Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen production | Hacker News Reader

Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen production

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For a lot of countries in the world, discussion of a hydrogen economy at any scale seems to be a bit of a hard sell. Barring sources like steam methane reformation from landfill-reclaimed methane, it's stuck between not being nearly as portable due to hydrogen embrittlement of storage container materials and ease of leak because of the small molecular size as traditional fossil fuels (albeit less C02 intensive), but a fair bit less efficient overall than just directly using the electricity.

That said, Germany's somewhat unique situation with regard to limited natural capacity for renewable energy means that that, in an argument for any degree of national energy independence, hydrogen could make sense if they can maintain some control the means of production and export.

The mention of using hydrogen in heavy industry is also interesting, and aligns with what I think of as a realistic stance. I used to work in the R&D section of a hydrogen fuel cell OEM, and one of the primary applications of hydrogen vs. batteries is in exactly the area stated: things that need quite a bit of consistent power generation, like buses or cranes or forklifts. Areas where recharge rate and up-time are really important, since available voltage doesn't drop with remaining energy capacity (you have the some available voltage until you stop supplying hydrogen to a fuel cell) and tanks can be refilled or swapped out more quickly than batteries.

I think it's also worth noting, that at least as far as I know, the tech for that sort of thing isn't years and years away on the energy-conversion side. The manufacturing capacity isn't exactly at scale yet, but because of the work put in by giants like Toyota and for specialty industries like refrigerated warehouses, I'd put the maturity of the fuel cells themselves closer to a TRL-7 or -8 than a TRL-2 or -3. It at least makes expectations seem more realistic than if the ministries were to say, "Well, we'll just hydrogen all the things!"

One thing that often comes up with clean energy solutions is the fluctuations in capacity. In the minds of some this translates into a "OMG we need so much battery to survive the post apocalyptic circumstances that will surely make wind + solar insufficient". However in the real world, you can also address fluctuations by simply having over capacity.

If e.g. wind is half the cost of other solutions, you can install 2x the capacity that you need so that you still get 100% of what you need when winds drop by 2x. That of course creates the interesting problem of what to do with the extra energy that you don't need under normal circumstances. One solution is to simply transport it around by cable to places that have under capacity but if everyone puts over capacity in place, that's not going to soak up all the over capacity.

Solar has the same challenge. Having barely enough production + batteries can work. But when prices for solar + wind continue to drop you can start thinking about installing 2x, 3x or even 10x the capacity that is needed. That then creates a challenge of how to utilize that over capacity. This is not a problem but a huge economic opportunity.

Hydrogen is one of several ways to store energy and if we nail cheap & clean mass production, it becomes a very useful source of energy for all sorts of things. The German industry (i.e. Siemens + car manufacturers) are keenly interested in making that happen because there's going to be a world wide demand for components for all of this and that kind of is something they are good at. So, there's a very rational reason for bootstrapping the hydrogen economy like this in Germany.

> Hydrogen is one of several ways to store energy and if we nail cheap & clean mass production, it becomes a very useful source of energy for all sorts of things.

If we’re talking about long-term storage, hydrogen is nearly the only option available. Alternatives would be ideas like synfuels or ammonia (which both use H2 as a feedstock). You need the high energy densities of chemical fuels for this purpose. Something that other ideas, like pumped hydro or compress air, sorely lack.

What is "long term storage"? Why would you store energy for longer than it would need for the grid to provide appropriate capacity again?

On a grid level (that usually means: very large), how are H2 or chemical solutions better than simply pumping water up a hill?

This article might be of use: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48693439_Large-Scal...

Long term means weeks to months of storage. This deals mainly with large season shifts in energy availability. Other ideas only really make sense for hours or days worth of storage. The need for this type of energy storage is well beyond what is plausible with pumping water or compressed air.

I think if we solve the hydrogen storage problem, it would also be the future for vehicles. Batteries just aren't going to cut it in the long run because of their limited power, limited charge cycles and heavy weight. I see those in a stationary role to provide capacity.

Sure, hydrogen diffuses through everything, but if we have a clean energy source that can be scaled, efficiency of conversion and loss from storage becomes secondary. Especially since fuel for cars is a short term form of storage. And it provides all the advantages fossil fuels currently have for this application.

That said, current technology doesn't provide adequate solutions for fuel cell cars en masse. Refueling is hard, fuel cells degrade quickly like batteries, distributing hydrogen is pretty hard and current production not environment friendly at all. There are some cars on the market with impressive performance, but the price is quite steep

But on the other hand, we also don't have infrastructure for batteries on scale. Imaging what the power supply for a "gas" stations on frequented roads has to look like if suddenly everyone had a electric vehicle. You would also need a lot more "buffer space". That is currently not possible to implement for any region with a large traffic density.

> think if we solve the hydrogen storage problem, it would also be the future for vehicles. Batteries just aren't going to cut it in the long run because of their limited power, limited charge cycles and heavy weight.

