> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that.
A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar + daily discharging batteries won't work. The cost was then around 10-20 times more expensive than nuclear. Those costs has gone down a bit since then, but it is still several times more expensive than nuclear.
Sweden and Germany are still very much in favor of green hydrogen, and there are on-going experiment to use it for industries that need hydrogen itself (rather than burning it for energy), but they are no investments for a grid storage. If nuclear is not economically viable, a technology that is several time more expensive is not something they are just going to throw money at. Those money are currently going towards fossil fuels, since that is cheaper than nuclear.
If however we would ban fossil fuel, especially cheap fossil fuel from Russia, the economics might change. There is also always the hope that politicians investment into fossil fuels today will give green hydrogen enough time to become economical viable for the energy sector.
China is selling electrolyzers for < $300/kw. Given that renewable electricity's LCOE is a fraction of nuclear, I don't see how hydrogen could be 10-20 times the cost of nuclear. Were they doing something ridiculous like assuming it's stored as liquid hydrogen?
Also, remember the big use of hydrogen on the grid would be as a dispatchable backstop to cheap renewable sources, not as something that's used 24/7. So most of the energy flow would not be through hydrogen, it would be from the renewables directly (or through batteries for short term smoothing.)
There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power combinations that can solve that issue today then people should rush to invest before next winter where prices are predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices has also gone up a lot since the war.
And it was 10-20 times a few years ago. Prices has gone down a significant bit. If you get the prices to around $1 per/kg (about 3-10x reduction from this year prices), and we don't account for transportation, infrastructure and physical storage, the price would start to look really competitive to nuclear.
If you search online you will find plenty of predictions that prices might reach that magical $1 per/kg in say 2030 or so, in which case that will be a great choice. As a bonus it will make medical oxygen dirt cheap. At that point all discussions about nuclear power will mostly be made moot since hydrogen will be the factual best choice.
Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).
Have you heard of "lamp gas"? It used to be delivered via cast-iron pipes to every house, factory, and street light. It was a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. There was no problem with embrittlement, because the pressure was low. Natural gas is today carried (in the same pipes, some places) at quite low pressure. Germany could start admixing H2 anytime, although feeding it to NG turbines would be a better immediate use.
Anyway aluminum is quite resistant to hydrogen embrittlement.
This study from MIT found that the LCOE of fully renewable energy production, backed by LI batteries would be $3000/MWh vs $2400/MWh for hydrogen instead of batteries for storage:
That's grossly excessive. This website lets you look at optimization vs. actual historical weather data and reaches a much lower cost. BTW, you use both batteries AND storage; their combination can be cheaper than either alone. You also store the hydrogen underground rather than above ground.
I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the MIT study over the model above, that states directly that it is a toy model.
It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted.
Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support the conclusions?
Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. It is not the average cost/kWh over all the energy being consumed off the grid.
Comparing this to nuclear is to compare apples and oranges. Nuclear supplies baseload, not additional seasonal power. If you tried to use nuclear to supply seasonal power the cost would be extreme. If you use nuclear to supply baseload, it is competing not just with hydrogen but also with much lower cost energy sent directly from renewables to the grid, and from batteries to the grid.
Of course the fraction of the output from the hydrogen fueled turbines will be expensive. But what we get from that toy model is the average cost of power, of which seasonally stored power is just a small part. In that toy model, nuclear is "Dispatchable 2", which you can enable, and which comes out to about 10 euro/kWh (EPR assumptions, perhaps optimistic considering Flamanville 3.)
About using nuclear to cover seasonal variation, its not ideal, but at worst you increase the cost by 50-100%.
Day/night cycles can make that even slightly worse, but even small amounts of storage can even that out.
This Korean study claims that a at 3% dicount rate, the price the LCOE of their APR1400 reactors go from 36Won/kWh (a bit under 3cents) at 90% average utilization to 52Won/kWh (a bit over 4 cents) at 60% average utilization.
> Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen.
I interpreted those numbers as average LCOE for the electricy supply, but I could be wrong.
Let's assume that you're right, and this only applies to maybe 25% of total energy needs. The averge price would still be increased by $1000/MWh, on top of the renewable costs themselves, grid costs, etc.
