Hydrogen battery startup says it has $700M order backlog | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen battery startup says it has $700M order backlog

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73 pointsNazzareno97 comments

Been thinking (daydreaming) a lot about a fully off-grid house and how in the summer, you get more solar than you need and in the winter you use much more electricity than you produce. What I'd love to see is some sort of system that used batteries for short term storage, and then during the summer, would convert excess energy to a long-term storage format like methane or LNG.

I have not run any numbers on this, but the idea behind it is to stockpile your energy in the summer to be able to make it through the winter without having to resort to some outside source of energy like wood or gas delivery.

I initially thought about hydrogen, but given it's storage density, and the problems that SLS has had with leaks, taking the additional step to convert into methane would greatly simplify storage and use, and likely improve reliability since you'd be able to use COTS products for natural gas instead of custom hydrogen storage

Vanadium redox flow batteries have a decent energy storage density and can scale very well but ultimately it does add to the cost of the energy being produced as opposed to some tech that doesn’t need it.

Ideas are easy. Implementations are either hard or expensive.

Converting solar to hydrogen, then to methane, then to electricity requires a pretty big setup. If you want to be efficient, you have to do all that at a large scale with a proper power plant turbine. It will not work well at a scale of one house.

Is hydrogen -> methane -> turbine more efficient for electricity generation than just hydrogen -> fuel cell?

Probably not, fuel cells are quite efficient. The problem is, do you want to deal with storing hydrogen? It's very annoying.

There have been recent advances in sand batteries to store heat. Use the excess energy to heat the sand. Then pull heat from it in the winter to heat the house. Unsure if this would scale down to personal usage.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

It might not be a solution on its own, but you can get a little ways with compressed air energy storage (CAES). There's a bit of discussion on how it can scale up and down to various sizes of installation around the internet[1] but I don't know how much actual storage you get in terms of kilowatt hours.

But used as a part of a more robust system, I think there's promise here. The other type of low-chemical physical potential energy storage that gets some attention nowadays is pumping water to a higher location, only to let it out via a hydro generator later. Not sure how that scales into winter though. (actually air tanks might lose a certain amount of pressure to cold as well; perhaps buried tanks would work better, so that the ambient temp is cooler?)

It's fun to apply this pattern to other types of gravity-based energy. Maybe take excess in the summer and use it to ratchet your water tower up higher, or roll a large boulder up a hill? Or force two magnets really close together :p

1 https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-18/ditch-the-batt...

Regarding water pump solution, it is used in the UK as mitigation for the "TV Pickup phenomenon"

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

It would probably make more sense to store the heat of summer into the ground directly, using something like a ground source heat pump. An additional benefit is that the same system cools the house in the summer cheaply.

My friend has an off-grid cabin and his solar panels were easy to size for all other energy needs during winter by having them installed angled towards the winter sun position.

He does have a small generator just in case there is a particularly bad winter storm, but even in that circumstance it just has to run long enough to charge his batteries, so fuel consumption is minimal.

Buying more solar panels and insulation is probably cheaper. Seasonal storage struggles to compare with overbuild and lithium batteries.

Might be worth playing around with vertical installation if that's an option, this lets you shift the power curve towards winter.

This is even more attractive if you have some way of not wasting your summer over production.

The new developments in Aluminum-sulphur batteries look promising for this kind of grid buffering usage.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/new-aluminum-sulfur-...

You are missing that you get more electricity from wind in the winter: https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/understanding-variable...

There was an article in Wired around 2006/2007 where a guy built exactly that. Basically built a solar powered hydrogen collector in his back yard.

Found it: https://www.wired.com/2007/03/backyard-fuel-cell/

Ammonia as a hydrogen store air+methane+temp and high high pressure. Pump liquid uphill as another option for potential energy minus evaporation losses and friction. Geothermal as year round steady state thermal process, I don’t know how those scale capacity.