That was true in the past but not any more. Battery powered ev's, especially the best ones, are good enough for a large proportion of use cases, and are steadily getting better. And the infrastructure situation is also getting better at a rapid pace. To put in another way, the proportion of use cases where hydrogen fuel cells, if they ever become practical, would be superior, is shrinking every year.

I am not an expert on the hydrogen economy, but I've consistently seen a couple of important road blocks.

First, like you mention, the transport and storage of hydrogen is complicated due to hydrogen embrittlement of iron and steel. The Dutch gas companies seem to be very optimistic using the existing high-pressure pipe system crossing large parts of the Netherlands to transport H2. Question is whether long-term embrittlement might occur? how do we know? What about the smaller pipes leading to homes? The rate of embrittlement is quoted to be ten times higher. Do you have any wise words to add to this? Do you share my concerns?

2. Risk of hydrogen build-up in enclosures. Hydrogen's lighter than air property is often cited as a benefit, as it can evaporate into the atmosphere. However, in an enclosure, it might delay detection, since it is captured in the top of the building and presence might not be picked up with added odors. Some buildings open mostly at the bottom, such as distribution centers. Is this an unknown risk? We don't know, because it is actively being researched.

3. For powering vehicles, there is tremendous loss of energy from renewables due to transfer of energy and transport of gas. I think I've seen cited 30% efficiency.

4. There is an actual, continuous demand for hydrogen. However, for green hydrogen, we will need near 100% utilization of the electrolysis plants. That contradicts the premise to use excess energy from renewables to produce hydrogen. The electrolysis plants would shut down when generated electricity can be used to power industry motors directly.

5. Subsidizing hydrogen initiatives pulls subsidy away from Photo Voltaics, better electricity distribution and battery technology.

6. Long-term, we will end up with two infrastructures, with all the fixed costs associated. That might be more expensive than one (less efficient) infrastructure.

So, all in all, I am mildly skeptical on mass-scale hydrogen solutions. Perhaps you can make me more optimistic?

> Risk of hydrogen build-up in enclosures.

Allowing smoking in buildings again would stop this build-up.

1) Main strategy to avoid this is to just coat pipelines with plastic or make them out of plastic. Not all metals are equally susceptible to this process, and newer alloys are being developed that can strongly resist this phenomenon. While it is a problem, it is a solvable problem.

2) What I’ve read is that they’ll build hydrogen sensors and alarms for this.

3) This is hugely overstated for two reasons. One, just because an process contains inefficiencies, doesn’t mean the entire process is invalid. After all, gasoline powered cars throw away more than 80% of the original energy found in crude oil as waste heat. Fuel cell cars may waste more energy than battery cars, but it is less than ICEVs. Also, you do want to have excess heat sometimes.

Second, most of the sources of inefficient are solvable and/or were wildly exaggerated to begin will. Many arguments against hydrogen seem to cite some 20-30 year old source, and had some extremely pessimistic projections like hydrogen tanks leaking 20% or more of their fuel. Most of these projections haven’t been borne out.

4) Why do electrolysis plants need to run at 100% utilization rates? In a renewable world, almost nothing will have 100% utilization. This is not really a big deal since electrolyzers can be turned on and off quickly.

5) That’s true of any subsidy. One of the biggest complaints of the subsidy regime is how wasteful it is, and how poorly optimized it is for reducing GHG emissions. It will be almost a relief if hydrogen gets of those subsidies, since right now it is an important necessary technology that’s getting close to zero subsidies.

6) We don’t really need two overlapping infrastructures. Limit each infrastructure to where it is most effectively used.

Ad 1) But is that realistic, given the existing LNG infrastructure? The story being told is that we can just pump H_2 into the existing LNG pipes.

Ad 2) Yes, in processing environments. The story that is told to us is that we can replace LNG with H_2 to heat houses (with minimal investments).

Ad 3) True, ICEs are grossly inefficient. However, as I've seen it, EVs are still twice (?, reference needed) as efficient as H2. Especially for renewable, efficiency is key, as the whole production line competes with the price of oil.

4) Capital Expenditures. The YoY ROI is obviously very strongly influenced by the utility rate.

5) Green hydrogen as it stands is heavily subsidized and it needs to be. The capital expenditures for a hydrogen filling station is more than 50% covered by subsidy. And that is optimistic. So, close to zero subsidies, is not what I am seeing.

Ad 6) This might be true for industry usage, but not for consumer usage.

1) You can blend hydrogen with natural gas. To go 100% H2, you may need new pipes, but this isn't an insurmountable problem.

2) These sensors aren't that big. It'll probably be like fire alarms but for hydrogen if we go that route.

3) The gap is shrinking over time, as fuel cells and electrolyzers get better. Batteries are basically maxed out on efficient so they won't improve by much. Loosely spoken, the gap should shrink to about a 50% advantage for the EV in the long run. That means EVs may always make sense for short ranged trips, but for anything that needs big batteries the cost of the batteries probably will outweigh electricity savings.

