Well, 1 out of 22,300 TWh is a start! Menlo park didn't light the world in a day.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu...
EDIT: Misread power as energy.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu...
EDIT: Misread power as energy.
You are using a metric of TWh/year, so multiply 1 TW * .2 * 24 hour/day * 365 day/year and that 1TW of solar generates 1700TWh/year.
Given an average lifespan of 25 years, a 1TW/year productive capacity supports 44,000TWh/year production.
Given that solar will be so cheap, I expect us to be throwing away 20%-50% of solar electricity (curtailment, in current jargon). For example, production may be sized to produce enough at the seasonal minimum (winter in Northern countries), and summer time might have ridiculous abundance.
even if the round-trip efficiency is 20% and all you do is mix it into the gas turbines, eventually the numbers are going to work out to "why would you not, why would you leave the money on the table"
even if the tanks leak like sieves a 10 - 100Hr buffer will go a huge way toward smoothing out winter lulls.
By itself, it is just 6x. But it has lots of other interactions, such as increasing lifetime of methane.
But round-trip efficiency of hydrogen will be rising fast. Electrolysis by itself, which used to be 60%, will go well over 90%, maybe over 95%, in short order.
We have a hundred years of experience dealing with them with all the deep knowledge and huge mass of deeply embedded systems that that implies.
And they are nearly as energy dense as liquid hydrogen.* There doesn't seem to be much "there" there with hydrogen, except generation efficiency if it is generated at the point and time of use.
Reliability, safety, operational life, risk management, availability of expertise, and cost will probably trump technical efficiency, just as when buying servers. I expect to see synthetic hydrocarbons being made with green hydrogen (and green carbon) before I see the hydrogen itself being transported around in any significant way or stored for any significant time.
* Fun semi-related fact: there's more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline than in a liter of liquid hydrogen.
Gaseous hydrogen is much more dangerous than natural gas (flame speed, range of air fraction for combustion, ability to escape seals, etc., etc.) and you need three times the volume to deliver the same energy.[1] I doubt there will be much reticulated use.
1. https://www.powereng.com/library/6-things-to-remember-about-...
It would be a it of a shift, but it uses the same core competencies and would allow them to survive.
However I don't think there's a single gas company with management with the vision, innovation, and smarts to make the switch. It would take a new generation of management, that's smarter and more forward looking.
Maybe a shareholder revolt at one could cause a change in management that would pioneer this change... how much does a gas company cost?
Trick is to force them all to make the change.
Most ex-Soviet/Warsaw pact countries tried to move from district to direct gas, or small CCGT plants (as in one for about 10000 people) exactly for this reason: maintenance is hell and losses are enormous. And that's in high-density urban. In low-density suburbs it won't ever fly.
We will need to convert hydrogen into something else to make it easier to handle. Perhaps ammonia, which is useful both for fertilizer and perhaps as a liquid fuel.
There will be a lot of hydrogen banked in underground caverns and tapped-out fracking wells. But industrial users who have been buying it, or LNG, will take to electrolysing locally instead. Airports will electrolyse and liquify locally, international hubs first.
I kid but I don't.
(I don't actually know much about desal - there's details, but is it power in = water out, plus a bunch of facility maintenance and operations?)
We need a shitload of green generation infrastructure, and Bitcoin is going to pay for it. Sometimes the world is weird, sorry.
Basically yes. I'm mostly familiar with Reverse Osmosis, where electricity to drive the pumps is about 40% of the TCO. There's another big chunk for consumables - chemicals, failed membranes, etc. Then the rest is capital costs to build the thing.
It's not "free power == free water", but the power is a significant factor.
> Desalination will be the new pumped hydro.
Eh, no. Desal is a great place to dump surplus energy, but you can't get the energy back out. It pairs well with nuclear power, so you can use extra nighttime capacity. It's less useful with solar, unless you've severely overbuilt panels and can't find anything else to do with them on sunny days. It's a better tradeoff to buy fewer panels and use that money to pay for storage (pumped hydro, batteries, whatever).
A key fact about desalination is that it is totally OK for it to happen only when the sun shines or the wind blows.
My mind went "you can't do pumped hydro if you don't have enough water!"
Although I guess you could just pump salt water, and we're not gonna run out of that.
It's too concentrated to just put back into the ocean in one spot without killing everything around it, and you don't want it contaminating what little fresh water you have under ground. Not an insurmountable problem, but it does add another cost in addition to maintenance and power
This is just sad.
More significantly, it requires more infrastructure under the water where it will be difficult to inspect and repair. Furthermore there is a financial incentive for plants to neglect these pipes. Suppose there is a break in the pipe that discharges concentrated brine straight into the ocean. Slowing or ceasing production until the pipe could be repaired would be very expensive to the plant operator. On the other hand if they ignore the problem, they wouldn't have to slow production and it would cost them nothing (unless they got caught.)
8 * 5 * 50 = 2000
so the sun gets two weeks vacation a year :)
Where I live the rule of thumb is 4. So 1 KW of panels will make around 4kWh a day, averaged over the year or about 1460 a year.