This was a peak situation, but long term with even more renewable energy, that’s when Hydrogen becomes relevant.
And when we have enough surplus production of electricity to produce cheap hydrogen the sky is the limit. Because cheap hydrogen can replace oil and gas everywhere.
We are not there yet, but I think it’s not too far away.
the Danish Energy Agency is spearheading an ambitious plan to produce even more wind power for both export and domestic use.
And we are far from alone in this, all European countries are working towards more renewables. Which is why I think the above will become reality soon. Hydrogen is wasteful and cost a lot of electricity to make, but when electricity becomes plentiful enough that renewable production goes to waste, that’s when hydrogen becomes really really relevant, and can replace everything that can’t be replaced with electricity and batteries.
doesn’t hydrogen have way worse round-trip efficiency than batteries, even before things like embrittlement? i’ve heard as low as 45%, with the rest just becoming heat.
Hydrogen has other uses too. Currently we use gas which results in carbon emissions. But with cheap enough energy, you can get hydrogen from water. There is also an option to not emit the carbon when using gas, but you get less hydrogen for the same input so no one is going to do that at scale.
Another major use for hydrogen is the haber-bosch process.
Currently, but a large part of that cost is due to energy prices. If you have cheaper energy, or periods of excess energy that bring the cost down to/near zero, that is what brings down the cost.
Yes, but it can be stored where batteries lose power over time. And a lot of the infrastructure doesn’t need to be build but can be converted from natural gas use.
In the end batteries and hydrogen fill two very different gaps. You can use batteries to shift the renewable production peak at noon (thanks solar) to the demand peak in the evening, maybe even flatten fluctuation (in production and demand) over a few days. But they are entirely useless as seasonal long-term storage.
Also plans to produce green hydrogen exist independently. It’s a requirement to decarbonise a lot of industry processes where direct use of electricity doesn’t work. It’s also a raw material in chemical industry.
So if decarbonisation of more than just electricity production is the goal, large scale hydrogen production is a given. As is large scale storage as production from renewable energy will always have seasonal fluctuations. From there having it also double as long-term on-demand stored energy means just scaling up what is already there.
Hydrogen is the smallest atom and literally cannot be contained by any other material in the universe over time. Not to mention the intense refrigeration and pressure requirements.
i don’t remember if you and i spoke about this before but i did talk to someone on here about the fact that hydrogen can’t really be stored for long periods either. whoever it was linked a statement from a german gas company claiming that their existing infrastructure could handle hydrogen without modification, and i remember coming away from that entirely unconvinced.
i’d be happy to be proved wrong but i don’t believe green hydrogen is going to play a big part of the grid. i’m personally hoping for pumped hydro and thermal storage.
Sounds indeed like bullshit. More so as here in Germany there are indeed a lot of projects using natural gas infrastructure for the planned hydrogen transport network. But definitely not without modifications.
but i don’t believe green hydrogen is going to play a big part of the grid
Europe seems to disagree, with projects worth more than ten times of those in North America and Asia combined.
Edit:
Here’s the already approved part of Germany’s planned hydrogen core network (new lines, converted lines, opened by 2025):
And an article about one of the earliest segments of 55km opened 1½ years ago, based on 95% pre-existing lines.
And an article (but only available in German) claiming that the planned capacity for 2025 (converted or newly build) is met with new ~525km out of ~9000km by 2032. Of which ~60% will be converted pipelines, 40% new construction.
huh, i thought only japan was betting on hydrogen. i hadn’t heard of expansion here. although that’s more likely because everything we get about germany is how it’s their fault that our electric bill has gone up.
Fun fact: the other big investor in hydrogen pipeline projects is your neighbour to the east… planned to go all the way through the Baltic Sea to Germany.
Also the French energy concept (see: RTE’s (French grid provider) study about energy by 2050) is at its core entirely based on nuclear base load in a renewable/storage system making electrolysis more economical because on top of producing hydrogen with excess renewable power during the day, you then also have a steady production of excess electricity throughout low demand night times.
Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It’s not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve “boil water and run a turbine”).
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn’t work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
But at that point why have hydrogen-based or ammonia-based energy infrastructure? Why not use the excess electricity to make fertilizer and use that to grow crops?
