feddit.org

1 point

1 month ago

The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.

…or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.

Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

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iii@mander.xyz

-1 points

1 month ago

is what gas is for

Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change. And the fact that the gas needs to be shipped all the way from the US.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?

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1 point

1 month ago

Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.

Gas can be synthesised and we’re going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don’t need much maintenance if they’re not actually running.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?

It’s not technology it’s physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn’t explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.

Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it’s not like we don’t know how to do that, or don’t already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and “but we don’t want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive”.

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iii@mander.xyz

-1 points

1 month ago

Gas can be synthesised

When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?

They’ve been saying that for decades. It isn’t happening. It’s just natural gas.

It’s not technology it’s physics

Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany. (1).

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1 point

1 month ago

When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?

Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it’s still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we’ll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.

Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.

Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that’s what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer’s initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn’t hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that’s negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there’s good enough interconnectivity.

…meanwhile, we’ll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.

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iii@mander.xyz

0 points

1 month ago

Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale.

I mean, isn’t that the problem with all storage technologies?

Is the goal of renewables to do 90% of the year with renewables, and 10% of the year with fossil fuel?

Hopefully one day, the last 10% is “green hydrogen”, “syngas”, “synpetrol”? That’s how the intermittancy problem is “solved”?

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2 points

1 month ago

In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we’ll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.

Even with fusion up and running we’re going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running… and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they’ll have customers from day one.

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