It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
This will hopefully lead to storage methods, maybe exportable ones like hydrogen
Hydrogen is not good for energy storage. Round trip efficiency is abysmal and its incredibly difficult to store in the first place
Of course not, hydrogen is pathetic compared to batteries and similar stored mass energy solutions, but hydrogen does have its place, the future should be a mixture of different solutions because many methods have their advantages and disadvantages, but having a mixture means we can apply the best solution to the viable problems. Let’s take transportation, you have a truck that earns money by travelling. If we want to transition away from fossil fuel, hydrogen makes sense over batteries that takes an hour to multiple hours to charge and the weight of the batteries reduce the overall payload of the truck.
There are two solutions to trucks:
- Better batteries
- Trains
The first will almost certainly happen in the next few years. Batteries have been improving kwh/kg at 5-8% per year. There are still enough lab research projects making their way into actual manufactured batteries that we expect this to continue for a while longer. It’s been at the higher end of the range for the last few years. That growth compounds every year; at 8%, you’ve more than doubled capacity in 10 years. Which is about where trucks would need to be.
How much would you want to invest in a parallel set of hydrogen infrastructure and trucks when batteries are likely to overtake them in a few years?
The better solution is to replace most long haul trucking with trains. If the trains kept running on diesel, it’d still be a huge win. Even better is electrified overhead wires, but diesel will do fine if we have to.
The US commercial train system has deliberately avoided competing with most long haul trucking for decades. It doesn’t have to be that way, and the investment needed may not be that much.
As far as grid storage goes, we have flow batteries, pumped hydro, flywheels, heating up sand, or sodium batteries. They all have advantages and disadvantages, but hydrogen doesn’t have much of a niche.
Hydrogen has its place, and we need plenty of it in places where we don’t have viable alternatives. Road transport is pretty far down that list though.
Don’t store it in diatomic form. Ammonia is the common alternative for hydrogen storage and transport, iirc
And even if round trip efficiency is poor, if renewables are in excess, it would be so much better to dump that energy into something that to have to curtail.
There’s no shortage of solutions better than hydrogen for storing grid energy.
There were niches where hydrogen might have made sense 10 years ago. Other solutions have gotten better and better–not just lithium batteries, either–and it’s gotten squeezed out. There’s still a few where it might, like trucks and planes, but even those seem to getting overtaken by better tech elsewhere.
Any significant investment in hydrogen infrastructure is likely to be overtaken before it can see a return on investment.
You just sent me down a rabbit hole, I had heard of electrolysis but didn’t realize that it was able to store energy on a large scale. Seems like a waste of water though.
Well the water isn’t disappearing anywhere and I believe that works on salt water as well
it works on salt water, submarines do it for oxygen, obviously, though you also have to deal with the salt build up, along with mineral build up, though unlike desalination, you can just run constant water flow through and yoink a small portion of it, you don’t have to yeet all the water. So that makes it easier.
Splitting water and keeping the H2 converts the energy into chemical energy. The oxygen is just dumped into the atmosphere, which is a loss of efficiency I think? What I know, H2 is the highest form of chemical energy there is.
Some processes require burning, or cannot be electrified otherwise. It’s these where the hydrogen is needed directly. I think hydrogen is a source material that should be mostly be converted into other chemicals. Etc. methanol and ammonia are more easily storable, unlike diatomic hydrogen which can slowly diffuse through a metal wall, enbrittleling it. Clean ammonia production could replace a giant mass of fossil fuels.
Here is an another rabbit hole: most of your body’s nitrogen is from ammonia and the fertilizers made from it.
