Solar energy storage breakthrough could make households self-sufficient
sifted.eu
sifted.eu
* metal hydride to store hydrogen.
* a reversible fuel cell that can either split water to extract the hydrogen, or combine the hydrogen with oxygen from the air to make electricity
* using the "waste" heat as space/water heating (this is another variation of "combined heat and power" and is pretty widely deployed, though perhaps not with fuel cells).
There's been talk about using metal hydrides for hydrogen storage for many decades, and they appear to be commercially available [1]. That said, none of the discussion of hydrogen bulk storage at commercial scale seems to be talking about hydrides - it seems more to be about underground caverns just like natural gas, or tanks if you don't have a handy underground cavern. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles all seem to be using cryogenic tanks.
If this company has an approach that can lead to anything approximating seasonal storage in a home-friendly form factor at anything approximating a reasonable cost (and that reasonable cost could be pretty high given the functionality), the world will beat a path to their door.
CHP is also, IMO, cheating since the retrofits to take advantage of the waste heat aren't simple or non-invasive - i.e. theoretically CHP could power hot water and air conditioning for me via heat pumps, but in practice doing any of that residentially is prohibitively expensive.
CHP is widely used in Scandinavia at least, not to mention almost all new houses here are built with water borne in-floor heating as it is much more efficient (lower circulation temperature due to more surface area for heat dissipation).
It is a metal. It produces hydrogen and electrical energy while discharging. It holds up energy for some time after charging. It can be fully discharged without negative effects like all the existing technologies.
So it seems, that there are a number of companies working on this promising technology.
The first thing I'm reading is some statement about how they don't actually want to locate these things on your property, but nearby, which makes me think (a) either "I wouldn't want this thing on my property" or (b) it's "not practical and/or safe to locate this thing on my property" (a being a subset of b).
And then "solid hydrogen" is mentioned and I'm thinking ... huh? Glad I wasn't alone.
So nobody on Earth would ever confuse me with a chemist, but (at least) I think I have some of the basics down.
Hydrogen isn't solid until you drop the temperature a whole hell of a lot or increase the pressure a whole hell of a lot. Now, I guess the upside is that "solid hydrogen" requires temps/pressures that render oxygen similarly frozen which[0] I guess reduces the probability that said "hydrogen battery" doesn't become a "crater surrounded by the fiery wreckage of the neighborhood where said hydrogen battery once was." But, gee, it better be one hell of a power storage source to offset the cost of cooling/pressurizing its storage.
I guess the more logical explanation is "an attempt to dress up what is likely a different use of/material-but-not-flashy-improvement upon an existing technology" which likely hasn't had the slightest bit of practical testing behind it. That sounds a little more cynical than I mean it to -- I mean I really do hope they have something that is as sexy as this thing is trying to sound but the best I could get out of reading that "skeptically" was:
"Put some (top of the line) solar panels on a building (for reasons unmentioned, we aren't using your roof) and store the power in these things just outside your neighborhood (for reasons unmentioned, we aren't small enough/safe enough/it's otherwise impractical to store these on your property/in your home) and they'll go in this sleek-looking 3D rendered thing that we haven't yet worked all the details out of yet[1]."
[0] ... according to the two second Google search that I did.
[1] The cynic in imagines a meeting "Let's see, our technology is something that's solid ... and it's chemical make-up includes something with Hydrogen" ... somewhere along the lines someone was like "F!ck it, let's just call it 'Solid Hydrogen' and see if anyone bites".
"We're locking up the hydrogen molecules in a solid to basically fix them."
And indeed there exist materials that can absorb hydrogen in a sponge-like fashion, so you don't (as much, anyway) need the pressure or low-temperature extremes normally required to squeeze H2 into an empty vessel.
Iirc, you're probably talking some metal(s?), or material containing those like a salt or hydroxide.
So it may be a case of sort-of-existing tech, put together in not previously used manner.
Regardless: hope this pans out (esp. cost-wise). Our world badly needs solutions like this. Cheap, at scale, yesterday.
More Discussion of ammonia's potential over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38053586
gas is combustible aka it explodes.
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-ammon...
It's a pity break away billionaires with heavy industry backgrounds haven't heeded your sage advice and are pressing ahead regardless.
* https://www.ttnews.com/articles/phoenix-hub-plug-power
* https://norwegianhydrogen.com/
* https://www.incitecpivot.com.au/sustainability/projects/gree...
I'm all in favor of alternatives for gasoline. We just need some that don't perpetuate carbon fuel use. The mirai folks end up paying way more for hydrogen than gas, way way more in that subreddit, run into unavailability of fuel, the stations break and aren't repaired. I was quite surprised when I came upon the discussions there. When or if we can create h fuel without using lots of fossil fuel and energy it would be great. Today it's primarily companies and govts perpetuating their industrial bases in Japan that seem to be pushing hydrogen.
With an excess of sunlight hydrogen can be used to generate electricity at night to recharge mobile equipment batteries and cable powered semi mobile equipment, with conversion of hydrogen to ammonia it can be bulk shipped to large scale generation plants elsewhere.
> Consider looking at the disastrous situation in California for people with hydrogen powered cars.