Are the factories that make hydrogen so much cheaper than the factories that make fertilizer that when you build enough factories to make use of all the excess electricity (meaning they’re idle 80% of the time), the cost of having those factories make fertilizer instead of hydrogen is greater than the cost of building and maintaining the entire infrastructure for using hydrogen or ammonia as energy storage/fuel?
Is that as efficient to produce from excess energy? Especially energy that might be highly variable. Hydrogen production can be turned on/off instantaneously and only need a fairly small amount of buffer space for it if you are turning it into something else.
It could be not far away. That’s the reason we see such a big uptick in funding and publicity for basically every right-wing moron on the planet fighting against (among other stuff) renewables.
It’s more the other way around. Globally you can look up the production capacities to see that renewables have already won. Locally, especially in western countries, this reality is fought very hard at the moment with every right-wing populist and their grandma screaming loudly about those evil wind turbines and ugly solar panels (and don’t let me even start with the more fringe indiots –or not so fringe anymore since they got coopted by the far-right, too– telling all kind of insane stories about solar is heating of the planet and wind power is causing extreme weather patterns…) and well-connected industry lobbies even covertly paying alleged environmentalists and all those other nimbys to block green energy.
Sure… tell me how the German government is not destroying the renewable upbuild that was finally on track, while blocking needed battery capacitites and building new fossil fuels plans.
Sorry to tell you, but it’s indeed universal (because the people spending money to push that insanity are operating globally). In most other countries they are just more subtle and not loudly screaming about all the good work they do for their fossil fuel linked donors.
Germany is still progressing, just at a lower speed. I agree that’s not good, but it is nothing compared to how Trump has prevented the building of new Wind turbines that were billion dollar projects, and had ZERO federal spending. He just does it out of spite.
I bet the German government doesn’t prevent privately funded or state projects. They may not be the best on renewables, but they are not insane like the situation is in USA.
I bet the German government doesn’t prevent privately funded or state projects.
Jokes on you. They are planning to eliminate all feed-in compensation while also letting the grid providers (all well-connected or subsidiaries of fossil-fuel heavy power companies) freely decide if capacities of the grid are sufficient to connect renewables, but of course with zero incentive to improve capacities. So in short: nobody will lend you money for your private renewable project anymore as no matter your business plan a third party benefiting from your failure has total control over just cutting you off from the neccessary infrastructure.
Again: works just as well. Just so much quieter that that Trump idiocy.
They also don’t need to be insane, just corrupt and bought by the fossil fuel industry. In fact the ex-CEO of the grid provider with the most impressive track record of burying needed battery storage projects in red tape for years and years, was rewarded for this with a job as Minister of Economy and Energy and is busy rewrting the laws to cement Germany’s fossil fuel dependence for decades to come (for example: they changed the planning rules regarding energy security requirements with totally made-up bullshit numbers, so nothing but gas-peakers are sufficient as “storage”).
Before using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, you need to ensure that no fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity. Otherwise you would increase carbon emissions, not reduce them. I don’t see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.
Share of electricity generation from low-carbon sources
Renewables include solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal, wave, and tidal.
It seems like hydropower is doing a lot of lifting across the developing world. Spots like Ethiopia, Paraguay, and Brazil are all heavily dependent on hydroelectricity to power major municipalities and industrial centers.
As climate change impacts the volume and flow of major waterways, I’m a little worried how that ends up.
United States: 43%
That really shocked me. And, I gotta say, these numbers look deeply suspicious. I work in the Houston energy sector, and I can say we’re not slowing down development of the Permian Basin. US fossil fuel exports are only going up. Then there’s the big investment in data center fossil fuel plants that doesn’t seem to be in the forecasts.
That’s not to say we’re also not building out enormous new solar and wind facilities, even in the belly of the Texas Beast. But the Flint Run plant alone is more than they’re reporting. And that’s assuming Trump doesn’t get his 1.25-gigawatt Terra Energy Center in Alaska.
And, I gotta say, these numbers look deeply suspicious. I work in the Houston energy sector, and I can say we’re not slowing down development of the Permian Basin.
I think liquid hydrocarbons are much more likely to be used directly in combustion engines, rather than electricity generation. So even as oil production increases, the percentage of electricity coming from high carbon sources might still be dropping, while the primary energy numbers might go the other way.
But if you look at primary energy mix, fossil fuels are much, much higher percentage: something like 16.8% low carbon (renewable + hydro + nuclear), 35.0% gas, 38.8% oil, 9.3% coal.
