Hypx

Long duration energy storage is necessary for a purely renewable grid.

They should just post-pone the PS6.

It is no more inefficient than many other ideas. Hydrogen is not much more difficult to store than natural gas. In reality, we have more than enough renewable energy to justify making and storing hydrogen.

The narrative of “batteries are progressing” is becoming wishful thinking if not outright delusion. They are not progressing in a way that could actually solve their fundamental problems. Hydrogen for energy storage is necessary for a 100% green grid, as well as many other things. We can make hydrogen close to the point of consumption too.

Hydrogen is a viable option in nearly every situation. And in many sectors, practically the only option.

Hydrogen pipelines are possible and have existed for decades.

It’s far easier to store and distribute hydrogen than electricity. Hydrogen is not a GHG either.

The problems are mostly solved already. You wouldn’t use metals known for hydrogen embrittlement. Often times, you’d use something else, like HDPE or fiberglass that avoids this issue. Storage facilities can even be naturally occurring geological features, like salt caverns.

You would only use LH2 for specific cases, specifically where you are expected to use up the hydrogen quickly. But even this is changing, as self-refrigerating systems are being developed, allowing for very long-term LH2 storage.

We already can make hydrogen via electrolysis. This is a long-solved problem. Efficiency is not that relevant. The main limitation of batteries is that you simply cannot make enough of them. There are huge resource limitation problems. Meanwhile, hydrogen can be made from water and is effectively unlimited as a resource.

Militaries will switch to synthetic fuels or hydrogen. It is already doable, and expansion of production will make it cheap in the future.

You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.

If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.

Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.

The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.

You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.

The same applies for home hydrogen storage too. Compressed hydrogen is good for months. Another option would be metal hydrides which apparently last a long time too. The problem is that you simply cannot power your house entirely with batteries alone.

Even in tank form, you can store it for months. It is not much different than CNG.

Large-scale solutions matter too. The utility companies can utilize such a thing.

Underground caverns can store it for years. This is simply not true.

You would store it as a pressurized gas in this scenario. You would only use liquid hydrogen in specific situations.

Hydrogen can be stored for years.

They are failing at basic editorial controls. This is not a “pretty good fucking job.” It is a sign of real decline.

It’s one of the stages of enshittification. Unless we see hard changes to avoid further decay, Ars will inevitably get worse and and worse until it does become an “internet rot site.”

I hope people here are realizing that our current strategies are not working. They are mostly just “feel-good” solutions like paper straws, and will not eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Which is why I keep pushing for green hydrogen, because I already knew this and want real solutions to be pursued.

The first point to make is that hydrogen is not decades off. Green hydrogen is happening now, and its production is rapidly expanding alongside the expansion of renewable energy production. Many sectors can rapidly adopt green hydrogen right away. This is similar to the conversation we we had about solar power about a decade ago. Critics of solar power back then were being Luddites (and sometimes secret fossil fuel industry stooges). They were convinced that solar could not be cost-effective or scale, based off of very outdated understandings of the issue, but they were wrong. This conversation is repeating with green hydrogen.

On a related note, pro-electrification crusaders are being hypocrites on this subject. They themselves are demanding that we wait decades for miracle batteries or multi-decadal long electrification programs. Because they want “perfect” solutions rather than “good” solutions. A good example is how they demand we fully electrify all rail, a process that will take decades, rather than doing something faster like switching diesel trains to hydrogen trains. In reality, adopting hydrogen now, alongside more reasonable forms of electrification, will be a faster path for reducing CO2 emissions.

Also note that most “fearmongering” types of argument against hydrogen originated from the fossil fuel industry. They are always spreading propaganda intended to undermine green energy projects, and make similar claims about all green technologies. Claims that hydrogen is dangerous, or a GHG, or will leak, etc., are all fear tactics created with minimal amounts of evidence. In reality, hydrogen has very few problems, and adopting it will drastically make transportation and industry safer and more green. It is unfortunate that many environmentalists have fallen for this tactic, but I suppose every green idea had to overcome it.

Finally, you can buy hydrogen and hydrogen-related products. Sure, we are still a bit early on the adoption curve, but that is true of every new idea. Someone can buy a hydrogen car, or a furnace, or whatever right now. Many more are also capable, but don’t know it yet. So rather than demonizing something for not being able to basically time travel, environmentalists should promote green ideas in order to accelerate their adoption.

Believe it or not, sails! Obviously you’re not going to get a 100% reduction because modern shipping companies wouldn’t tolerate being becalmed (and I’m not falling for that article’s “up to 90%” claim either, BTW – I only picked that one to link because it has a decent overview of multiple different technologies), but it can still make a big dent in the fuel requirements.

No. Absolutely not. Sorry, but I cannot this claim seriously at all. We are not going to switch to sail ships again. I don’t think you grasp just how big modern shipping actually is, and how impossible such an idea really is.

I doubt you have any grasp of how massive the problem really is, and how tiny your proposed solutions are in comparison. For instance, you keep citing the possibility of using waste cooking oil for biofuels. Well, the world only makes 3.7 billion gallons of that per year: https://oilandenergyonline.com/articles/all/supply-and-demand-report-used-cooking-oil/

Converted to barrels of oil equivalence, that’s around 100 million barrels. The problem? That’s literally one day’s worth of petroleum consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption

So you are about 0.3% of the way of solving the problem with that idea. Even if we could radically reduce petroleum use in the way you are imagining, that’s still going to be a negligible impact. And the world’s GDP is still growing. There’s still multiple billions of people that will want to live like the first world. So demand for energy will skyrocket in the coming decades, not decrease. The problem will only get exponentially larger and harder to solve.

Ultimately, this is eco-Ludditism, and is more about wishing away the problem than actually solving it. Worse, you enabling the worse stereotypes about environmentalists. Namely that they are crazy wackos who aren’t willing to engage with reality. Any solution must take seriously the idea that there >8 billion people on Earth now, and they all want to live in convenience.

(Speaking of which, once you reduce the demand for vehicle fuel that much, stuff like biodiesel made from waste veggie oil starts to look plentiful enough to make a decent dent in the market. That, at least, has been a solved problem for decades, and I’ve got the ‘90s VW and B100 fuel receipts to prove it.)

Not even close. Even if all cars were eliminated, there will still be enormous commercial need for fuels, such as commercial trucking, shipping, aviation, mining, construction, etc. Not to mention that growing crops for biodiesel require massive energy inputs in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment, etc. And of course, the farmland needed will displace food production, which is its own major problem.

Which is why biofuels can never really be taken seriously as part of a green economy.

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

Sure, same here.