but one that hasn't actually encountered and overcome the challenges of implementing it at scale. Same with thermal batteries, synthetic methane, and so on. These are proposals that haven't passed the test of actual implementation at scale.

[pfdietz]

Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.

Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.

This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.

[Manfredo_1]

Storing hydrogen is only one piece of the puzzle. Yes, if you happen to live near an abandoned salt mine that's a convenient place to put a large quantity of hydrogen. That doesn't solve the problem of massive electrolysis facilities, and turbines that can burn hydrogen.

And it certainly doesn't answer the question of whether or not this represents a viable grid-storage solution, since we haven't built it at remotely close to the scale required.

It's not "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done"

It's "if it isn't already being done, it is extremely reckless to assume that it can be done cheaply at a massive scale".

Screw it, let's just use fusion. Nobody has actually built a fusion plant? Well, who cares if it hasn't already been done, that's a "foolish argument" in your own words. /s

[Hypx]

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s...

We could easily have Petawatt-hour scale hydrogen energy storage.

[Manfredo_1]

No, you have salt caverns with a volume sufficient to accommodate a lot of hydrogen. Actually implementing such a solution involves massive scale electrolysis, and either massive scales of oxidation cells or gas turbines designed to burn hydrogen. Neither of these things have been done at anything remotely close to the scale required to make renewables feasible.

Back in the 1950s people thought that nuclear power would be effectively free. But actually building it at scale exposed challenges of implementation that weren't foreseen. The cost of a system on paper and the cost after overcoming the challenges of actually building it are two very different things. For hydrogen storage, you only have the former.

[Hypx]

Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines. The only limiting factor would be electrolysis, but that is already something people are planning to build a lot of.

Nuclear's problem are fundamentally political in nature. If we really cared about green energy, nuclear power could easily be built out at scale.

[Manfredo_1]

No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with. If they are interchangeable, expect drastically smaller service intervals.