4) If electrolyzers get really cheap this may not hold. I suspect that optimizing to 60-70% utilization is more than good enough.

5) Relative to the competition, it is tiny. We're subsidizing wind, photovoltaics, batteries, etc., to the tune of tens of billions, but for hydrogen it was in the hundreds of millions. Though this is starting to change as well speak as hydrogen is starting to get bigger subsidies.

>Why do electrolysis plants need to run at 100% utilization rates? In a renewable world, almost nothing will have 100% utilization. This is not really a big deal since electrolyzers can be turned on and off quickly.

The problem is capex. I am not at all an expert here, but from what I have read electrolyzers are at present very expensive, so to pay off their capex they need to be run continuously. Perhaps that will change in the future.

I'd imagine it should change in the future. We're looking at something like a 10,000x increase in production so current models won't hold in the future.

There is already a lot hydrogen use by German industry. Including a 240km pipeline built and in operation since the 30s.

The first step will be replacing hydrogen from fossil sources with renewable. This also provides industry which cannot be electrified a path to low carbon emissions.

> Barring sources like steam methane reformation from landfill-reclaimed methane

You got this reversed: as a general purpose energy carrier, methane is far more useful than hydrogen. Because it is so much easier to handle (as you said), and because so much infrastructure is already in place.

But you can't produce methane from surplus electricity without having hydrogen as an intermediate step. All this talk about hydrogen is just about skipping the inefficient methanization step. Methanization would also have a hard scaling limit in how much concentrated CO2 can be captured. Ambient concentrations are far too low for methanization and carbon fuel applications like aerospace won't ever be able to capture.

Right now, the UK is getting 7% of its electricity from burning biomass, primarily woodchips. CO2 capture there seems eminently doable, as a source for methanization of hydrogen.

It seems unlikely that hydrogen will be a viable fuel for commercial aircraft, given the difficulties of keeping hydrogen liquid or storing it compressed without excessive mass. Liquified natural gas (primarily methane) is however a viable fuel: https://www.wired.com/2012/03/boeing-freezes-design-with-liq...

If we can generate hydrogen from wind and capture CO2 from biomass, and use them to generate methane, this seems a viable way to power aviation going forwards. For most other things, batteries or direct hydrogen use seem viable, but aviation is hard.

Wouldn't aircraft H2 storage just be low pressure insulated tanks that self maintain their temperature by the boiling of the H2? Insulation is mostly air and as a result is light.

Any vented excess H2 isn't a big issue. You can just dump it straight into the atmosphere with no environmental consequence. If that turns out to be unsafe in some situations you can run it through some sort of heated auto lighting burner.

The energy loss of liquefaction is worse than that of methanization. If you add liquefaction of methane it gets close and H2 might even be slightly ahead, but LNG handling would be so much easier. 190K and 33K are very different temperatures.

You are pretty much describing the end-game scenario I had in mind: the use cases where CO2 capture would be hard or impossible are mostly the same as the use cases where direct use of H2 (without methanization or even further synfuel steps) is prohibitive. Mobile (mostly aviation) and decentralized (upgrading distribution networks for H2 capability down to individual kitchen gas stove seems almost as unlikely as upgrading the stoves to capture).

A post-fossil energy economy that combines H2 (where feasible) with methane (where necessary) won't see much if any of the methane's carbon captured. In a post-fossil economy CO2 sufficiently concentrated for methanization could easily be a limiting factor. Photosynthesis is the only scalable way to concentrate carbon from an atmosphere where CO2 is measured in hundreds of PPM, so all the post-fossil methane has to come either directly from biological processes or from biomass burning capture + H2.

Hydrogen producing wind farms could be located far offshore without having to tie into the grid. Hydrogen is a great medium for long-term energy storage and is mostly compatible with existing natural gas infrastructure.

Natural gas pipelines do not handle embrittlement from H well.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245232161...

There are work arounds on their way:

Ammonia—one nitrogen atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms—may not seem like an ideal fuel: The chemical, used in household cleaners, smells foul and is toxic. But its energy density by volume is nearly double that of liquid hydrogen—its primary competitor as a green alternative fuel—and it is easier to ship and distribute. "You can store it, ship it, burn it, and convert it back into hydrogen and nitrogen," says Tim Hughes, an energy storage researcher with manufacturing giant Siemens in Oxford, U.K. "In many ways, it's ideal."

More details:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...

Pretty cool stuff. Would ammonia be a drop in replacement for LNG? Or is the assertion that existing LNG infrastructure can be upgraded to handle ammonia at little cost?

Presumably the vast deserts of the coastal Middle East could continue their dominance of energy if they converted solar to ammonia as well.

Ammonia is great. It is also useful directly by farmers, both for fuel and fertilizer.