I’m gonna be a bit nit-picky here. You linked the “Low-carbon” source, which includes nuclear energy. Granted, long discussions can be had, whether nuclear counts as green energy, but besides that, I’d argue that nuclear should not be used to generate hydrogen - if at all it should be used the same as hydrogen would be used: to bridge gaps when not enough renewable energy is available.
If you switch to renewables-only in the source just above that graph, the world is, according to latest data (2025), at 33.76% electricity generation from renewables. So when it comes to share of electricity generation with renewables we’re on par with sometime around the 1950s. If you switch that graph to absolute generation and fossil fuels, you can see that electricity generation from fossil fuels has not yet started to decline.
On top of all that, this is electricity generation, not primary energy use. For primary energy use we’re currently at 8.59% world-wide.
I’m not saying this to make us give in, I’m just saying that there is a long way to go - 100 years are (hopefully) a bit too much, but it’s definitely not around the corner. And as an aside maybe also highlight that reductions in (primary) energy consumption are as important as ever.
This statistic includes nuclear and bioenergy. I’m unsure about bioenergy, but nuclear certainly can not qualify as green. Unless you mean green glowing stuff, like nuclear waste is often depicted.
Also 100years are a very long time
Yes and humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.
In terms of carbon emissions, it’s pretty lean. You’re only really talking about the cost of concrete and of harvesting uranium fuel, which is negligible beside the cost of coal or natural gas.
humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.
The turnover to wind and solar has been genuinely shocking in its rapidity. Market forces are one hell of a drug.
They’re probably using green to mean “not CO2 producing” given the context of the discussion being about CO2 emissions. As far as I’m aware nuclear energy fits that criteria.
They’re probably using green to mean “not CO2 producing” given the context of the discussion being about CO2 emissions
I understand the argument and yes CO2 emissions are indeed lower. However, only marketing/sales/lobbyists/politicians would use that argument alone to sell it as green energy. It’s not green, it’s not environment friendly, it’s not renewable.
Actually one could argue that it is extremely environment friendly, seeing as Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary.
True, but with a constant 100% plus generation from renewable, there obviously wouldn’t be any fossil fuel burned to generate electricity. Here we are already at 80% of our total yearly electricity generated by renewables.
When that reaches 100%, it can be done by utilizing surplus at peaks to generate hydrogen, exactly to completely prevent any use of fossil fuels.
I don’t see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.
100 years is a very long time, back in the 70’s it was considered a lofty goal to achieve even 10%, and now we are at 80!!
I don’t think you have historical perspective.
Personally I think within another decade we will surpass 100% here, and have the ability to export a lot of surplus renewable energy.
I was also mostly thinking about civilized countries, not so much for instance USA.
“here” is nice and good, but “here” is not global. This is not about a local incident. It’s easy to have “too much green energy” in one place, just build a single wind turbine and don’t connect it to a grid. But using that excess power to produce an inefficient expensive fuel in one part of the world doesn’t solve the global energy- and emmission- problem. It’s cheaper and more efficient to transport energy all over the world and shut down local fossil fuel power plants than to produce hydrogen, ship that all over the world and burn that.
It’s not as easy to ship electricity around as you might think. Electricity attenuates over distance, and when green sources are far from population centers, that effect is higher. To use electricity, you have to be physically tied to the power grid, or carry batteries. Those are heavy and require a bunch of heavy metals sourced from questionable places.
Hydrogen is more portable and transferable than electricity. It can be used for off-grid purposes, like vehicles and wherever you’d use propane now. And its efficiency compared to electricity doesn’t really matter if you’re producing it using waste voltage from surplus.
Both have their places. Converting away from fossil fuels isnt going to have a monolithic solution.
This was a peak situation, but long term with even more renewable energy, that’s when Hydrogen becomes relevant.
And when we have enough surplus production of electricity to produce cheap hydrogen the sky is the limit. Because cheap hydrogen can replace oil and gas everywhere.
We are not there yet, but I think it’s not too far away.
And we are far from alone in this, all European countries are working towards more renewables. Which is why I think the above will become reality soon. Hydrogen is wasteful and cost a lot of electricity to make, but when electricity becomes plentiful enough that renewable production goes to waste, that’s when hydrogen becomes really really relevant, and can replace everything that can’t be replaced with electricity and batteries.
doesn’t hydrogen have way worse round-trip efficiency than batteries, even before things like embrittlement? i’ve heard as low as 45%, with the rest just becoming heat.
