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by Manfredo_1 1906 days ago
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.
1 comments
Hypx 1906 days ago
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.

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Manfredo_1 1906 days ago
No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with. If they are interchangeable, expect drastically smaller service intervals.
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Manfredo_1 1905 days ago
Most companies are targeting hydrogen gas turbines to be produced in 2030 or 2040: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/news/magazine/2019/...

They aren't "off the shelf" technology yet.

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pfdietz 1906 days ago
> No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with.

The industries that manipulate tens of millions of tons of hydrogen each year would be astounded to hear this statement of yours. What are those facilities made of, unobtainium?

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Hypx 1906 days ago
A claim which simply isn't true. Only certain alloys have a problem with hydrogen. We've been using hydrogen in industry for decades and most of this problem has been solved.
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Manfredo_1 1906 days ago
We've been using hydrogen in the chemical industry. We haven't been using hydrogen to drive combustion turbines very much, and even then it's in a mixture of natural gas.

Unfortunately, those alloys that experience embrittlement includes the ones used in steam turbines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09215...

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