Swedish firms ink deal to make green hydrogen with wind power A project to produce green hydrogen using wind power is planned in the mid-east of Sweden, which is expected to have the ability to make up to 240 tons of the stuff on-site every day. However, work on the proposed facility is not expected to begin until 2025, and it may not be operational until 2030. The project is described …
Oxygen is a valuable product in its own right
So I am sure they will be using it, the Swedish and Scandinavian countries really have a handle on this stuff, unlike the UK which has to be seen to talk the talk
And as for the USA well they don’t even talk the talk anymore.
Actually Orkney is doing well on hydrogen. They have a lot of turbines but not enough connection to the grid so they using it for trucks and ferries - and apparently soon an aircraft.
I thought Orkney had received an updated interconnect, but it looks as if they are still struggling along on the old one, which is which they can afford to waste energy in this way.
https://www.orkney.gov.uk/Files/Strategic_Projects/Orkney_%20Transmission_Link_Report_May_2021.pdf
Its not Orkney that's 'wasting' wasting the energy. TNUoS seems to be the problem.This is set by the National Grid ESO. Interestingly they seem to not want power from wind - I looked into putting up some wind and they (according to the local distributor) wanted £70k to put up a £6k transformer to replace the 3 phase fed one already there - the lines were capable of the power I was going to put down it.
@Tom 7
Well done you! Both for your proposal and for apostrophising 'wasting'.
Wind energy can't be considered wasted if it is used to some useful purpose. You can't waste the wind. For many decades we use electricity to pump water uphill to reservoirs at night so it can flow down again during the day when it's needed to generate more electricity - AKA a huge battery.
Energy efficiency is irrelevant when the energy is free.
My garden is covered in sunshine and very little is flowing on me, very inefficient but not wasteful.
I did some physics and if you burn diesel in pure oxygen not only do you get rid of NOxs and particles of soot you raise the temperature so much (you're not heating lots of Nitrogen) that the potential thermodynamic efficiency to the high 80% - doubling the energy you can get from the same amount of fuel. So not only can we reduce demand for oil we can reduce the carbon footprint of it by half! This wind stuff is a win-win!
I don't downvote, but I do disagree with the sentiment, and policy, and here's why.
The EU has a looming energy crisis. Diktats have created an artificial market, where expensive and unreliable electricity has been promoted over cheaper and more efficient sources. At the same time, diktats have decided we must decarbonise our economy, massively increasing electricity demand.
That's basically economic suicide driven by lobbying, rather than science or engineering. Which is probably why posts on this kind of topic get downvotes. Some of us know the policy is nucking futs, others have drunk the Green Kool Aid, and bought into the 'renewables' lobby's PR. I know this post will get downvotes.
So it's still the ancient problem of wind and solar being intermittent, expensive and unreliable. Wind doesn't blow, no energy. Sun doesn't shine, no energy. We know this is an issue because we've relied on wind in the past. Trade depended on it, ie sailing ships. But those were pretty quickly repaced by steam, then diesel. Clipper ships held out for a while, because they were fast, gorgeous but are now mostly museum pieces.
So we've been there, done that, but Greens & politician blissfully ignore the lessons of the past.
But electrolysis is something we're taught in basic science. Take H2O, and electricity, break those chemical bonds. Take chemistry further, and you learn about bond strength, and H2O is quite strongly bonded, so you need quite a lot of energy to crack H2 from O.
This obviously a problem if it takes more energy to create H2 than you get from burning it, especially if you factor in energy, production, distribution etc. And your product is less efficient than the product it replaces, ie there's less energy from burning H2 than CH4. So once people have paid to convert their 'cheap gas central heating to burn hydrogen, their bills will be much higher. H2 production is expensive, so costs more than CH4. It's less energy dense, so you'll need to use more units to keep your home at 18C.
And it obviously increases demand for electricity, when currently there's a shortage. Especially when there's no wind for hours, or days. No wind, no H2.But it's being promoted around an edge case. When windmill generation exceeds demand, wind farmers get paid constraint payments. Part of the strange Green economics where suppliers are paid for a product when there's no demand. But those payments are added to consumer's bills, hence why those have increased rather than decreased.