Yes but how will the oil companies take their unnecessary cut if you use batteries?
why do you think lego is so expensive now
Because it has strong marketing and a cult-like fan base.
Hydrogen has other uses too. Currently we use gas which results in carbon emissions. But with cheap enough energy, you can get hydrogen from water. There is also an option to not emit the carbon when using gas, but you get less hydrogen for the same input so no one is going to do that at scale.
Another major use for hydrogen is the haber-bosch process.
most hydrogen is produced from natural gas unfortunately :(
It is currently. But cheap renewable energy makes renewable hydrogen a more viable option.
it’s currently about 5x the cost to produce so i think some other incentives are probably needed as well…
Currently, but a large part of that cost is due to energy prices. If you have cheaper energy, or periods of excess energy that bring the cost down to/near zero, that is what brings down the cost.
if only we actually got there… here the prices have been climbing more and more the more wind turbines we install because of grid instability.
honestly a great pilot area for energy storage.
Variable tariffs are an option here and can give you periods of very cheap, free or even negative cost energy.
That’s why it will never IMO be feasible until we have surplus electric power that it can be made with. Power that would otherwise be wasted.
Yes, but it can be stored where batteries lose power over time. And a lot of the infrastructure doesn’t need to be build but can be converted from natural gas use.
In the end batteries and hydrogen fill two very different gaps. You can use batteries to shift the renewable production peak at noon (thanks solar) to the demand peak in the evening, maybe even flatten fluctuation (in production and demand) over a few days. But they are entirely useless as seasonal long-term storage.
Also plans to produce green hydrogen exist independently. It’s a requirement to decarbonise a lot of industry processes where direct use of electricity doesn’t work. It’s also a raw material in chemical industry.
So if decarbonisation of more than just electricity production is the goal, large scale hydrogen production is a given. As is large scale storage as production from renewable energy will always have seasonal fluctuations. From there having it also double as long-term on-demand stored energy means just scaling up what is already there.
Hydrogen is the smallest atom and literally cannot be contained by any other material in the universe over time. Not to mention the intense refrigeration and pressure requirements.
i don’t remember if you and i spoke about this before but i did talk to someone on here about the fact that hydrogen can’t really be stored for long periods either. whoever it was linked a statement from a german gas company claiming that their existing infrastructure could handle hydrogen without modification, and i remember coming away from that entirely unconvinced.
i’d be happy to be proved wrong but i don’t believe green hydrogen is going to play a big part of the grid. i’m personally hoping for pumped hydro and thermal storage.
Sounds indeed like bullshit. More so as here in Germany there are indeed a lot of projects using natural gas infrastructure for the planned hydrogen transport network. But definitely not without modifications.
Europe seems to disagree, with projects worth more than ten times of those in North America and Asia combined.
Edit:
Here’s the already approved part of Germany’s planned hydrogen core network (new lines, converted lines, opened by 2025):
And an article about one of the earliest segments of 55km opened 1½ years ago, based on 95% pre-existing lines.
And an article (but only available in German) claiming that the planned capacity for 2025 (converted or newly build) is met with new ~525km out of ~9000km by 2032. Of which ~60% will be converted pipelines, 40% new construction.
huh, i thought only japan was betting on hydrogen. i hadn’t heard of expansion here. although that’s more likely because everything we get about germany is how it’s their fault that our electric bill has gone up.
Fun fact: the other big investor in hydrogen pipeline projects is your neighbour to the east… planned to go all the way through the Baltic Sea to Germany.
Also the French energy concept (see: RTE’s (French grid provider) study about energy by 2050) is at its core entirely based on nuclear base load in a renewable/storage system making electrolysis more economical because on top of producing hydrogen with excess renewable power during the day, you then also have a steady production of excess electricity throughout low demand night times.
i still find it strange to build out a technology with such a low efficiency. but with CHP plants it could probably be more economical.
Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It’s not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve “boil water and run a turbine”).
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn’t work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
Ammonia is used for fertiliser and could be used as fuel. About 1/3rd the energy density of petrol and much easier to store than hydrogen.
Probably wouldn’t want to plan to run the grid extensively on it. But if you are just having it to cover rare occasions then it could work well.
