| I think this is a likely outcome too. There was a paper recently (it may well have been Form that produced it) that examined this area of long term storage for the grid in a technology neutral way. Basically, if you're cycling regularly (e.g. smoothing solar and wind over a day) then Lithium is already pretty good and you can expect it to get bettwr as it scales out to the entire automotive industry and indeed those car batteries will be fed by the grid and can also act as short term storage and demand management. If you cycle less regularly though, storing power for weeks or more then you need something much cheaper than lithium can ever be but if you're cheap enough you can sacrifice some conversion efficiency and still be useful in a 100% renewable grid. This is where flow batteries are targetting, you can have a small/cheap "converter" but store the energy in tanks longer term. But as you say, thats also basically what you can do with hydrogen/ammmonia. And as an added bonus you can buy sell hydrogen/ammonia on the open market as it's used for other purposes, which lets you insure against under/over production and take advantage of economies of scale on the converter and storage parts. As a final bonus, during the transition you can add a percentage of hydrogen to existing gas turbines to reduce their carbon intensity and GE and other sell turbines that are built to run on gas, hydrogen/gas mixes and also pure hydrogen. This gives an easy ramp up as a carbon price and/or minimum targets can kickstart the green hydrogen industry without any particular customer needing to bear 100% of the cost. Methane from waste can also be used as a source of hydrogen, making it carbon negative, with a promising tech looking to generate solid carbon in the form of graphite. But even if you released the carbon I to the air it's better than releasing the methane. |
Low-cost methods for its safe storage and handling are well established, despite the need of being careful to avoid leaks.
Also the fuel cells using ammonia are not too different in performances compared to those using dihydrogen.