So potentially H2 could be produced from that surplus, but that's intermittent. So H2 production would be intermittent. That gets dangerous, ie a typical winter blocking high leads to low winds, low temperatures, and increased heating demand. 'Rennewables' are useless because they won't be generating electricity or hydrogen. So people will suffer and die.
But such is politics. I also wonder if the ecofreaks supergluing themselves to stuff in an attempt to shut down fossil fuels know that cyanoacrylate is made from hydrocarbons. Hopefully they do know what happens when you get it on organics like wool or cloth.
Right, so the gist is (and thanks for taking the time to reply, much appreciated) is that right here, right now the tech doesn't support sustainable hydrogen creation?
Surely the progress that is needed has to start somewhere though right? It is not unreasonable to think the more the sector moves to this tech the more efficient they'll become, manufacturing costs reduce, process and techniques are refined. Plus wind blows at night when electricity is often at it's least required and seeing as we still can't store it at least it's going to something useful.
I take on board your points but in the broader scope of progress and development step change, public consciousness and culture is just as import in the early days. Still not sure any of the (accurate) negatives mean we shouldn't be pleased to see some progress. What's the alterative?
No, the gist is that H2 takes more to create it from water than to burn it, so it's a loser's proposition.
That's basic chemistry, no matter the tech used.
Plus the wind doesn't blow all the time, so if you've become reliant on it, and you're becalmed for whatever weather reason, you're fucked.
Couple that with the loser's bargain from having to crack H2O, and people will be freezing to death.
Right now it does, but can you be certain that's always the case? Complementary tech will improve giving better efficiency across the board, that's basic progress.
Wind certainly does not blow all the time but when it does we may as well put it some good use no? Unless you alone can store excess electricity.
I am not sure anyone says come to rely on it either. Generally people come to rely on things whilst it's available or something better comes along. You are moving to extreme views with some of your extrapolations here mind, people freezing to death?!
Besides what's your proposition then, what would you see us moving towards?
Right now it does, but can you be certain that's always the case?
Yee cannae change the laws of physics
Yes, the electrolysis of water will always require more energy to be put in than you get from burning the result. However, that's not necessarily much of argument. Hydrogen is used industrially though produced differently but still requiring lots of energy.
The big problem with hydrogen is storage and transportation. This makes it unsuitable for storing energy.
> H2 takes more to create it from water than to burn it, so it's a loser's proposition
No process is 100% efficient - and that includes turning heat into electricity, or storing electricity in batteries.
However, if the electricity you're getting from wind or solar is sufficiently cheap in the first place (or free if it's excess), then it could still be economical even if you lose a substantial fraction.
The main problem I see is that H2 is a terrible store of energy - not just because it leaks, but also because it migrates into the structure of metals and makes them brittle.
If we combine it with CO2 to make CH4 or CH3OH, then we get something much more practical to handle. Extracting dilute CO2 straight out of the atmosphere is hard, but for the time being there are plenty of places where concentrated CO2 is being emitted and would be easy to get.
We could, of course, just plant trees and harvest the solar energy in the form of firewood.
Electrolysis remains the least efficient way to create fuel from water which leaves lots of opportunities for arbitrage or the black market if it's subsidised.
But the basic point is valid: while you've a glut of the stuff you should be making use of it by storing it. Just don't go with hydrogen from electrolysis.
Small-scale district heating and energy systems can probably make use of renewables, heat pumps and storage, and e-fuel in closed-loop systems: if you're not supplying to the grid, there's no room for arbitrage.
>Electrolysis remains the least efficient way to create fuel from water
However, given the wind doesn't always blow, a process that collects energy and thus supports an asynchronous energy supply is probably a good choice, even if the conversion efficiency is not as high as what is achievable from using natural gas as a feedstock.
You do realise we used to use coal gas that was 50% H2 and no-one had problems with storing that or significant leakage problems. Massive manometers were common in every town and city 50 years on we suddenly think H2 is leaky? My Granddad who flew on the R33 would laugh at the idea and that was only being kept in by rubberised cotton and not thick bits of metal. It seems to be invented to scare people off the idea.