My question about completely off grid housing and renewable sources and energy stores is that an isolated small scale unit will assuredly operate industrial processes at a lower efficiency than a centralized industrial facility, barring transmission loss. Economy of scale is real for thermodynamic costs and monetary cost. So any gas compression or thermal cycle or liquid pumps is self serving with higher personal capital cost and cost of run and maintenance reliability. And if enough of your neighbors do it it’s “renewable” but nowhere near sustainable.

How to turn sunlight into methane? Electrochemistry and membranes or catalysts? That seems like not a worthwhile question facing us if there is earnest need for energy transition for sustainability.

If you’re wealthy enough to have an off grid ranch or cabin and don’t want the baggage of society to replenish your winter energy needs then purchase in W texas and build a boutique diesel rig and refinery. Or purchase a bunch of land with fast growing pines and run a logging operation. If you want to live off grid but can manage paying money for society goods and services run diesel generators with long term fuel oil contracts and rig up a decarbonization unit on the exhaust stack.

Localized next gen storage isn’t a pressing matter in my opinion. Especially that benefiting anti-social people with means to live off grid but comfortably. If you have millions of emissions points it’s harder to control than a centralized regulated plant.

There is a working system commercially available in Germany, but it is pretty expensive [1]:

Long-term energy storage with hydrogen, with 1-5x 300 kWh. Which allows for full electric independence (not including heating though). Price: 85,000-125,000 €, minus government subsidies.

[1] https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/

That looks like exactly what OP was looking for. One would assume that over time and at scale the price would come down significantly.

Hydrogen embrittlement seems to be an unavoidable problem so not sure how that plays out.

Looks like the system uses standard tanks. There's probably a scheduled tank replacement schedule.

So 57-83 €/kWh, or on average about 175x more expensive than the current already insane electricity prices in central Europe. This is the concept that will save us according to the (qoften German, for some reason) anti-nuclear fundamentalists who have gotten into this pickle in the first place.

At that price, wouldn't a diesel generator burning cooking oil be cheaper?

Diesel in a diesel generator is already roughly on par with the current insane electricity price, dunno about cooking oil, but it's probably roughly similar.

You could have made the same argument against solar panels 15 years ago.

This is a pioneering product for early adopters - expect prices to go down significantly with economics of scale. And further research in this area is far from exausted.

I mean, I don't disagree. The problem is that lots of anti-nucluear-fundies are comparing existing nuclear power to hypothetical hydrogen storage - "it's just a matter of research".

My point is: Deploy nuclear power now, continue RND on large scale hydrogen storage that maybe will pan out in 20 years.

Yes, I was not proposing such system as a large scale solution for the coming winter. It would be prudent to keep our nuclear reactors running for now.

As always, There is No Silver Bullet™.

Nuclear is not the perfect solution. It cannot be powered on and off on short notice, which would be useful for complementation of solar and wind that have high power output, but also sudden slumps. Ironically, the ideal companion for renewables would be gas...

Lithium batteries could compensate short outages, but don't have enough (feasable) capacity for long seasonal shortages.

Enter Power to Gas. Hydrogen can be a good tool in that area.

A commerically available hydrogen storage system (that is in high demand even despite its price point) will definitely accelerate innovation very effectively. I think this tool will be available quite soon for mere mortals.

I'd add that it's also prudent to build new nuclear reactors now. The tech exists and there is a very clear lack of mostly plannable power supply in many countries/regions.

The tech for building reliable, safe, affordable, large-scale hydrogen "batteries" isn't here yet.

New nuclear reactors are also not here yet. They might become ready in 8+ years if started now.

So the solution is simple. Nuclear has its place. Power2Gas too. Build and invest in both. And in the meantime, use what we have without ideolgical eye patches.

Do you have any affiliations with "Power2Gas"?

Please respond to my argument instead of implying bad faith.

I can sharpen my argument even further:

Existing nuclear reactors - keep them going. They are here today.

Solar - leverage its decentralized, bottom up expansion by the people that can use their own roofs, reduce beaurocratic hurdles. Its expansion does not have to wait 8 years. The products are here today.