If you go to https://model.energy/ and solve for California, 2011 weather data, 2030 cost assumptions, hydrogen is contributing just 5.9 euro/MWh to the average cost of electricity (less than 10% of the total cost of 68.1 euro/MWh). This is for supplying "synthetic baseload", the best case for nuclear (for varying demand, renewables could only do better, since one could always just swap out the nuclear source with this synthetic source, providing an upper bound on the cost.)
Nuclear will do best in more northerly places that are away from coasts. Poland, for example. For extremely northerly places, like Alaska, the total demand is so small that nuclear is not a good fit.
I'm afraid I don't trust those numbers, or rather, the calculations. For instance, if I select only Wind + Battery, and keep raising the storage cost for battery, the battery cost of the calculations go down, and are replaced by 100% wind plant costs. (Battery capacity is only enough for 1 hour of storage in such a scenario.)
On the other hand, if I drop the cost of battery to almost zero, the battery fraction of production goes to about 30-40%, and storage capacity is about 20 days.
In other words, it seems that the model is optimizing for an extreme overprovisioning of windmills when storage capacity is expensive, compared to when storage is cheap. (Basically, it "constructs" 10x or more windmills than what is needed from a pure energy production perspective.) I suspect that there are some issues with doing that is not taken into account by the model, such as available space at that level of density, risk calculations for completely dead winds, etc.
> Nuclear will do best in more northerly places that are away from coasts. Poland, for example.
Solar in dry, sunny places will likely be able to fully replace fossil fuels way before wind will be, since you do get some sunlight every day, while the wind may be gone for a week at a time. (And you have to plan for the worst case, in terms of available storage.)
No, because if wind is predicted to die down for a week, you order liquified ammonia shipped in from solar farms in the tropics. You might even keep a tank of a week or two's worth, banked against the occasion.
You may object that this seems fragile, but it is in fact how we live now. People are importing fuel from dodgy countries all the damn time.
I think much of the anti-renewable mindset is white high latitude racism. It's a difficult pill to swallow for some that these mid to high latitude areas are going to become the world's energy ghettos.
There may be individuals that fit your stereotype, but frankly your statement comes off as every bit as racist as you blame that stereotype of.
Personally, I think it would be great if Africa, India and Mexico could become energy powerhouses. Much better to have energy that can be produced anywhere with a desert or tropical climate than a few monopolist countries, such as OPEC+Russia.
And before you blame that last sentence on racism, keep in mind that Russia is VERY white and also very high latitude. It's not about the race, latitude or skin coloar, but the fact that many OPEC countries are dictatorships that use the profits to wage war on their neighbours, both in the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine.
My impression is of post-apocalyptic survivalism. If you are installing renewables, it is because you will not be able to rely on anyone else in the world, for anything, forever; or anyway must never be obliged to.
Dependence upon imported oil, cars, aircraft, microchips, shop tools, home appliances, clothing, and ... everything, really ... has scarred them deeply, and they cannot consider entering into any new such arrangement.
One could ask, but I would expect only sputtering.
No, it is saying that it is currently about $6000000/MW construction cost. Then you devide by number of hours of operations to get the cost per MW/h. (Not adjusted for interest rate.)
The LCOE of new nuclear plants have estimates ranging from less than $30/MWh to around $150/MWh, while estimates for the cost of plants built a few decades ago end up at around $40-60/MWh, from the numbers I've seen.
A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar + daily discharging batteries won't work. The cost was then around 10-20 times more expensive than nuclear. Those costs has gone down a bit since then, but it is still several times more expensive than nuclear.
Sweden and Germany are still very much in favor of green hydrogen, and there are on-going experiment to use it for industries that need hydrogen itself (rather than burning it for energy), but they are no investments for a grid storage. If nuclear is not economically viable, a technology that is several time more expensive is not something they are just going to throw money at. Those money are currently going towards fossil fuels, since that is cheaper than nuclear.
If however we would ban fossil fuel, especially cheap fossil fuel from Russia, the economics might change. There is also always the hope that politicians investment into fossil fuels today will give green hydrogen enough time to become economical viable for the energy sector.