There have been major advances recently in small-scale (single-turbine) production of ammonia from just current, water, and air. It seems like a much better choice than hydrogen for everything except the next generation of aircraft.

Aircraft need high energy per unit mass fuel, and hydrogen is king, but tankage is huge, so hydrogen airliners would need to be lifting bodies to have room for the fuel tanks.

Ammonia is already a problematic pollutant in Europe, with emissions from agriculture contributing to soil acidification and smog/particulate formation.

With strict EU directives already in place to reduce ammonia emissions, I can’t imagine farmers using more of it would ever be encouraged!

In Europe right now farmers are pressured to limit their nitrogen off gassing due to environmental concern. Apparently too much of it disrupts plants that thrive in low nitrogen environments, and its unhealthy for humans in some way.

Isn't most of the ammonia produced using fossil fuels?

Currently that is the case.

As the article points out:

Most of the world’s ammonia is synthesized using Haber–Bosch, a century-old process that is fast and fairly efficient. But the factories emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2).

However they have invented a gentler, greener alternative.

A reverse fuel cell uses renewable electricity to drive a chemical reaction that makes ammonia..

Yes, but that is fixable now. Major improvements in catalysts have surfaced in recent years. Much of the work is done in China.

This is an interesting idea - the nitrogen essentially stabilizes the hydrogen for safer and more efficient transmission and storage?

Nearly double energy density of liquid hydrogen???

Many European gas systems were designed for town gas, produced from coal. This has a significant hydrogen component. So these systems can accommodate something like 15% hydrogen.

There are also a number of existing hydrogen pipelines in operation. One of which was first built in the the 30s.

Hydrogen embrittlement isn’t the bogeyman it’s made to be, especially for mass-insensitive applications.

Steel fatigues faster, but predictably so. Ultimately the pipes themselves are replaced with thicker material, but it can be done incrementally and along existing right of way.

> Hydrogen producing wind farms could be located far offshore without having to tie into the grid.

While true in theory the primary reason to do this is to use access production from current wind plants.

There very slim chance you beat

> Hydrogen is a great medium for long-term energy storage

Really not that great.

> is mostly compatible with existing natural gas infrastructure.

Not really true either. There are work arounds but even if those work, changing the infrastructure is still a big task.

The hydrogen will not be 'created' offshore.

It's just a wind farm that transports electricity to shore which then through regulations has to be turn to hydrogen.

Right?

The TL;DR to me is it's a complicated way to subsidise the hydrogen economy?

I get for hydrogen production the power doesn't have to be as clean so you might get some gains there. But I assume they will not be significant to the over all process.

Like this example which is still on the grid as you'd expect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJhm6S3Gs1Q

> The TL;DR to me is it's a complicated way to subsidise the hydrogen economy?

I get that impression too. The widespread usage of gasoline for passenger cars has created lots of jobs: Driving trucks for gasoline transportation, maintaining pumping equipment, gas station attendants, etc. If these jobs disappear due to a switch to electric vehicles in addition to the jobs lost due to the lower maintenance costs of electric cars then it seems reasonable to assume that some companies or organizations will try to maintain the current infrastructure. Even if it requires a switch to hydrogen.

Is there any chemical process which could produce methane from CO2 and water instead?

Hydrogen is hard to store.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Still need to generate the hydrogen but you don’t need to store it.

I recall hearing about navy peojwvrs to use reactor power and sea water to produce diesel for easier logistics. Less per Carbon density but a bit safer and easier to work with.

There kinda is, it's a two-step process: First you generate hydrogen and then methane out of hydrogen and CO2.

Problem is: Turning electricity into Hydrogen is inefficient, turning it into Methane is extra inefficient.

I've also read that hydrogen is some kind of way for the petro-industry to maintain its infrastructure and business, since it's a pseudo-green energy which can be advertised as an alternative to batteries.

Steam reforming is not green. Electrolysis is great but it's less efficient, although it would work with nuclear energy since nuclear can give energy in abundance.

There are 2 sides to reduce the carbon footprint: nuclear energy and energy sobriety.

Here's a map of the hydrogen fuel stations in the US: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/...

It looks like this is only in California. Is there a lack of demand from other areas of the country?

What are the ecological ramifications of turning seawater into hydrogen? Are we depleting the total amount of water on the planet? I realize the scale that it’s happening at is probably relatively small, but I’m curious.

The scale is way too small for it to matter. Also burning hydrogen you get water as exhaust. So it's a closed loop.

> Also burning hydrogen you get water as exhaust.

Indeed the word Hydrogen is Latin for water producing. So the Latin for "hydrogen producing" would presumably be Hydrogengen.

No, it is Ancient Greek, not Latin.

> The scale is way too small for it to matter.

I suspect that's what people thought when they began burning oil and gas for energy...

I don't remember the source, nor can I vouch for the veracity, but I remember reading an article that worked out what would happen if all cars ran on hydrogen. IIRC it had a significant impact on local weather conditions in cities.