Power 2 Gas - celebrate existing products on the market. They are here today.

All these things are here today and part of a solution which contains many parts. I welcome each and every betterment, because we will need it.

You on the other hand are dismissing key tools and instead focus on one thing that is not here today and will maybe be ready in 8+ years.

Nuclear power plants take years to build. Even if a plant were approved today, it wouldn't be finished before large scale hydrogen storage either fails or takes hold, at which point it would be an expensive and unnecessary boondoggle.

Reminder: You're comparing the construction of existing tech (nuclear power plants) vs tech that doesn't even exist: large scale, safe and affordable hydrogen storage.

You may find this interesting:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/wvjfiy/how...

Did you just divide the cost of a storage system by the amount it stores and then compared that to the cost of a kWh of electricity off the grid?

Thanks, it's good to know about this picea system.

For now and maybe always, it's probably more cost-effective to size the solar-electric system for winter months (if adequate roof / ground space).

Its definitely worth it to use all available space.

Still, it definitely cannot generate enough to bring you through the german winter. Some example numbers I have read: A 10kWp solar system that generates up to 1,400 kWh in a summer month will only provide about 200 kWh in December.

You can get more power in summer by using a vertical bifacial panel positioned E-W.

And if you position it N-S you'll get slightly less power than a standard setup, but it'll be less concentrated in the summer, and also spread through the day more.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...

Holy cow, seven times more energy in summer months. Hydrogen storage sounds compelling in that situation.

Let's say you want to use the system for heating with a heat pump.

Your energy consumption for heating might be ~ 3000 kWh/month during the winter months (Nov-Mar) for a moderately insulated house.

Assuming your PV produces only 10 % of the demand during these 5 months (so you have to rely on stored energy for the remaining 90 %) and your heat pump delivers a Coefficient of Performance of 3.5 then you'd need to store ~ 3900 kWh.

As to my back of envelope calculation, one standard 50 l bottle of hydrogen contains ~ 30 kWh worth of energy when filled at 200 bar.

So you'd need ~ 130 such standard bottles to store enough hydrogen.

That's quite a lot. But of course with a well insulated home, you'd maybe only need a third, so that'd be 3-4 bundles (with 12 bottles each).

If you're willing to have wood, you can also turn this into biochar. With excess energy you would get essentially good soil base and syngas, which can be used for heating.

This would be my off grid project if i could get the land.

What is the value of having the house off-grid? Wouldn't it be better for you and the rest of society if your house was on-grid and you could pump excess energy to the grid and buy it back during winter if necessary instead of trying to store energy long-term in your house?

I understand it is an interesting problem and all that, just thinking the energy used to solve this esoteric problem might be better used for more large scale solutions?

I’ve been dreaming about this for 15+ years and for me an important ideological aspect is decentralization. The amount of Bad Things tm that happened related to energy is immense.

Power to the people ;)

Exporting power to the grid requires a grid capable of that. In many places this is highly limited. Where I am the vast majority of applicants wishing to do this are rejected.

I'd guess we'll see mid to large scale electrolyzer plants pop up in many locations throughout a country as soon as the build out of PV on roofs of private houses (also everywhere else) leads to daily overload on the electric grid.

These electrolyzers will then take up the excess electricity and convert it to hydrogen as seasonal storage and thus stabilize the grid.

Additionally, you'd combine these sites with either fuel-cell or hydrogen powered gas turbine plants, to then generate enough electricity when PV generation cannot meet demand.

Based on my experience living in a large home in Colorado designed for passive solar heating, the trees would block the windows in summer so we'd stay comfortable without AC, but the sun was really intense in what should have been the cooler months. I'd definitely do some thorough modeling before building one of my own.

Along with solar thermal and photovoltaics, I'd use a redox flow battery for long term storage, and a GEK for emergency generation (too loud for casual use).

- https://www.allpowerlabs.com/products/gasifier-kits

> but the sun was really intense in what should have been the cooler months. I'd definitely do some thorough modeling before building one of my own.

