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by japanuspus 1699 days ago
Working in the strategy back office of a one of the worlds largest producer of renewable power, I feel I have a reasonable grasp of the problem here. Not sure what background you believe I am missing.

The point I was trying to make in my second paragraph is that when hydrolyzers get sufficiently cheap that you can buy enough to cover your peak over-production and let them idle when you are missing power, then you have effectively moved the elasticity from the production side to the demand side -- and then slow baseload does not require you to derate down your renewables.

This is far from the situation today where hydrolyzers are so expensive that you need to run them at pretty high utilization to make the economics work out.

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The question is: given that we MUST be reducing our CO2 output extremely quickly (5% a year, equivalent to an additional COVID19 crisis every year), what are the chances for your magical cheap hydrolyzers to 1° be developed 2° be deployed at scale before large parts of the world dive into climatic chaos?

BTW there is a very efficient way to run hydrolyzers at 95%: run them on nuclear power. Problem solved?