You could get 80% of the energy back from electrolysing H2 using fuel cells in 1990* , Twice as efficient as burning fuel. We can easily store it (as a kid every town had massive manometers storing coal gas to heat the places - and that was 50% H2 so dont come up with any bollocks about it leaking out).
So all it needs is for electricity prices to wary around 50% for large scale storing of H2 and then feeding it into fuel cells and someone can make a profit from it. This already happens on some tariffs and will only get more frequent as more wind and solar is added. The October price cap will mean PV will have a payback time of less than 10 years for domestic installations, 5 for commercial. And if perovskite lives up to its promises then you can more than 1/2 those timescales. On shore wind is even cheaper and there are some new designs in the pipeline that should bring the price down to less than 2p/KWh so the opportunities for overgeneration and H2 regeneration at prices Nuclear can only dream of could be less than 10 years away. The only thing stopping it are vested interests and the Queen.
*and the O2 that is also generated is very saleable too!
Not if it can't produce significant volume at an affordable price.
So figure a subsidy farming operation like Hornsea. Up to 1.2GW with and initial strike price of £140/MWh. Storing any surplus adds costs, say £100/MWh. So time-shifting something that has no economic value because no demand results in a cost of £240/MWh.
Gas costs around £30/MWh.
And there are other problems. Our clueless leaders signed Hornsea on an indexed contract, so as inflation increases, so do Orsted's profits. And as energy costs are a major input to inflation rate, Orsted can look forward to ever fatter profits until the contract ends, or is ended.
Basically it's a huge con. We only 'need' storage because 'renewables' can't deliver reliable power. If the 'renewables' lobby had to deliver reliable power, nobody would willingly pay for it. Instead, we have regulatory capture where we're forced to pay.
-- It is not unreasonable to think the more the sector moves to this tech the more efficient they'll become, manufacturing costs reduce, process and techniques are refined. --
OK lets take wind as an example - they've become more efficient? NO they are still inefficient just that they're bigger and there are lots more of them.
Now look at car engines they've gone from 7 litres down to a couple or less and are far more efficient in power output and fuel consumption.
Interesting difference in direction.
I looked at installing solar panels recently and yes they are becoming more efficient. The payback period (including barreries) had dropped from c25 years to c10 years.
Actually there is a limit on the power a free turbine can collect at best 60% of the available wind. Designs using sails on ski-lift type structure are more efficient over a greater wind range and can even be made to work well at ground level below planning permission height requirements. A 200m long sails on rails generate 10s of KW for very little capital investment.
OK lets take wind as an example - they've become more efficient? NO they are still inefficient just that they're bigger and there are lots more of them.
Actually, they have become significantly more efficient as they have become bigger. Smaller ones only manage to extract about 30% of incoming kinetic energy while the biggies can get 45%. Which is not bad, considering that the absolute limit (the Betz limit) is 59%.
You should vote those Diks out - and they can take their tats with them.
In the case of wind power, once we have significantly higher generating capacity that we can use on a windy day, two things happen:
1. On less windy days we still have enough capacity.
2. We make H2 on very windy days.
Secondly, it load balances the grid. Another thing you can do it NOT transport the H2, but leave it on site.
So - you electrical feed into the grid maxes out on the windy day and you generate H2 (and keep the O2).
Then on a much less windy day you use the stored H2+O2 and make electricity via a turbine or whatever.
1) Nope. That's 'renewables' version of a gambler's fallacy. Keep throwing money at it, and eventually the wind will blow somewhere. It doesn't really work that way, especially when weather systems may cover much of the UK & Europe.
It's still the problem of wind being intrinsicly variable, making it incompatible with a need for reliable energy. We could build say, 1GW capacity from nuclear or clean coal. Then we'd have 1GW pretty much 24x7x365. Windmills lie. They have a name plate capacity, say 10MW per windmill. Actual capacity depends on the prevaling winds, and might be 10-20%. So 100 very large windmills, but only deliver 100MW. Or you'd need 1,000 windmills to deliver 1GW. Or there'd be periods where there's no wind, and there'd still be no electricity or hydrogen.
2) But you have no control over the weather, so can't really predict how much surplus energy you'd have to produce H2, especially when demand is increasing from stuff like EVs.
