[Manuel_D]

Are there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects.

Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a hypothetical cost of hydrogen, to actual historical cost is comparing apples to oranges.

[pfdietz]

Why should any exist yet, when natural gas has been so cheap? Tighten the screws enough to eliminate fossil fuel dispatchable sources and you'll start to see it (or something else that can solve the same problem better).

[Manuel_D]

Many places are already seeing energy surpluses. California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess daytime energy production. If we really can store electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing hydrogen storage being built to profit off these intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or, maybe, it's because writing a white paper claiming an extremely cheap cost is not remotely the same thing as actually building an energy storage facility at said cost.

I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are experimental technologies that might operate cheaply at scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as fact for the same reason.

[pfdietz]

Natural gas is really hard to displace here, and won't happen until it becomes and stays expensive. It may now be above that price level in Europe, but it has to stay there to enable the capital investment in large scale green hydrogen production.

[Manuel_D]

Yet the condition you claim will give rise to widespread adoption of energy storage already exist in Hawaii: fossil fuels have to be imported making it expensive, and daytime energy prices regularly go negative due to widespread solar adopt. These conditions have existed for years. Yet people aren't storing and reselling this energy. Why not? If hydrogen storage really costs only $1/KWh then a company can reclaim their investment cost in less than a week of operation, with an average price of $0.30/KWh in the state. It's basically free money.

The reality is that hydrogen storage costs nowhere near $1/KWh. People making predictions about what a technology will cost and actually building it are two totally different things.

[pfdietz]

That storage cost is in salt formations, a technology that is already widely used to store megatons of natural gas. A single salt formation in Delta, Utah could store enough hydrogen to supply the entire US average grid power for 30 hours (and efforts to exploit this formation for hydrogen storage are ongoing). Salt formations exist in ample supply in Germany and Europe, but there are none in Hawaii, which is entirely volcanic.

[Manuel_D]

The same excess of energy during peak renewable production exists in California, and parts of Europe. So this problem is more than just Hawaii's geology. There are costs in electrolysis, compressions, decompression, and conversion back to electricity that are just being hand-waved away.

Can you point me to a developer that's actually offering to build hydrogen electric grid storage at $1/KWh? As in, if I give them $1 million they will build 1 GWh of hydrogen electric storage for me. Are there any enterprises actually willing to provide grid storage at this cost? If so, please point them my way. I'll make a massive amount of money. But I doubt I'll have anyone taking this offer.

The storage costs your citing are absolutely incredible. As in, I genuinely do not believe them. You're claiming that the entirety of the US's grid storage (which cost billions of dollars to build, mostly in the form of hydroelectric storage) can be matched by only $20 million in hydrogen storage. This is a cost estimate totally disconnected from reality. Until enterprises are actually building hydrogen electric grid storage for $1/KWh then this figure is meaningless.

If not then what's your explanation as to why people are missing out on the opportunity to become billionaires or trillionaires by construction hydrogen electric storage? Bill Gates alone could build enough storage for 24 hours of the USA's electricity consumption with only 10% of his net worth. This would be a rounding error on the national budget.

[Hypx_]

It's actually closer to $0.10/kWh, but we have to account for the cost of upgrades to the infrastructure.

[p_l]

Scaling is also hard... Turns out you need more than "trickle" overproduction to make reliable amounts of green hydrogen for energy storage.

[ephbit]

Hydrogen is relatively inconventient/difficult to handle except when transported via pipeline.

There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet).

Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to safely transport pure (or high concentrations of) hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The latter conversion appears to not yet be deployed at very large scales.

Seems to me that the reason why there is no large scale hydrogen generation yet (though there are medium-large/industrial scale projects now), is simply that until now large scale wasn't economically feasible. With hydrogen strategies and more pressure from a price on CO2 on their way we'll definitely see more of it soon.

[pfdietz]

For grid storage, hydrogen would not need to be transported at all (although the option to do so is there if it's favorable). It could be made above the storage caverns, pumped into them, then extracted and consumed there.