3/4th of the earth surface is covered by water. Total oil mining since 1850s is estimated between 100-150 billion metric tons. If you pump out 150 billion metric tons of sea water from the oceans the sea level will drop 0.5mm (1/50th of an inch).

Moisture levels will increase and water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. Everything is a compromise...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090507072830.h...

http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/estima...

https://climatechangeconnection.org/science/what-about-water...

In 2019 the UK used 46.5 billion litres of hydrocarbon road fuel [0]. Let's say it all has diesel's energy density of 36.9 MJ/litre. That's 1.71585e+18 joules per year total.

Let's pretend fuel use per capita is constant across the country. On 2018 numbers, London's 8.9 million people [4] out of the UK's 66.44 [5] gives it about 13% of the total, so 2.299e+17 joules.

If you get 286kJ from burning one mole of hydrogen gas, London would have to burn 803 gigamoles per year, making the same quantity of water in the process. If water weighs 18.0153 g/mol [3], that's 14.478 million tonnes of water per year. If that all fell as rain, then assuming water weighs a tonne per cubic metre, spread out over London's 1,737.9 km2 [4], that would be an extra 0.0228 mm of rain per day.

In July, Greenwich sees an average of 1.1 mm of rain per day [6], so that's on the order of 2% extra rainfall.

This calculation is extremely approximate, and i have neglected to account for a the water from the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels. Rain is not the only way water gets involved in weather - i'm not sure how to estimate the effect on humidity, for example. And the effect will be bigger for denser and drier cities (Dubai!).

It would be interesting to see a proper analysis of this.

[0] https://www.ukpra.co.uk/en/about/facts-and-figures

[1] https://www.acea.be/news/article/differences-between-diesel-...

[2] https://personal.utdallas.edu/~metin/Merit/MyNotes/energySci...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molar_mass

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingd...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_London

Oh, hydrogen. Do the cost savings in building and transmission infrastructure really outweigh the costs of building hydrogen processing and storing infrastructure and the vast losses encountered therein?

It would be better if Germany focused on getting rid of the lignate coal in its domestic power supply. I believe 1/3 of German electricity is generated this way.

One option would be build nuclear.

The earliest and cheapest we will get new nuclear at low-gigawatt scale, according to the people building it, is in 10 years at which time if everything goes right the cost will have fallen to $65/MWh. Today we can deploy on-shore wind and solar at ~$30/MWh, and generate hydrogen with surplus per the article. Here is a thread citing nuclear industry advocates for building new nuclear power on the state of the efforts:

[$65/MWh, end of thread] https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1224019148562321408 [start, focusing on China's nuclear buildout] https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656

Nuclear power is too expensive compared to solar and wind power these days.

Not until you factor in energy storage, at which point it’s far more expensive, and carbon intensive.

Not sure how to parse this comment, but 11 months ago bid prices for solar plus storage were about $35 MWh [1]

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...

These stats are quite misleading. Solar + storage can deliver cheap energy, but still somewhat intermittently. Usually it would be something like a 10MW solar array paired with 10MWh of batteries. This only gives you 1 extra hour of runtime at 10MW. If you were to match nuclear's 24/7 output you'd need something like 100MWh of storage connected to a 10MW array. This becomes cripplingly expensive.

I'm aware the grid can balance some of this load, perhaps with wind or solar arrays further away. But solar itself has externality costs of intermittency which the grid has to pick up.

When I Google large recent projects, I see 4hrs [1][2] or (at 1.3GWH!!) 2 hours[3] of storage at much more than 10MW, and at lower prices today than the people selling nuclear hope to reach in 10 years.

Nuclear is good! We should deploy it as fast as we can! That happens to be quite slow relative compared to our deployment of utility scale solar and wind. Let's go faster if we can. But for heavens' sake, nuclear advocates should, well, advocate for nuclear, not badmouth the clean energy coming online today at grid scale.

[1] https://microgridknowledge.com/solar-plus-storage-prices-hec... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/11/la-8minute-solar-ink-lo... [3] https://www.environmentalleader.com/2019/12/gemini-nevada-so...

That's at $80-120/MWh though, much higher than the GPs $35.

Agreed though it is exciting to see the cost drops - but it's important to compare like for like wrt to intermittency.

That's the price range for the Hawaii projects. The cost for the (much larger) Eland and Gemini projects is $35 MWh (previous and [4], respectively).

WRT intermittency, the point of this conversation is that hydrogen generation is a solution: over-provision and generate combustible hydrogen (or ammonia, etc) that can be used later and / or where electricity performs poorly: long haul transport and high-temperature industrial processes. Many links on @ChrisGoodall2's excellent "Carbon Commentary": https://us9.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=a336c39e55a6260d59a...

[4] https://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffett-berkshire-ha...

Isn't hydrogen one of the hardest things to transport?

They are shutting down their nuclear power.

