this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
1687 points (95.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
6021 readers
1417 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we'd really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.
This is what gets me. Relative efficiency of stuff is pretty much nullified when the energy used is free. Total power use still matters because it will determine the total size of the array of solar panels to generate the power needed.
But this is near and dear to my heart. I like hydrogen as energy storage. If you burn it, you get water. Natural gas is just CH4, so the output of burning it is 1CO2 + 2H2O. But a lot of natural gas stuff can also use hydrogen with little modification, so we don't have to upend entire industries to adapt. Machines can be updated to use the new fuel type with little expense and we're not throwing out entire production lines to replace them with ones based on electricity.
Why hydrogen? Simple, hydrolysis. Using power generated for free from the sun, you can split water into its base components. Hydrogen and oxygen. With some fancy knowledge, you can capture pretty much all of the hydrogen and none of the oxygen, and store it for use.
It's inefficient compared to some other technologies, in that it takes a lot of power compared to how much hydrogen/oxygen you get, but bluntly, if it's coming from solar, who cares? Not like we're paying for the power anyways.
I keep thinking about this in the form of industry. Say a factory uses natural gas in boilers to make something hot. Whatever the material, whatever the reason, that's what they're doing. With little modification, the system can be adapted to hydrogen, and the company can build a hydrogen hydrolysis reactor on site using either city water, rain water, lake or river water.... Even an underground well. The reactor runs all day and generates hydrogen, stored in a large, high pressure tank, also on site, then pipelines run it to the machines, boilers, whatever, to run the production lines. It's free to run, and only requires a single capital investment.
Hydrogen, also, can be stored indefinitely and not "lose charge" unlike other, battery-based storage systems (or heat, or flywheels). So hydrogen is ideal for long term energy storage. Fuel cells are still the most efficient way to convert hydrogen to electricity, and yeah, you lose a lot of potential energy in the electrolysis/fuel cell conversions, but the energy input is free in the first place, so who cares?
I'm not saying we should go all in on hydrogen. I'm just saying that it's worth continuing to develop the technology for it. Batteries, capacitors, storage via heat or flywheels, they all have their place in the energy future. At least until fusion makes them all obsolete (once we find a way to make that self fueling or use materials that are not extremely limited. IMO, we're making good progress but we're decades, if not centuries away from something practical, given our currently known planetary resources).
And yes, battery EVs are a good thing. Hydrogen electric vehicles... Let's just say "too soon", and leave it at that. Batteries for daily charge/discharge for home use, absolutely. Larger scale heat/flywheel storage, absolutely. But longer term than days to months, hydrogen may be the better option. It's certainly a good option for industry that currently relies almost exclusively on natural gas.
Hydrogen is troublesome as an energy storage. The roundtrip efficiency (electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just... very not worthwhile compared to batteries. Then beyond efficiency there is still the question of "how do we store hydrogen safely?"
Storing energy indefinitely is not a problem for electricity storage, since we are pretty much guaranteed to use the stored energy up in a single day.
Yep. When you're using the energy quickly, within days or weeks, then hydrogen is extremely impractical.
The merits of hydrogen are in long term storage and cycles. A well built storage tank can last a lifetime. To be fair, a poorly built one might not last a year... So it's very dependent on the external factors involved.
Batteries have their flaws, which I think we all know by now. Weight (regardless of state of charge), volume (energy density), charging speed, cycle life, etc.
It's all about the application. Is the energy storage method going to be efficient for the desired outcomes.
Regardless of what other outcomes are in play, one that should be constant is to preserve the environment. Lithium technologies have reached a high level of development in recycling, so, for the most part, the environmental impact of end-of-life batteries is effectively mitigated to a large extent. This is a great thing that we have developed.
We need to do the same with solar PV panels, and mitigate as much of the environmental impact as we can from that as well. I know that's something that's being worked on, but we're not at the same level of efficiency as we are with batteries, probably due to the comparatively long life of PV panels, vs the comparatively short lifetime of lithium cells. We've simply had a lot more lithium to deal with and find ways to recycle, so far. I'm sure PV panels recycling will come along as more early adopters upgrade to something newer, and more panels get into the stage where they need to be recycled. I haven't checked in on PV panel recycling in a while so I'm not sure how outdated my information is.
To be clear, I am not, have not, and would never suggest that we move all our efforts into any technology, including, but not limited to, lithium, solar, wind, hydrogen, or anything else that's been discussed. IMO, we need to leverage several technologies to achieve our long-term goal of global net zero, while meeting the energy demands of everyone.
I just feel like hydrogen is treated like a dead end technology, and I can't blame the public for thinking so. A lot of the information about it as an energy storage solution is either very old, or still in its infancy. From electrolysis, which is a very old idea, to hydrogen fuel cells, which are extremely new by comparison. IMO, there's a lot of work that can be done here, and we need to keep looking into it. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it becomes so practical that other solutions seem like shit by comparison. I don't think either of those is likely, we'll probably land somewhere in the middle of those extremes. I don't know, and I'm not a scientist, so I'm just hoping we, as a society of people, keep working on it.
One thing I'm particularly excited for in this field is solid state batteries. But that's also in its infancy. I know a lot of work is being done on them, so we'll see what happens.
My point, if I have any point at all, is that we need to keep researching varied technologies for it. While solid state might be the right answer for EVs, and cellphones and most consumer electronics, they might not be the best solution for other applications. We need answers to energy demands of all sorts and giving up on something like hydrogen when there's still research to be done, isn't a great idea. We don't know what researching a technology could uncover. Maybe an air battery that's hyper efficient and has a high energy density, better than solid state technologies could hope to achieve. Maybe a lot of things. We just don't know.
Let's try everything and figure out what works for what application.