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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

> The bulk of that money — about $67.7 billion — will go toward a new power plant and hydrogen system, the company said in a stock exchange filing. Reliance plans to make the massive investment over a 10-to-15-year period, and has already begun scouting for land for the 100-gigawatt capacity site.

If I'm reading this correctly they want to build 100GW worth of solar capacity and a hydrogen plant for $67.7bln.

That's actually pretty cheap.

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Renewables are massively cheaper than anything else on the market today, and this is one of the reasons I am definitely in favor of them. One thing to consider though is that the capacity factor (basically how much of GWh you actually produce from your available capacity) of renewables is less than coal/nuclear plants, so in that case 1GW of solar and 1GW of nuclear is not the same. But even with this taken into account, renewables are the cheapest and there is virtually no chance for this to change in the future.

Is this really that simple?

I'd imagine there's a certain size above where nuclear becomes cheaper even with the added costs of mining for fuel, waste management, etc. (Eg. the manufacturing, setup, maintenance, decommissioning of millions of solar panels and wind turbines, distribution network to connect them will be offset by a few very large nuclear plants. Especially if they are fuel efficient [eg. fast reactors].)

A bit of a tangent here, but does anyone have a grasp on whether using electrolysis to store and transport excess solar/wind is a feasible thing? Could hydrogen behave as a on-demand scalable (if inefficient) store of unused power?

I think this is called "green hydrogen" [1] which has application as an energy storage medium, but also more. Energy storage also does not imply, that that hydrogen needs to be turned back into grid electricity, but could be used for heating or for hydrogen cars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen

> I think this is called "green hydrogen"

I'm aware of the term, 'green hydrogen', which is in contrast to 'blue hydrogen' (or as I prefer to call it 'dirty hydrogen') which is a product of methane gas extraction and allows some of that methane to escape.

> but could be used for heating or for hydrogen cars.

I'm under the impression that hydrogen ICE vehicles at scale is impractical due to lack of infrastructure, safety issues etc, at least compared to batteries

Methane synthesis is a potential solution. Simpler infrastructure/reuse of existing infrastructure.

Or potentially methanol (and better yet, butanol, which is easier to deal with than methanol, less corrosive, less hydroscopic).

Hydrogen as a replacement fuel for vehicles is a dead duck. Batteries have won there.

Hydrogen, or zero net carbon hydrocarbons synthesized from it, is a good fit where energy density exceeds what current lithium chemistry batteries can provide, like aeroplanes, or rockets.

If we overbuild solar to store energy for winter heating, CNG may be pretty competitive for on road use (especially for larger vehicles).

Yes, this is currently becoming a reality in the UK. [1]

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/glasgow-to-be-home-to-fir...

One of Australia's richest men, the billionaire Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest, is shifting his focus from Mining to Hydrogen with big projects announced late last year in Australia and Argentina.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-11/qld-hydrogen-capacity...

It's actually this news that made me curious about the potential for hydrogen to act as a battery for solar projects where pumped hydro doesn't make sense. I've read that the water output of hydrogen energy generation is non-recyclable, if that's solvable we could have excess solar in arid places along with a fully-contained hydrogen electrolysis and power generator combination acting as a battery

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