Exactly ! If the problem is Climate Change (and thus CO_2 production), why would you, in your sane mind, shut down nuclear power ? It's the best method to produce electricity with the less grams of CO2 per kwh..

Because the anti-nuclear mindset is too strong in Germany. We are still affected from the Chernobyl disaster (still can't eat wild boar, still can't eat mushrooms from certain areas). The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and extremely expensive. Then there is politics: Nuclear plants lifetime was extended, then Fukushima happened and "overnight" lots of old plants were shut down.

Germany is at 14% nuclear, 30% coal (even though all national coal mines have closed), 10% gas, 46% renewable (wind, solar, bio-gas, water, all without proper energy storage)

> even though all national coal mines have closed

If only. It's just hard coal mines that were closed. Lignite is still being open-pit mined.

> The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and extremely expensive.

You could do what coal plants do with their nuclear waste: incinerate it and distribute it on the wind.

I agree, looking at long term health, injurys and deaths. Coal is the worst and Nuclear the best source of energy. https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Personally I would like to see new and safe Nuclear power plants in Germany, preferably using what is now considered nuclear waste as fuel.

Wow wait where can't you eat mushrooms from? This is new to me as a European.

The bavarian forests are partially still strongly contaminated in the ground. As a result, certain species of mushrooms can collect radioactive contamination. And wild boar likes to eat mushrooms, so can be even stronger contaminated over time. In general you can eat mushroooms and wild boar, but it is recommended to do so not too regularly, if they come from one of the stronger affected parts.

There are also restrictions on livestock and game in Northern Europe, in areas from Britain to Finland.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2019/06/08/chernobyl...

I've never heard that either. Can't be correct.

"I've never heard of it, so it can't be true" is a terrifyingly bad standard to set.

https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

> As a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident, certain species of mushrooms and wild game are still highly contaminated with caesium-137 in some areas of Germany.

Highly contaminated is a strong word. You'd have to eat 20kg+ of those mushrooms according to that article to reach your annual recommended amount of radition for the year. Considering how long it would take to pick 20kg of wild mushrooms I think you would be at it for a while.

Bananas are also radioactive - those mushrooms maybe an order or two of magnitude more.

20 kg doesn't sound too much at all. I know some people who pick a few dozen buckets of mushrooms every year.

I've just made an Ottolenghi recipe-based mushroom lasagne with 2.4 kg mushrooms the other week. Eaten over two days, very delicious and wouldn't mind it more often.

> wild boar

Where's that? Eating wild boar is quite common in Germany. I'm not sure if I'd eat imported wild boar from the Ukraine but never heard of issues with German wild boars.

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/33-jahre-nach-tschernob...

'In south Germany there are regions where 20% of the wild boars are radioactive contaminated. The meat is not allowed to be sold.'

If you account for waste disposal it becomes prohibitively expensive. In 2016 the largest German utilities agreed to pay €23.6bln so that it would be the government's problem to deal with the waste:

https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d...

Decommissioning all the (23) plants still active in 2016 will eventually cost another €24bln.

All in all €2bln per plant. And this is just the lower bound. It's hard to tell how much safely storing this waste will cost over the next several decades.

I remember this from my German lessons in school. Managing radioactive waste is simply too troublesome.

It's way more expensive than coal, wind or solar. And since the German government doesn't seem to subsidize anything except coal, nuclear has no chance.

An already up and running nuclear power station is not at all that expensive.

They are uninsurable, which means if someone actually had to pay for the insurance their price would be astronomical.

The fact that they've been running for decades is hard to explain if that's true.

Risks had not been factored in as likely (like in Japan the authorities have demanded protection against earth quakes and tsunamis, but only to a certain level and they were surprised to learn that over the lifetime of these plans stronger events happen than anticipated) and if anything happens, the companies are simply not insured - other than via the government, which had created the demand and the environment for these reactors. The companies are also not well prepared if larger accidents happen.

Example: Many old reactors never were designed to withstand an impact of a large passenger airplane.

Large passenger airplanes don't fly into buildings. Right? Well, we have learned in the meantime that this scenario is not that unlikely, since 9/11 and for example the Lufthansa/Germanwings pilot, which flew an Airbus into the ground in France killing all passengers on board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

One could now just let these old reactors run. What to do with the risk? Well, set up military systems to shoot down aircrafts approaching a reactor site? Adding more concrete as a protection? I'd guess that there were some clever people exploring the options and in the end its just to costly to do something working...

That's extremely easy to explain. They are expensive and therefore nobody wants to be the scapegoat that is responsible for hundreds of billions of lost tax dollars unless a convenient event like Fukushima offers an excuse.

Isn't this more about self-sufficiently powering the country?

I mean, Germany would have to buy uranium.

We need to buy coal and gas also. Closed down all the coal mines, and coal is the only resource Germany has in its territory. We are very dependent at the moment.

