[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.