Not especially relevant here to the current reality of large scale green hydrogen generation for direct industrial application to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions though, is it?
Californians struggling with small cars doesn't negate what else is happening in our current reality.
When gasoline spills the fumes aren't pleasant (to most people) but they seem fairly tolerable even at close distances.
Contrast with my experience of concentrated ammonia in the chemistry lab, where if you get one strong whiff it can send you reeling with burnt sinuses.
But I may not be aware of safety strategies that are already in use.
Then non-toxic freon was introduced and rendered those efforts irrelevant.
ammonia-absorption refrigerators of more or less the einstein-szilard type still aren't leak-proof, even without moving seals as you will easily learn if you go to a junkyard to find spare parts for one (they're still popular in rvs, and i stayed in a hotel room earlier this year that had one, manufactured within the last decade)
freon was a huge safety improvement over early vapor-compression refrigerants like propane and sulfur dioxide, but ammonia-absorption refrigerators are a different beast entirely
hopefully it's less dangerous now?
Just don't, say, descend an elevator shaft into an un-ventilated sub-basement with ammonia storage.
The amount of inconsequentially small ammonia leaks which nevertheless the owner insists on a service technician fixing immediately because of the alarming odor, actually form most of the case against ammonia as a refrigerant, which it's otherwise well-suited to.
Ammonia seems like a grid scale storage solution, not something we can distribute across people’s homes. Home storage we should start focused on thermal batteries since it’s highly proven technology that needs almost zero maintenance.
Besides, differently from what the GP claims, it does need to be pressurized. It can indeed be used as a fertilizer, requiring careful application because if it's over-applied it's pretty deadly to any plant, and if applied incorrectly it can leak from the soil and become pretty deadly to anything above it.
But some people really do love the stuff and believe it's a solution to everything.
Sure, we have the experience and infrastructure to handle it - just not at the scale required to use it as fuel.
What we need is better batteries, not Ammonia or Hydrogen, those are essentially obsolete given present day tech, another billion or two into battery research and we should see the end of Lithium Ion (we're pretty much there already but for a penalty in density, but that's not a limitation for stationary storage systems) cost wise.
Add in 2 EV's per household and you won't be able to do it all year round without grid connections.
The only way that's physically possible is if these EV's are electric scooters.
I have solar that covers all my usage, and net metering, but I still need to ~€30 per month to cover the cost of storing it and taking it back from the grid. I'd be paying around €120 if I didn't have solar.
I don't think it's going to be rich households vs poor households, it's going to be sparse residential areas vs dense residential areas, respectively.
Because, in all honesty, you aren't going off-grid if you don't exclusively own the roof (for solar). And because solar nets so little power per square meter, you need a lot of panels per household.
A single roof over a six-floor apartment building just isn't going to have enough surface area to let the residents go off-grid.
A single roof over a single-family home in the suburbs is generally enough.
Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day: https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...
[1] Yes I'm being a bit snarky here as NiMH batteries are like last century technology.
Solid state hydrogen storage, yes. But it's common for people trying to hype it to call it "solid hydrogen".
People have been researching it for decades, but compared to pressurized storage, it's heavy, large, expensive, and low-throughput. But it has no high-pressure, that is one of the things that make storage dangerous, and very low leakage.
I am actually more curious about the metal-oxide ion separator they talk about, but the article is intent on not giving any details about anything.
Also the article claims batteries have short lifespans which is just factually false, especially compared to fuel cells, which are a known wear item which will need to be replaced far sooner than a battery.
Overall terrible quality press release masquerading as an article.
Huh?
If they actually have a patent, that info should be available.
Storing hydrogen in tanks filled with metal chips has been around for years. Overview from 2019.[1] So far, the energy density has been unimpressive.
Is there an energy density number for this thing? Cost?
There are other companies doing this.[2] That one does have some actual installations, mostly in places where someone needed some off-grid power storage and money was no major problem.
You actually buy their product already, but the investment and maintenance cost still require a good deal of idealism. But maybe in a couple of years this becomes interesting...
Can you make households self-sufficient with solar? Well, it'll probably work. But also, it's probably expensive. So the question is: should you make households self-sufficient?
If you look into the renewable intermittency issue, some of the best and cheapest solutions are not storage, and are not possible in a self-sufficient setting. Those include a combination of wind and solar (they complement somewhat, because days with lots of wind are often days with little sun), grid improvements (transporting electricity is almost always more efficient than storing it), flexible demands in industry etc. Yeah, there is still a need for some expensive storage, but you should only do that if you have no better alternative.
The better solutions are on a grid level.
The thing to keep in mind is that solar panels are cheap, so it’s not that big a deal if some of the energy collected from them is lost as heat during the summer. What really matters for the viability of this system is the cost of the fuel cell and hydrogen storage medium.
>Batteries are too expensive and have short lifespans, and high costs and poor efficiency have crossed hydrogen
nonsense
>The cylinder contains a patented solution of solid hydrogen, which has more efficient storage capabilities than batteries
no number
>No storage solution is 100% energy efficient, and neither is Photoncycle’s system.
tautology