We are at 46% renewable energy, but without proper storage that's just a sad book-keeping trick.

Currently there is not much reason to store electricity in large amounts, since there is not that much surplus electricity in Germany. Storage will become relevant after 2030 or later. Means we are still in the stages of R&D and planning.

R&D remains just R forever if you postpone deployment until R&D is "done", whatever that means. As a lone consumer you can let others be early adopters, but this approach is not applicable to the national economic policy level. None of the progress in renewables we saw in the last three decades would have happened with only research spending, no matter how generous. Funding research is important and immensely helpful compared to not funding research, but it can only get you so far.

Germany has been neglecting storage with the argument "but we don't need it yet" for far too long already and is already starting to suffer chicken/egg problems as a consequence. "Why build more renewables if we can't store the energy anyways" is heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists.

There is simply no need for mass deployment, yet. We would waste a lot of money. If there are business models, which make the existing storage profitable, then it gets viable.

For example near my home town there is a pumped hydro storage facility, which the last years struggled economically.

It's also useful to distribute electricity over several countries via a grid designed to do so - something which starts for countries around the North Sea.

It's not that nothing is done. For example North Germany builds a 1.4 GW HVDC line to Norway (called NordLink) to be able to store and retrieve electricity from&to there. Additional lines can be added, and at least one is in the planning stage (called NordGer). One of these lines costs 2 billion Euros to be build.

We are also far away from having infrastructure to use electrical vehicles as a grid component - there are simply also not yet enough of these vehicles. Recycled batteries from these vehicles could be used in homes. There is a compressed air power plant running for decades. There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. There are first deployments of storage systems using heat, in the industry.

I would expect that more storage variants and mass deployment will start in a decade, once we reach interesting levels of cheap surplus electricity, there is large scale demand for stored electricity, and when there are viable business models.

> heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists

I would not invest billions into storage deployment, just because populists are unhappy.

> There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity.

Only with power to gas conversion capacity. Which is exactly what this project is trying to ramp up to practicality. "You should not do X because you could do X instead" isn't a very compelling argument.

There are a bunch of power-to-gas projects. It's already being done. But there is very little experience on a large scale industrial level. We are just starting to work on that.

https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energiewende-pete...

> Bis 2030 sollen 20 Prozent des in Deutschland verbrauchten Wasserstoffes aus nachhaltigen Quellen wie Wind- und Solarkraft stammen.

In 2030, 20% of the Hydrogen used in Germany should come from renewable sources...

What makes you think that this Spiegel link isn't talking about the exact same thing as the original article on rechargenews.com ? The latter just happens to be slightly more specific, singling out one project (likely the most concrete plan within a bigger initiative) wheras the Spiegel from two days earlier remains high level.

Correct, and it makes it again clear that this is currently not about storage, but about production of Hydrogen on a level which is mostly for consumption: vehicles, industry, heating, ... Since 20% share of renewable generated Hydrogen in 2030 is not much, scaled storage applications won't come into focus before the next decade.

With 'storage' I'm talking about systems which can provide electricity for the grid (or consumers) when other renewable sources (wind, solar, ...) are currently not available in sufficient capacity.

But methanization is part of the project and the storage of methane is both solved and deployed at scale (e.g. current German gas consumption could be served for months entirely from storage) and includes a massive x-to-electricity component (conventional gas power stations). The fact that is both storage and direct application only makes this project better than anything that's exclusively one or the other.

> methanization is part of the project

That does not mean that there is currently any business model for it, for example because it is extremely expensive. Technology will be applied in scale, when there is a need for it, when it is affordable and when it is price competitive with other solutions.

Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first. There is still uranium in the Ore mountains. The USSR and GDR were mining it.

> Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first.

The mines are closed.

Germany is currently investing billions to clean up the Uranium mines. Wismut might have cost then around 8 billion Euro. The technical and environmental standards of the USSR and the GDR were rather poor. Left is some Uranium, which too costly to mine and not competitive in any way with the world market.

Germany is a rich country. It can afford to import things.

All analyses of hydrogen I've read from EROEI conclude that it is more economically and thermodynamically efficient to direct power to the grid and send it to batteries.

It always seems anything this is advertised it is the fossil fuel industry trying to prop up a power generation system that will use fossil fuels, and window dressed/greenwashed by a small fraction of alt energy.

"Green Hydrogen" smells like "Clean Coal" to me.

You're completely right but the challenge is sending the electricity from the north of Germany to the south. The construction of new transmission lines is being delayed. Generating hydrogen for use in the steel industry could be one way to take advantage of the excess energy. Long term energy storage and load following could be implemented by storing the hydrogen and burning it in natural gas plants. This is strictly necessary to increase the renewable share past 80%.

Absolutely, a lot of those wind turbines in the north sea are still not connected to the power grid because of missing infrastructure. They need to be turned by diesel generators, to not corrode. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-offshore... If they were connected there is still the problem of missing north-south transmission line.