And it doesn't load-balance the grid, it destabilises it because of 'renewables' fundamentally intermittency and unreliability. If the 'renewables' blob wants to sell H2, fine, find your market. We might save some money because we can scrap constraint payments given they can now utilise any surplus.
H2 is really a solution looking for a problem, and glossing over the underlying problem being fundamental to 'renewables'. Nuclear + gas would be cheaper and more efficient.
Wind strike price is already lower than grid cost. Nuclear is 3 time higher already and that's not including the £53 billion bill for the first 150 years of storing the waste we've got and dont know what to do with yet, and we also have to pay 50% of the decommissioning costs (probably 100% as the companies that run them will probably phoenix to avoid paying their share).
Err bollocks. Hinkley C was a lousy deal, but still costs less than Hornsea, or the current average strike price of £150+
Again if the 'renewables' lobby were telling the truth, our electricity bills would have fallen, not massively increased. Drax's £1bn a year from subsidies show there's fat profits to be made from burning forests, and the wind farmers make £6-7bn a year.
Storing radioactive medical waste is a mostly solved problem, issue is the ecofreaks & environmental terrorists don't want the problem solved because they're ideologicaly opposed to anything nuclear. Plus some reactor designs can burn waste anyway. But the biggest waste volume comes from medicine & industry, not nuclear power.
Europe's energy policy is largely driven by two facts: Europe doesn't have enough of its own fossil fuels for its own consumption, which makes it dependent on almost inherently corrupt and instable countries for it; pollution due to fossil fuels and, by extension, climate change.
Generation costs per MWh for some renewables are, in some places, at some times (Extramadura for solar, anywhere on the coast for wind)- now considerably below fossel fuel alternatives. Storage remains a problem as does the need for hydrocarbons for all kinds of industrial processes. Renewables to hydrocarbons would solve a lot of problems at a stroke but the amount of research done on it has been pitiful in comparison with, say, batteries, or nuclear and now, hydrogen. Follow the money if you want to find out who's been doing the lobbying.
Storage remains a problem? Not for us it doesnt we have millions of barrels of empty north sea oil and gas wells we could use. Some of it was being used for storing a natural gas reserve which the idiot government allowed to close but unless they deliberately destroyed it to prevent H2 making use of it thats one hell of a lot of storage. Alternatively storing it in Manometers is actually not very expensive and we used them for coal gas until north sea gas came in and that was 50% h2 and the whole bloody country used it and there were problems with leaks other than breaks.
Wind power needs storage to be a solution, but it's worth noting how inefficient and expensive storage is. The UK's biggest energy storage is the incredibly impressive Dinorwig pumped storage power station in Wales. Despite begin an engineering marvel the energy stored is equivalent to 15 minutes of average UK electricity demand.
It gets worse. UK households use about 4 times as much energy from gas as they use from electricity. So one full fill of Dinorwig is equivalent to 3 minutes of gas and electricity power demand.
Wind power can and often does go to insignificant levels for a couple of weeks at as time. If we were relying solely on wind we would need 7000 Dinorwig's and at the end of that two windless weeks we would be on the edge of collapse and praying for wind.
Small Modular Reactors can be built relatively quickly - not weeks but not decades either. Being modular the cost is reduced too - although not to wind levels but then again, they work better than wind not being reliant on UK weather!
Also a bunch of small reactors can be rotated for maintenance or dynamically brought online/offline to react to load in a smaller granularity that the larger reactors. Back on topic, I seem to remember seeing something about using heat from reactors to split Hydrogen for fuel but I can't remember what that was all about...
SMRs also save on paperwork, ie standardised, pre-approved modules built to common designs. H2 production is something they could do a lot better than 'renewables'.
Back when the UK first built reactors, we also came up with 'Economy 7' tariffs to create an off-peak load. Simple energy storage solution made from cheap hot water cylinders, resistive heating elements and a radio switch.
That's the kind of energy storage you'd think could be enhanced with 'smart' meters. Of course consumers would benefit from cheaper surplus power, instead of having to pay far more.
>Of course consumers would benefit from cheaper surplus power, instead of having to pay far more.
Haven't looked recently, but for many years, the utilities have priced Economy 7, so that for your typical home it costs (per annum) about the same or more than one of their other tariffs.