I mean sure but like in the worst case, window shades are a thing.

Edit: Or maybe this isn't about passive heating and you're saying long term storage might not be necessary in winter?

The largest windows didn't have shades, but some did. We'd also use free standing shades to help keep specific areas cool.

Some of the features of RMI's Carbondale office would probably be worth considering as part of a more thoughtful design.

Also, you're correct that there was never a need to store energy for months on end, at least at our latitude.

I expect altitude plays a role as well. I grew up in Montana. 5,000ft plus sunrays are gnarly.

This prompted me to think about oversizing pv and solar gains, then using a heat pump to extract the excess heat in the summer.

Seems like it would work:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Concept-for-enabling-inc...

For a house-sized storage, you may want flow batteries. Handling gases is expensive and full of unexpected problems, while molten solids is relatively easy.

Hydrogen storage makes sense for a country, not for anything smaller. LNG storage may make sense for a city grid, if our tech advances. Anyway, you really don't want those on your backyard.

Anyway, even though they are simpler, flow batteries may create enough problems so that you don't want them on your backyard either. I will repeat the sibling that recommended just getting more panels.

> and then during the summer, would convert excess energy to a long-term storage

Like this ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

That sounds like an awful lot more infrastructure than simply over-provisioning cheap solar panels.

assuming that you insulate well, then your electricity needs should be pretty small.

In the UK we have a 5kw array, and a 13kwhr battery. this year we have been 93% self sufficient.

we have triple glazing and 90mm of external wall insolation (but its not passivehaus) to cover our heating as well, we'd need to do a proper insulation survey. I am reasonably confident that if we insulate the floor and loft properly(and figure out air exchanger) we could cover our heating and hotwater as well, (assuming solar water heater)

In the US, depending on where you are, you have aircon/heating as the main energy draw, but with the option to have a boatload more solar. However insulation/glazing standards are patchy, so with good insulation a 20kw array, plus 30kwhr battery would cover you for most things and a car as well.

The UK has a much more moderate climate than most of the US. Compare London avg temps[1] with Boston[2] or Dallas[3].

The UK temperature averages are pretty close to LA, which is well known for being so moderate.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/uk/london/climate

[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/boston/climate.

[3] https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/dallas/climate

but thats the point right? aircon in dallas is the biggest energy sink in summer.

combined with the shorter days (compared to the UK) that means that insulation, solar gain control & thermal mass management is critical to reducing power usage.

Boston has double trouble, as in hot(ish) summers, high humidity, and cold-arsed winters.

> To date, only prototypes of the Lavo domestic system have been built, and the company has not yet decided where to build a factory.

Surely it can't be that hard to choose a factory location, considering there are $700M of pending orders.

I imagine planning the construction of a factory is harder than writing a product spec for your average software feature. Not sure that order requests speed up the process.

If that thing goes seriously wrong it could be an impressive incendiary device.

I would want that to be in it's own separate brick outhouse or on a concrete pad twenty feet from anything that should not be sprayed with fire.

See this video of taking apart a USB power pack that runs on hydrogen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y48wCuC3KcA

Lavo seems to be claiming that one of their devices will last 30 years, which is better than a flooded lead acid battery system, if that is actually true.

https://youtu.be/y48wCuC3KcA?t=1020

TIL: hydrogen soap bubbles float up

Many, many places that are not served by gas lines have external propane tanks now, and those are right next to the house. How would this be any different?

At least in the US, there are regulations for placement of a propane tank that depends, among other things, size and capacity of the tank.

One major difference is that hydrogen tanks are subject to embrittlement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

For a start, propane does not leak through solid metal.

It also requires much smaller pressures to be useful.

I think that a better analogy would be a big tank of acetylene connected to a complicated chemical reactor.

Propane does not concern me. A big tank of acetylene would be of concern to insurance companies, the fire brigade and the local safety agency.

natural gas is a lot easier to store than hydrogen gas. Hydrogen atoms are small, permeate most materials, and rust metals into hydrides.

