Hydrogen Storage Could Slash Renewables' Costs | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen Storage Could Slash Renewables' Costs

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2 pointsmfiguiere4 comments

Electrolysis isn't a huge problem efficiency wise, but the cost to liquefy or compress hydrogen is insane. It's also scary high pressure. It's way easier to convert it to methane and store as LNG. In any case you are talking about less than 40% round trip efficiency for storing electricity.

Compare that to lithium battery storage at 96%? Unless your Power-to-gas storage is less than 1/3 the cost of lithium batteries, you are going to have a bad time competing with battery storage. Especially considering the new designs coming out for grid scale battery storage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas#Efficiency

Edit: Hydrogen is pretty valuable just on it's own as a chemical feed stock. Burning it for electricity is not very economical.

Methane appears convenient at first glance, yes. Can be burnt in regular turbines, stoves, even some cars.

But is it really the overall best way to store hydrogen?

Methane has a rather high climate impact, compared to CO2. So if you're taking CO2 to synthesize methane from hydrogen, any leakage afterwards is much worse than leaking CO2.

Why not use salt caverns (which are used to store natural gas and AFAIK can also store hydrogen directly) for seasonal storage at relatively low pressure?

And if you're going to synthesize some other molecule from H2, why not make ammonia instead?

There's already an ammonia powered FCEV semi (amogy.co).

> .., you are going to have a bad time competing with battery storage.

According to what I read here and there, battery storage won't be able to compete with chemical storage for the seasonal aspect, unless it becomes another order of magnitude cheaper or even more. Also, for seasonal storage over months, batteries don't really make sense due to loss through discharge, right?

I think the big deal for power-to-gas methane isn't as energy storage, but as a feed stock for agrochemicals. There are just way too many cheaper and more efficient storage methods for electricity like pumped hydro and battery storage.

Ammonia is still only about 50% round trip efficient and I'm sure it would be a huge part of the demand for green hydrogen production. But once again, ammonia is more useful as an agrochemical than as an energy storage medium.

With regards to seasonal storage, it isn't as big of an issue as you would think. Especially since seasonal declines in solar tend to coincide with seasonal increases in wind power.

https://energybyentech.com/blog/seasonal-variability-of-rene...

> There are just way too many cheaper and more efficient storage methods for electricity like pumped hydro and battery storage.

Pumped hydro is cheaper and more efficient. But AFAIK there isn't much potential for new capacity in areas where it'd be needed. Batteries are more efficient. But cheaper per kWh stored for 6 months than power-to-gas-to-turbine? I don't think so. At say USD 500 per kWh battery, 1 GWh would cost USD 500 MM. But seasonal storage is likelier in the TWh magnitude. 500 billion then.

550 MW electrolyzers (* 0.5 a * gas turbine efficiency 0.4 = ~ 1 TWh electricity), methanation plants, 2.5 TWh salt caverns and say 5 GW gas turbine plants to store 1 TWh for the 6 months that have less solar+wind than the other 6 would cost a lot less than 500 billion I assume.

> .. ammonia is more useful as an agrochemical than as an energy storage medium.

I think this will change. You don't transport/consume the petawatts of the world's deserts via HVDC to somewhere to 100 % immediately use them. You'll ship them in the form of some molecule. Which could well be ammonia.

> With regards to seasonal storage, it isn't as big of an issue as you would think.

The combination of PV/wind isn't perfect though. The more of it there is, the larger the storage needed to flatten the seasonal fluctuations.

It comes down to whether one assumes that either (A) electricity demand will adapt to some seasonal pattern (meaning that economic activity might fluctuate in synchrony) or (B) that economic activity will drive deployment of technology such that electricity consumption can be mostly even throughout the year.

I'd guess B is more likely.

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