[briandw]

I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries.

I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.

[Tuna-Fish]

In a lot of places in the world, the marginal cost of electricity is zero, if your capital costs are low enough to only purchase when there is excess wind.

The cost of batteries for long-term storage is still prohibitively high. In contrast, large hydrogen (or methanol, etc further products) are relatively cheap to store.

Those two things put together is pretty much it. There is massive room for additional wind capacity in northern europe (and solar in north africa, etc). In order for constructing that additional capacity to make any sense, there needs to be more demand that can idle for ~2/3rds of the time, and make economic sense to run a third of the time. In these conditions, the roundtrip efficiency is an entirely uninteresting statistic, and the capital cost of capacity is what matters.

[KennyBlanken]

How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure.

How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.

HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s

Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.

You don't pour money into a fuel that is a logistical headache and a half, a fuel that nobody uses, and can only be converted back into electricity with the standard terrible internal combustion / turbine efficiencies.

[IAmBroom]

So, do you have a materials science degree, or are you claiming you know more than the trained experts already tackling these issues IRL?

I'm tired of Internet Experts(tm) announcing how dumb the specialists are for not seeing the Obvious Facts.

[oh_my_goodness]

The pervious comment includes '/s' and appears to be a complaint about internet 'experts'.

[Tuna-Fish]

> How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure.

BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days.

> How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.

HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you.

> Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.

Extremely low costs some of the time. Not low at all average costs. Metal refineries have significant capital costs and shutdown costs. You are not going to profitably operate one if you need to shut it down when the wind calms down, or if you are running it on batteries. The kind of existing industries that can make use of intermittently cheap power have already been scaled up, and we need more to keep building more renewables.

> HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s

I don't have to, because there are significant pilot projects ongoing.

This is new, and requires higher initial capital outlay than batteries (which have the significant advantage that it's easier to do small projects and then scale them up), so of course it's going more slowly. But there are things that hydrogen (+ things derived from hydrogen. Storing it as gas is not usually the best option, but if you have the gas you can refine it further at very low cost.) can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.

But seriously, you need to consider different metrics for different situations. If your data is from California or Australia, maybe consider that it is not applicable to all of the rest of the world?

[lukeschlather]

> can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.

A battery can definitely store power for three months. What do you mean? Say it loses 10-15% charge in 3 months, that still sounds more efficient than electrolysis (and storing hydrogen will have a nonzero amount of loss too, compounding its lower efficiency.)

[Tuna-Fish]

Not just charge a small battery and discharge it 3 months later, but to store 3 months worth of production.

And using batteries, the cost of that is currently bonkers.

The lowest cost large-scale BESS projects that have been completed are in China, with the record-holder currently being ~$51k/MHh.

As a comparison, OL3, the most expensive nuclear plant in the world, and which is generally held up as an example of nuclear plants being too expensive to be worth it, cost a total of €11B. It produces net 1600MW electric. That is, if you have the lowest construction, labor and battery costs in the world for the battery project, if you want to store more than ~6.5 days of production, it makes more sense to instead build the world's most expensive nuclear power plant and idle it when you don't need the power.

> sounds more efficient than electrolysis

NOBODY CARES ABOUT EFFICIENCY. Nobody should care about efficiency. If you care about efficiency, you do not understand the problem. If you can get capital costs low enough, your competition for that power is curtailment. The cost of input electricity can be assumed to be zero.

BESS is useful and important for stabilizing the grid, and for leveling production/consumption over a day. Hydrogen solves a different problem, namely, how to run your entire grid on renewables without using coal or nuclear as baseload, and without natural gas as peakers, when your production varies greatly over time.

[fisherjeff]

Well green hydrogen is also a necessity if you want to make carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.

[dec0dedab0de]

I think the best argument for hydrogen is for automobiles. Existing cars can be converted to use it, doesn't spray pollution all over the city, and can be refilled quickly unlike a battery.

[SoftTalker]

Can existing cars be converted? Yes for CNG/methane or LPG/propane but not sure I've heard of Hydrogen conversions. Wikipedia says conversion to Hydrogen requires:

... hardened valves and valve seats, stronger connecting rods, non-platinum tipped spark plugs, a higher voltage ignition coil, fuel injectors designed for a gas instead of a liquid, larger crankshaft damper, stronger head gasket material, modified (for supercharger) intake manifold, positive pressure supercharger, and high temperature engine oil.

For CNG or LPG conversion I think some fuel system components need to change but the rods, valves, head gasket, etc. are all unchanged.

My guess as to the reason is that hydrogen will basically detonate in the cylinder, whereas methane or propane will burn more like gasoline.

[cduzz]

Hydrogen is no good for cars because it sneaks into the metal and ruins it (hydrogen embrittlement). Your car is mostly metal, especially the part that stores the fuel and the part that makes it go boom.

You can probably make electricity directly from H2, and you can probably make special pressure vessels that'll store that H2 (though even then it'll have a 7 year "inspect thoroughly" and a 15 year "throw it out regardless" lifespan.)

H2 is a silly fuel unless you're making rockets. Or if you're trying to distract people.

[spauldo]

I seem to remember Iceland was looking hard into hydrogen for their fishing fleets. They have to import Diesel fuel but they've got geothermal running out of their ears.

I haven't checked to see how that went, but it sounded like the perfect test case for hydrogen's viability.

[DoctorOetker]

with hydrogenotrophs you can create food (all amino acids) from solar hydrogen, supposedly about 10% more efficiently, this could return a lot of arable land for wilding, solar farms, housing, ...

Imagine dividing farmland by 10x by feeding hydrogenotrophs with solar H2.

[SoftTalker]

It's basically a battery. It's not a power source, it's energy storage. If the energy is cheap enough (e.g. solar) inefficiencies don't matter as much.

[Brian_K_White]

I truly do not understand the fixation with trying to use batteries in applications that really need a fuel.

[alephnerd]

> I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel

Not everything is about "muh EV".

There is a reason that countries that have built significant Solar PV and Wind Turbine manufacturing capacity like China, Germany, SK, Japan, and India have also been investing in H2.

H2 as an energy market helps subsidize additional H2 usecases such as Ammonia/NH3 production for fertilizers (this has become critical due to the ongoing Iran War), steelmaking via H2 direct reduced/sponge iron, and (for China and India) coal gasification.

Additionally, REEs and critical minerals have increasingly become a bottleneck so additional options is good to have depending on the country, which is a major reason Japan heavily invested in hydrogen along with sodium solid state battery R&D.

And finally, the brutal truth is no major country actually cares about climate change - they care about energy security. Most larger countries have the ability to afford the externalities that arise from climate change, the three largest CO2 emitters in the world (China, US, India) are seeing CO2 emissions rise (mind you at a reduced rate, but still unsustainable from a climate change perspective), and in China and India's case continue to leverage coal as an energy security tool especially after the Iran War supply chain crisis highlighted the criticality of coal gasification for the fertilizers and agriculture.

[KennyBlanken]

You don't need hydrogen to smelt, refine, recycle, whatever, metal.

You build an electric arc furnace.

[marcosdumay]

Furnaces don't refine metals just by themselves.

Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.

[alephnerd]

You still need iron to be processed in steelmaking. THIS is where the carbon bottleneck in steelmaking exists because pig iron has a high carbon ratio. H2 helps with processing sponge iron which dramatically reduces the carbon ratio within iron ingots used for steelmaking.