I suspect once we get over the hype around smart meters, we'll see similar convergence in tariffs with the fully flexible market price being on the face of it cheaper, but in practise about the same or more than the simple tariff in part because it requires more complex back office and billing systems.
Hydrogen is a horribly inefficient way to capture energy. It takes about 4x as much power to turn water to hydrogen, store & transport it, and then turn back to power as it would to store in a battery. I bet there is also potential to "greenwash" hydrogen produced from fossil fuels.
So maybe it is the future in particular niches where the power would go to waste if it wasn't sequestered, but it's not going to displace battery tech or other forms of sequestration any time soon.
No, it's just that people have since bothered to study and compare the efficiency of various technologies and hydrogen is awful. It's the sort of tech that is used for sequestering energy when there is no other choice, or where the requirement for energy requires immediacy.
That's why it is a non-starter for electric vehicles but it might find niches it can live in.
"Just remember, folks, that round trip efficiency through electrolysis and fuel cell is at best 50% efficient, which is a spectacular waste of valuable electricity."
True but green hydrogen is very helpful if it's electricity that would otherwise be wasted (wind blowing in the night etc.). It also has the benefit of then being transportable. Yes transportation will further erode the efficiency.
If anyone can up with a more efficient reasonably economic way of storing electricity then the world wants to know.
True but green hydrogen is very helpful if it's electricity that would otherwise be wasted (wind blowing in the night etc.).
Well maybe, if the electricity would otherwise be wasted. Which has never been the case.
It also has the benefit of then being transportable. Yes transportation will further erode the efficiency.
Electricity is transportable too, in things we call "wires". Though it is possible that hydrogen might at some point make an unwieldy and inefficient way of powering rural trains.
If anyone can up with a more efficient reasonably economic way of storing electricity then the world wants to know.
More than 50% efficient is not a very high bar. Hydrogen generation and storage is nowhere near being a reasonably economic way of storing energy. A Tesla powerwall has a round trip efficiency of 90% and even Dinorwig, which was not designed with efficiency in mind, manages 75%.
“Electricity is transportable too, in things we call "wires". Though it is possible that hydrogen might at some point make an unwieldy and inefficient way of powering rural trains.”
IIRC the HST (or was it the APT?) was originally intended to be powered by hydrogen-fuelled gas turbines but it seems that idea was shelved pretty early on when they decided the traditional big diesel engine was more practical. I'm not sure of the specifics but presumably the usual matter of fuel storage and availability.
A Tesla powerwall has a round trip efficiency of 90%
Yes battery storage is much more efficient, but its high cost means it's only affordable for short term storage so its used for applications like leveling out demand. Increasing the amount to storage goes up almost linearly with capacity so its a very very poor choice for long term storage. Bulk chemical energy storage is much better here as you don't need to replicate the expensive bit that does the conversion process. The actual storage capacity can be increased by adding more relatively cheap tanks.
> If anyone can up with a more efficient reasonably economic way of storing electricity then the world wants to know.
Perhaps the need isn't so much to store 'electricity' but to store 'energy' and remove grid electricity and fossil fuels from the equation.
So for example the use of wind turbines to produce fertiliser feedstock is a good use of this technology because it can replace processes based on natural gas and (grid) electricity, plus the feedstock is only needed at specific times of the year when it is needed in large quantities.
One thing that baffles me is people using electricity to produce heat - given you can focus the sun and get 3000C relatively easily and its not actually that hard to store heat it seems a relatively unused storage method.
Though some solar thermal generating farms do it to heat salts for overnight generation.
>Consider how many kettles of water you can boil (both temperature and phase change) from just one bottle of Calor gas.
Given what is possible from a relatively small domestic solar-thermal/voltaic installation, the Calor gas bottle (or equivalent) shouldn't be necessary for most of the year.
One of the things about solar energy is it makes no difference whether or not you have solar panels, the same amount of energy will be hitting your roof everyday, so in some respects once you can collect sufficient for your daily needs (most of the time), efficiency and efficacy of usage become relatively unimportant.
It's not Nirvana. We need all the electricity we can make. There is simply no point - unless you live on Orkney - in using 50% of some of it to heat up the atmosphere.
