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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

The long term vision is for those gas plants to be hydrogen-powered, with the hydrogen generated by the surplus of wind and solar during peak times. Pumped hydro for power storage is also something that will become viable. You lose a lot in conversion, but excess wind power is very cheap.

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Honest question, but do people actually believe that? It sounds like a tactic by oil companies to sucker in gullible people in order to punt a problem down the road. It also acts as a great excuse by politicians to avoid having to deal with a problem.

IMO, the reality is that these plants will never convert to anything other than natural gas and will eventually be shut down, still running on natural gas.

Hydrogen is not a fuel, it's an energy storage mechanism, and not a very good one at that. If you're going to store energy there's much more efficient and/or cheaper ways of doing it.

Natural gas is still a good fuel but I don't think anyone in the US at least is under any illusion that these will ever run on anything other than natural gas.

Well, any plan for green energy has major holes in it. If it was easy someone would have already done it. The EU is taking this very seriously however as part of their climate plans.

The big problem with the hydrogen economy is not the conversion of the gas plants, it is having enough wind to generate the hydrogen in the first place. You need excess wind capacity to make hydrogen, and no private venture will invest into wind turbines that aren’t needed. Without a strong government hand shaping this market it will not happen.

If you are looking for a skeptical take, here’s a good one: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/06/new-eu-hydrogen-policy-...

In Des Moines more than 80% of all power comes from renewable sources. Despite that my power costs are good. Iowa has a lot of land relative to people, but still there are a lot of power that other states are throwing away. (Texas as someone else mentioned is also doing well)

Texas of all places are building tremendous numbers of wind turbines primarily driven by market forces.

Having their own grid has some serious downsides as they found out last February but the upside is that they get to run things so that their installed base of renewable power is larger than the backlog of projects waiting for approval which is the case most of the country is in.

Moving quickly to renewable energy with only a few downsides sounds like a great tradeoff. Especially if they're downsides that consumers can work around.

I seem to remember that you can’t even pump hydrogen through existing natural gas infrastructure because the smaller hydrogen molecules are more prone to leaking. I would imagine the equipment at a plant has a similar problem and combine that with lower efficiency from burning a fuel that the plant wasn’t designed for, and the abysmal efficiency from converting electric energy to hydrogen and it seems like pure snake oil.

Edit: the problem I am remembering is that hydrogen actually degrades the metals used in pipelines (https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/0...) so I don’t see how any of this infrastructure is useful at all for hydrogen.

Not to mention ignited hydrogen leaks being invisible in daylight!

You can walk right into one if you are not careful - which is why you might see people walking with brooms in front of them around hydrogen equipment. :)

Coal gas contained significant amounts of molecular hydrogen (~50% or so) and it had been used for decades. What magic did those people know back then?

Pumped hydro has been viable for energy storage for decades and decades, running 70-80% efficiency. It's more efficient than most alternatives, to include compressed air, but it can't be dispatched quite as quickly.

The real problem is the fact that environmentalists tend to hate dams, especially large hydro projects, so there's a major political battle on top of finding funding for these kinds of capital-intensive projects.

Even if we could build dams with no worry about the environment, it wouldn't help. There are not many places left to build them, and a lot more would be needed. Sure use them where we have them, but they are not a something we can grow.

> There are not many places left to build them

...unless you go radical? https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...

Pumped hydro can be built off rivers. The opportunities for that are vast.

Not at the scale needed.

Incorrect. There are some geographic restrictions, but on a global scale the potential off river pumped hydro resource is enormous.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

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