Also gotta make a shitload of it for fertiliser production anyway. Cheap excess wind/solar power could make it economically practical.
But at that point why have hydrogen-based or ammonia-based energy infrastructure? Why not use the excess electricity to make fertilizer and use that to grow crops?
Are the factories that make hydrogen so much cheaper than the factories that make fertilizer that when you build enough factories to make use of all the excess electricity (meaning they’re idle 80% of the time), the cost of having those factories make fertilizer instead of hydrogen is greater than the cost of building and maintaining the entire infrastructure for using hydrogen or ammonia as energy storage/fuel?
isn’t methanol better for fuel?
Is that as efficient to produce from excess energy? Especially energy that might be highly variable. Hydrogen production can be turned on/off instantaneously and only need a fairly small amount of buffer space for it if you are turning it into something else.
no, it requires a lot of heat. but on the other hand it binds hydrogen into a more stable form and can be made with captured carbon.
Ammonia requires hydrogen and nitrogen from the air. Both certainly are more stable than hydrogen on its own.
It could be not far away. That’s the reason we see such a big uptick in funding and publicity for basically every right-wing moron on the planet fighting against (among other stuff) renewables.
Local today global tomorrow.
It’s more the other way around. Globally you can look up the production capacities to see that renewables have already won. Locally, especially in western countries, this reality is fought very hard at the moment with every right-wing populist and their grandma screaming loudly about those evil wind turbines and ugly solar panels (and don’t let me even start with the more fringe indiots –or not so fringe anymore since they got coopted by the far-right, too– telling all kind of insane stories about solar is heating of the planet and wind power is causing extreme weather patterns…) and well-connected industry lobbies even covertly paying alleged environmentalists and all those other nimbys to block green energy.
No only in USA.
Sure… tell me how the German government is not destroying the renewable upbuild that was finally on track, while blocking needed battery capacitites and building new fossil fuels plans.
Sorry to tell you, but it’s indeed universal (because the people spending money to push that insanity are operating globally). In most other countries they are just more subtle and not loudly screaming about all the good work they do for their fossil fuel linked donors.
Germany is still progressing, just at a lower speed. I agree that’s not good, but it is nothing compared to how Trump has prevented the building of new Wind turbines that were billion dollar projects, and had ZERO federal spending. He just does it out of spite.
I bet the German government doesn’t prevent privately funded or state projects. They may not be the best on renewables, but they are not insane like the situation is in USA.
Jokes on you. They are planning to eliminate all feed-in compensation while also letting the grid providers (all well-connected or subsidiaries of fossil-fuel heavy power companies) freely decide if capacities of the grid are sufficient to connect renewables, but of course with zero incentive to improve capacities. So in short: nobody will lend you money for your private renewable project anymore as no matter your business plan a third party benefiting from your failure has total control over just cutting you off from the neccessary infrastructure.
Again: works just as well. Just so much quieter that that Trump idiocy.
They also don’t need to be insane, just corrupt and bought by the fossil fuel industry. In fact the ex-CEO of the grid provider with the most impressive track record of burying needed battery storage projects in red tape for years and years, was rewarded for this with a job as Minister of Economy and Energy and is busy rewrting the laws to cement Germany’s fossil fuel dependence for decades to come (for example: they changed the planning rules regarding energy security requirements with totally made-up bullshit numbers, so nothing but gas-peakers are sufficient as “storage”).
That can’t be right???
Strange to hear Germany doing so poorly, even under Merkel Germany was doing just fine on building renewable capacity.
Before using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, you need to ensure that no fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity. Otherwise you would increase carbon emissions, not reduce them. I don’t see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.
The world is currently at 42.6% green electricity. Also 100years are a very long time.
It seems like hydropower is doing a lot of lifting across the developing world. Spots like Ethiopia, Paraguay, and Brazil are all heavily dependent on hydroelectricity to power major municipalities and industrial centers.
As climate change impacts the volume and flow of major waterways, I’m a little worried how that ends up.
That really shocked me. And, I gotta say, these numbers look deeply suspicious. I work in the Houston energy sector, and I can say we’re not slowing down development of the Permian Basin. US fossil fuel exports are only going up. Then there’s the big investment in data center fossil fuel plants that doesn’t seem to be in the forecasts.