>Hydrogen atoms are small, permeate most materials, and rust metals into hydrides.

Hydrogen also has very low ignition energy, wide band of flammability (LEL to HEL), and requires usage of comparatively more expensive materials for handling.

I admire the audacity and the inventiveness of Lavo, but buying these seems nuts to me.

A 40 kWh LiFePO4 battery + grid tie inverter can be had for much less. Safe, well tested and already in high volume manufacturing. Shipped to your door tomorrow.

Last time I costed out an LiFePO4 battery for my house, it looked like it was about $1/kWh, so $20k for 40 kWh still seems like a good trade. However, battery prices may have gone down by that much since 2 years ago.

Here’s one example ($341.60 / kWh):

https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-lithium-battery-24v-200ah/

That still seems far more expensive than what tesla pays. 100kwh packs would cost $34,000 and that is NOT what Tesla pays. Replacement (aka likely retail so more expensive than their OEM/component cost) is 13,500$ for a Tesla 100kwhr battery.

I get Tesla has so many investements and supply setup to enable that but... 3x as expensive? From a direct-from-china supplier basically?

It annoys me how much battery costs are still sky high for consumers of batteries for all the different cases (lawnmowers, snow blowers, etc), but it shows how much future cost drops will happen with battery-electric goods in the future as supply continues to be scaled.

200 wh/kg LFP and 140 whk/kg sodium ion (next year in production, allegedly) should make for some huge cost savings to so many applications.

You know, if they passed savings to the consumer. Which is probably a pipe dream.

Rumors are that Tesla pays less than $100/kwh

Also, https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-...

(ITYM $1/Wh, not kWh)

For reference, I'm currently waiting for delivery of a 10kWh battery that will cost me about €6100 (including VAT, excluding installation and government subsidy).

You can get that for half the price on aliexpress. Shipped from within EU.

28kWh of battery cells is 3,746.48 USD with free shipping. Price went up recently. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803518663847.html

Yeah, I dont see how this hydrogen battery is a very good battery.

If they could get anywhere near lithium battery efficiency for a round trip then the breakthrough in fuel cell efficiency (and possibly also electrolyzer efficiency) required to do that would be the headline.

And if they can't, then they'd probably need to be implausibly low cost to make it worthwile, and they don't seem to be that either.

Maybe there's some way of using the waste heat that improves it? Still seems unlikely.

So just an expensive, awkward low efficiency battery, when cheap, commodity, high-efficiency batteries are available.

Can we ever reasonably expect to use our cars for that, with vehicle2grid?

I have a ~60kWh battery sitting around in my garage, that I typically only use 10% for daily driving.

How many cycles is that battery good for, and how much would you have to be paid for some of those cycles. Electricity where I live is 10 cents a kWh so there is $6 of electricity in your battery. Is it worth an extra cycle Every day, halving the life of the battery, for some fraction of $6?

It might if it prevents buying an extra €6100 worth of batteries for the house.

Economies of scale will bring prices down. It's becoming clear that a combination of energy density, capacity and transport requirements are going to make hydrogen a thing for some applications. Remember that in the 90s GM was using lead acid batteries in its electric cars and the general population laughed at them.

The price quoted in the article is $20,000 which is almost exactly the market cost of a 40 KWh LiFePO4 battery, but most people would probably end up paying more than that. The cost is directly comparable, nothing nuts there.

Might be a dumb question, but would they be profitable?

I worked at a small company that had $1.5M in 'backorders'. But it was going to take more than $1.5M to fulfill the orders, which ... is not a place you want to be in (regardless of how many zeroes?). Half the company was laid off shortly after this 'milestone' was reached.

Now.. perhaps with more zeroes... there's seemingly enough wiggle room to move stuff around in the books to balance things out...?

Also, I realize it might be premature asking that type of question, but... having been burned once, it sticks to top of mind.

