CO2 per kWh is steadily going down, but kWhs consumed is still going up, especially in developing nations like China and India where _a lot_ of people live.
I have 1kW of solar on my balcony with some storage. That's enough to satisfy a large part of my demand. On sunny days I produce 4-6kWh, depending on the season.
What amounts to „concrete plan“? Right now we’re still in the state where building more generation is the best use of our money with batteries for load shifting a few hours ramping up. So it’s entirely expected that there is no infrastructure for seasonal storage yet. However the maths for storing energy as hydrogen and heat looks quite favorable and the necessary technology exists already.
"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements:
1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant
2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size
Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.
Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.
Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of electricity still falls to negative values(!) over noon, almost every day.
Yes, those are easier to store, but more expensive and less efficient to generate.
The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or too unsafe, at least today.
With rapidly dropping PV prices it just gets cheaper - this is only a relatively recent thing; the projects that exist to exand production are barely complete yet .. capital plant takes time to build.
Fortescue only piloted athe the world's first ammonia dual-fuel vessel late last year, give them time to bed that in and advance.
If that's so easy, cheap, and safe, why aren't there companies doing it on a large scale already? We're talking about billions of Euros of market volume.
Right now it’s cheaper to make hydrogen from methane and methane is easier to store and process so no large scale storage of hydrogen is in demand. Nevertheless storage in salt caverns is a proven process that is in use right now eg. Linde does it.
You probably don’t want to use regular batteries for that. I’d go with shipping energy as aluminum or something like that and use aluminum-air batteries. But regular hvdc seems really hard to beat with shipping of any kind.
Students study to pass exams, teachers teach to enable students to pass exams. If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for.
> If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for
My favorite college class was compilers.
The whole semester you worked on a compiler for a simplified Pascal. Each homework added a feature.
The final exam was 4 hours. Open textbook, open internet. No chat with classmates. You got a description of 3 features to add to your compiler. Grade is number of tests passed.
~ 40% bookwork. Rote learned facts
~ 30% standard questions. Do in an exam hall standard variants of what was done in class/homework/tutorials.
~ 30% New applications and logical extensions.
I don't know how well they achieved that split, I suspect it was mostly aspirational. Seemed like a reasonable ideal though!
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-...
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