That’s not to say we’re also not building out enormous new solar and wind facilities, even in the belly of the Texas Beast. But the Flint Run plant alone is more than they’re reporting. And that’s assuming Trump doesn’t get his 1.25-gigawatt Terra Energy Center in Alaska.
I think liquid hydrocarbons are much more likely to be used directly in combustion engines, rather than electricity generation. So even as oil production increases, the percentage of electricity coming from high carbon sources might still be dropping, while the primary energy numbers might go the other way.
So for our electricity mix in 2025, we reached 17.4% nuclear, 10.3% wind, 8.6% solar, 5.4% hydro, 1.0% bioenergy.
But if you look at primary energy mix, fossil fuels are much, much higher percentage: something like 16.8% low carbon (renewable + hydro + nuclear), 35.0% gas, 38.8% oil, 9.3% coal.
Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for clarifying.
I’m gonna be a bit nit-picky here. You linked the “Low-carbon” source, which includes nuclear energy. Granted, long discussions can be had, whether nuclear counts as green energy, but besides that, I’d argue that nuclear should not be used to generate hydrogen - if at all it should be used the same as hydrogen would be used: to bridge gaps when not enough renewable energy is available.
If you switch to renewables-only in the source just above that graph, the world is, according to latest data (2025), at 33.76% electricity generation from renewables. So when it comes to share of electricity generation with renewables we’re on par with sometime around the 1950s. If you switch that graph to absolute generation and fossil fuels, you can see that electricity generation from fossil fuels has not yet started to decline.
On top of all that, this is electricity generation, not primary energy use. For primary energy use we’re currently at 8.59% world-wide.
I’m not saying this to make us give in, I’m just saying that there is a long way to go - 100 years are (hopefully) a bit too much, but it’s definitely not around the corner. And as an aside maybe also highlight that reductions in (primary) energy consumption are as important as ever.
This statistic includes nuclear and bioenergy. I’m unsure about bioenergy, but nuclear certainly can not qualify as green. Unless you mean green glowing stuff, like nuclear waste is often depicted.
Yes and humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.
In terms of carbon emissions, it’s pretty lean. You’re only really talking about the cost of concrete and of harvesting uranium fuel, which is negligible beside the cost of coal or natural gas.
The turnover to wind and solar has been genuinely shocking in its rapidity. Market forces are one hell of a drug.
They’re probably using green to mean “not CO2 producing” given the context of the discussion being about CO2 emissions. As far as I’m aware nuclear energy fits that criteria.
I understand the argument and yes CO2 emissions are indeed lower. However, only marketing/sales/lobbyists/politicians would use that argument alone to sell it as green energy. It’s not green, it’s not environment friendly, it’s not renewable.
Actually one could argue that it is extremely environment friendly, seeing as Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary.
True, but with a constant 100% plus generation from renewable, there obviously wouldn’t be any fossil fuel burned to generate electricity. Here we are already at 80% of our total yearly electricity generated by renewables.
When that reaches 100%, it can be done by utilizing surplus at peaks to generate hydrogen, exactly to completely prevent any use of fossil fuels.
100 years is a very long time, back in the 70’s it was considered a lofty goal to achieve even 10%, and now we are at 80!!
I don’t think you have historical perspective.
Personally I think within another decade we will surpass 100% here, and have the ability to export a lot of surplus renewable energy.
I was also mostly thinking about civilized countries, not so much for instance USA.
“here” is nice and good, but “here” is not global. This is not about a local incident. It’s easy to have “too much green energy” in one place, just build a single wind turbine and don’t connect it to a grid. But using that excess power to produce an inefficient expensive fuel in one part of the world doesn’t solve the global energy- and emmission- problem. It’s cheaper and more efficient to transport energy all over the world and shut down local fossil fuel power plants than to produce hydrogen, ship that all over the world and burn that.
It’s not as easy to ship electricity around as you might think. Electricity attenuates over distance, and when green sources are far from population centers, that effect is higher. To use electricity, you have to be physically tied to the power grid, or carry batteries. Those are heavy and require a bunch of heavy metals sourced from questionable places.
Hydrogen is more portable and transferable than electricity. It can be used for off-grid purposes, like vehicles and wherever you’d use propane now. And its efficiency compared to electricity doesn’t really matter if you’re producing it using waste voltage from surplus.
Both have their places. Converting away from fossil fuels isnt going to have a monolithic solution.
Exactly.