They're not even in production, so nobody knows really. Reading the article they have accepted $65M AUD in deposits which may or may not be refundable. The $1B AUD in demand seems to be a very speculative number likely based on the amount of interest they've received rather than any actual commitments. Probably a ton of customers saying "We'll buy these if you can actually make them". We've seen enough this flame out to stay skeptical, but the fact that they have a prototype and cash deposits is at least a positive sign.

A lot of people didn't read the article before commenting.

1) This battery is not affected by hydrogen embrittlement, in which hydrogen reacts with metals to form hydrides, and is not explosive like compressed hydgrogen, because it stores hydrogen in the form of metal hydrides (but note that hydrides are still very flammable). They did not disclose what metal(s) are used for storage.

2) They don't have a factory, but have been in talks to outsource the actual manufacture of the utility-scale version of the product.

It appears that this system turns tapwater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis.

I'm not a chemist, but I messed around with electrolysis decades ago when I was a teen who was into chemistry sets.

I am not convinced that tapwater is anywhere near pure enough that this system can work without frequently changing electrodes and removing gunge, even with some filtering.

Electrolysis does not just split the water molecules, there is a chemical reaction with whatever else is dissolved in the water.

Good intuition about the importance of pure water. In professional engineering, filtering water is a sufficiently solved problem. Even for consumer use, you can buy multi-stage filters for home use that perform well enough to make water taste "bad" because it is so pure.

It would likely require periodic replacement, proportional to use, of relatively expensive filter(s) - not regularly changing electrodes or invasive deep cleaning.

What would you make the electrodes out of?

Copper will react with the chlorine in tapwater and make an insoluble green scum of copper chloride.

Electrolysis with stainless steel makes highly toxic hexavalent chromium.

Platinum is astoundingly expensive, even for plating.

How expensive a filter is needed to remove 99.999% of the chlorine?

The thing with electrodes is that a fiftieth of a millimeter of non-condutive crap on the surface hugely reduces the effectiveness. Around here the bottom third of my kettle has a tenth of a mil of limescale.

even type II water, which is a standard output of off-the-shelf lab water filtration systems, only has <= 5 ug/L of chlorides, sodium, silica.

And Platinum is like $30 a gram. There is 1/5th of a gram of Gold in a standard desktop computer and Gold is twice as expensive as Platinum.

Does it leak? It is a solid state and I guess unlike the nasa liquid one and no senator become the administrator game etc, it is easier. But at least someone has to ask the question. Hence, does it leak?

The other issue is how it compete with lithium battery it also used. May be unlike car …

I've always wondered why this kind of thing wasn't available much earlier. We've had electrolysis for a long time now - are fuel cells the limiting technology here? Are electrolyzers not as simple as I expect?

Part of it is safety I imagine. Hydrogen can be nasty (e.g. blow up) if not handled correctly in the electrolyser design.

They are only 20-30% efficient and have a low energy density compared to hydrocarbon fuel.

You need a massive amount of excess grid energy for it to make any sense.

Batteries were (are?) cheaper and you don't have to handle Hydrogen, which likes to explode.

I'm not an expert at all, but I was under the impression that hydrogen requires electricity for it to be synthesized. And that it's quite a bit more efficient just to use electricity in a battery directly instead of going through the process to create hydrogen, store it, and use it.

I do think it could be used in situations where the energy density benefits are important (planes, racing).

What do you believe is inside a standard battery? Pure electricity? That doesn't exist. It's a compound that goes through a chemical reaction when you charge it, and which goes through another one when you discharge.

"...lithium-ion batteries are 70-80% efficient, and hydrogen is only 25-30% efficient."

Source: <https://www.motorbiscuit.com/hydrogen-fuel-cells-vs-batterie...>

I don't see how that's relevant to what I said.

It's relevant to what I initially said. So I'm not sure how your comment relates. Maybe you just wanted to nitpick a word I used to sound smart?

Patents for such things that would help humanity and earth get better should be invalidated. Fuck your profits, let's have better battery tech. Patent your iphone round corners all you want

And there are 10s of EV firms with billions in orders.

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