When there is so much renewable power that no fossil fuels are being burnt, Dinorwig is full and turbines are being shut down then sure, fill your boots. Make hydrogen. But at the moment - unless you live in Orkney - every kJ derived from electrolysed water requires another kJ generated by gas to make up for the waste.
Given current gas prices, synthetic production makes a lot of sense. Though hydrogen remains a problem for storage and transportation. But Sweden has smelting operations that could use it.
Synthetic methane or methanol remain better options for "fungible" fuel but we still seem to spending little on research for cheaper production but I was heartened the other week by a report about Sunfire finally scaling production up. A couple of similar announcements would surely move the needle on oil and gas futures.
Before some scammer even dreamed of NFTs, "fungible" was used to denote the ability to transport, store and, therefore, trade something. Electricity can be easily transported but can't be stored, this makes it less fungible than say gas, which can be stored and transported, but less fungible than oil.
Every energy conversion wastes heat: electric generation, electric or fuel transport (even power lines), and every kind of usage. Every electric vehicle has cooling systems. Every wind/solar/nuclear-fed data center needs aircon. Every H2 or CH4 engine wastes lots of heat of combustion. We dump this heat mostly into the air, with some to lakes/rivers/ocean, all day long.
Even if all fuel oils (including diesel, kerosene, mogas/octane, avgas, Jet-A, and JP military grades), coal, and even straight wood (forest scale, at least -- hands off my campfire!) are eliminated, I still think the waste heat of all civilization may be something that still affects climate. Has anyone done a serious study on this?
I imagine the only solution to save air and water temperatures are to force the heat into the ground (geothermal), but with enough build-up the effects will eventually occur -- groundwater and surface air temps will be affected -- meaning it's only a delay, nothing more.
One could argue the sunlight we harvest would have the same heating effect. Fine, but we've seen how hydro usage affects river ecosystems. So what's the downside for harvesting wind and making heat from that energy? Shirley taking energy out of the weather affects it, right?
Unfortunately, hydrogen is just another way of getting electricity from where it's generated to where it's needed.
However, unlike the more conventional wires and batteries approach, there are several relatively[1] inefficient conversion processes en route, plus a load of additional energy usage overhead in transportation and storage.
[1] Note the important word here.
Relative to what?
Petrol engines struggle to get into the high twenties (percent efficiency). The "best" diesels -- monster marine installations, nothing like what's under the bonnet of your estate car -- can get close to 50 percent. Hydrogen can beat that. Batteries can beat it by more, possibly by a lot more, but so what? The weight and charging rate problems (amongst others) are hardly insignificant,
-A.
Where? Well, Volkswagen for starters say 30% turbine to wheel.
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydrogen-or-battery--that-is-the-question.html#
I’m not expert on the whole of the chain, but on the one stage I do happen to know in detail, compression&liquefaction, they are assuming 88%, which is more than just optimistic. From thermodynamics alone, the theoretical perfect performance to compress H2 is 87%. This paper, by *hydrogen proponents* ends up with 75% efficiency of that stage.
https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/hyd_economy_bossel_eliasson.pdf
And then there’s all the rest, which that paper addresses, still quite *optimistically*.
If Wind Turbines were an efficient and practical means of generating renewable energy for the future…..
What you’d want to be, is have a *vast* land area, preferably quite northerly where the wind blows a lot. And over a really wide distribution, such that it was really true that the wind is always blowing somewhere on your territory - unlike even the whole of Europe which is still too geographically small to achieve that.
And you’d want guaranteed access to vast national supplies of the raw materials for epoxy turbine blades (ultimately hydrocarbons) and the towers ( steel and concrete).
Then, you’d want a vast workforce to build and service *a lot* of wind turbines: a typical large one is 1.5MW (installed) compared to a 1GW power plant. You need at least 1000, and realistically 2000, to really replace just one large power plant. And they need to be quite “compliant” to agree to go up the 150meter pylons with minimal safety regs to service them, even 3000km from civilisation. And cheap…..
Any countries we can think of that fit that bill? I can think of two.
One begins with R. The other begins with C.
It’s not like they haven’t thought of it. It’s that *even if you have a slave Labour workforce, infinite land, and nearly-free raw materials*, it’s still nonsense.
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