So converting wind energy into hydrogen and using it for industry, in cars, or blending it into the natural gas pipelines is a "ok" idea. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f11/blending...

> Absolutely, a lot of those wind turbines in the north sea are still not connected to the power grid because of missing infrastructure.

The wind turbines mentioned in the linked article from 2013 have been in 2014 connected to the grid.

There is more to a national power system than EROEI. If hydrogen is more versatile and useful it will have advantages even if it's EROEI is lower - lets say powering remote places or powering equipment for which battery powered is not an option, but fuel cells are.

Hydrogen is difficult to transport: it leaks out of everything, it's a gas that needs to be liquified or compressed, and it is flammable.

I get that grid lines don't appear out of thin air, especially in seas/oceans.

Too bad microwave transmission cooks wildlife and humans.

Leakage is widely exaggerated. From what I read it's something like 0.1% loss from leakage.

It might well be cheaper when starting from scratch, but it’s also useful to be able to keep using existing equipment that has been built to burn gases. I don’t know how useful — it’s certainly possible it’s better to build batteries than to e.g. make hydrogen, turn that hydrogen into methane, and use that methane in existing gas plants, but I can also believe the hydrogen route might scale up faster than batteries and therefore be a decent stop-gap measure while we build enough battery-building factories.

Plus it’s always a good strategic idea to not have a single point of failure in the event of e.g. an export ban of some important input to the battery manufacture from some country you have a trade dispute with.

I've always assumed hydrogen would end up having a place as a spillover. Renewable + battery systems will need to be overbuilt for the worst parts of the year, so in the average case there's going to be an excess.

You have to do something with this power, and hydrogen allows you to store a lot of energy very cheaply at poor efficiency, perhaps for heating as gas is used today. In the summer, the excess could be used to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

You have other uses for hydrogen than using it to produce electricity: You can use it as the reducing gas in steel making. Right now coal is used.

For thermodynamic efficiency, yes, batteries are better. But they're not available at anywhere near the levels required. The global battery production capacity is at just under 300GWh per year. By comparison, the US's night-time energy consumption is ~4-5TWh. Even if we stopped producing electronics, electric cars, any any other battery product and directed the entirety of the global battery production supply to grid storage, it'd still take the US over a decade at the current production levels. And if we're trying to make the globe carbon free, you're operating on levels of demand that won't be met for the better part of a century.

Why are you assuming that we don't know how to build more battery factories? And does the wind not blow at night?

It's unlikely we'll ever build enough battery factories to catch up with hydrogen based energy storage. The other guy mentioned total global battery production capacity is about 300 GWh of storage. 300 GWh can be matched by a single underground salt dome or salt cavern storing pressurized H2. A number of these facilities already exist, and the total number that could exists number in the tens of thousands worldwide.

Lithium ion battery production is estimated to reach 1TWh per year in 2023 and 2TWh per year at ~2030 [1]. If you integrate that curve, you're still looking at several decades to build enough battery capacity to fulfill the world's storage demand if solar is the primary generation source.

The wind does blow at night, but intermittently. Wind generation is even when averaged out over long stretches of time, but in the near term it can vary a lot. Some estimates for how much storage we'd need to reliably meet demand for generation that comes from solar and wind at 3 days supply. The US consumes over 10TWh of energy daily.

1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

Why would growth slow down after 2023? And are you’re comparing primary energy to electricity? That’s a lot of waste heat that would not need to be replicated

Anyway, we don’t need all of this by 2030 if we have large scale electrification - that will have made a lot of CO2 savings in other sectors

> Why would growth slow down after 2023?

The growth is mostly linear.

> And are you’re comparing primary energy to electricity? That’s a lot of waste heat that would not need to be replicated

Are there plants that scavenge waste heat from batteries? Batteries generate some waste heat, but not at temperatures that can be used to drive a turbine.

> Anyway, we don’t need all of this by 2030 if we have large scale electrification - that will have made a lot of CO2 savings in other sectors

This is the opposite of what is true. Large scale electrification will make it so that there is even more demand on the power grid as things like cars and trains that are currently being fueled by fossil fuels now draw electricity from the grid.

Yes - the article states that electricity is more efficiently used directly.

Hydrogen is valuable for other processes such producing steel, high temperature heat, and chemicals.

German industry already uses large amounts of hydrogen produced from fossil methane. The first step will be to replace this with renewable hydrogen.

Interesting fact: Germany has a few 100km of hydrogen pipelines which have been in operation since the 1930s.

America has 2600 km of hydrogen pipelines:

https://hydrogeneurope.eu/hydrogen-transport-distribution#PI...

Can't hydrogen from methane be produced and the resulting carbon/CO2 effectively sequestered at production point?

Batteries are ludicrously expensive for long term energy storage, and costs don’t scale sublinearly.

Still way more expensive per megawatt than nuclear... Probably higher death toll as well.

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