Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient
Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient
Norway's Photoncycle has come up with a solution for storing solar energy captured in summer to be used in winter — with solid hydrogen.
@ooli tl/Dr "Photoncycle
Brandtzaeg holds up a chalk-looking substance: “With this, you can store electricity 20 times as densely as in a lithium battery.”“We're locking up the hydrogen molecules in a solid to basically fix them. We're using a reversible, high-temperature fuel cell, so we're assisting a fuel cell which both can produce hydrogen and electricity in the same cell,” he says.
That means no need to cool the hydrogen down, making it non-flammable and giving it a higher density than an ion-lithium battery"
I wonder what's the volumetric energy density, historically that has been a bigger issue than gravimetric energy density.
Good question, this article is pretty fluffy, not a lot of hard data. Reads kind of like a fluffed up press release honestly.
The article is light on details, but it claims they're storing the hydrogen as a solid - not as a gas. Solids are generally about a thousand times more compact than a gas.
That's hardly a revolutionary thing - there are hydrogen powered cars on the road and those don't use hydrogen as a gas either. Those cars don't make much sense compared to lithium, but mostly only because there's almost nowhere in the world you buy hydrogen for your car. That's not an issue if you're producing your own hydrogen at home.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: most new hydrogen technology is snake oil.
Its main source right now is as a byproduct to petrochemical processing, so a lot of the motivation behind it is really about maintaining these production lines, rather than "going green".
Some things do require hydrogen, eg science applications. Hydrogen can be made using green electricity, but the energy cost is incredibly high. In order to fulfill just the things that require hydrogen, where there is no other alternative, we would need 3x the global renewable capacity solely dedicated to hydrogen production. If we start adding mass transport into that mix, or things like this hydrogen heating system, then we're only exacerbating the problem.
We need our renewable electricity to power things that already use electricity. We don't have enough capacity to be pouring it away into all the potential uses for hydrogen - which are often far less efficient. You lose so much energy creating hydrogen (as well as losses due to leaks) that you may as well just power it with electricity directly.
There could not have put up a bigger sign saying, "I didn't bother to read the article."
Otherwise I don't disagree with most of what you're claiming. But most of the problems you posed do not even apply to this relatively new system.
Yet in some places there’s an excess of wind production at times and it’s economically viable to throw it into hydrogen and ammonia production. Do you think Maersk is designing ammonia powered ships for nothing?
https://hydrogenisland.dk/en https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2021/02/23/maersk-backs-plan-to-build-europe-largest-green-ammonia-facility
Production and consumption are two different things. We need more green hydrogen production (currently at 0.1% of all hydrogen production), and we need to heavily tax black and brown hydrogen to balance the environmental cost against the low price of dirty production.
With hydrogen consumption, we already have a significant demand for scientific and other uses that have no alternative. This currently relies on black and brown hydrogen, but will eventually need to be fulfilled by green hydrogen. If we throw anything and everything that could use hydrogen on top of that, then we'll be using fossil fuels for even longer while we build enough renewable generation capacity for it all to be provided by green hydrogen.
Also, the vast majority use scenarios proposed for hydrogen could be fulfilled directly by electricity at a much greater overall efficiency. Maybe hydrogen would be cheaper right now, while it's all produced by petrochemicals, but when you factor in the cost of green hydrogen the long term projections simply do not work.
Do you think Maersk is designing ammonia powered ships for nothing?
I think Maersk is designing ammonia powered ships because they're not far removed from conventional ICE's, which they're already proficient in. They're less concerned with what is the best solution overall, but which is the most profitable to them right now.
This is anti-hydrogen propaganda. It is basically a marketing spiel for the battery industry. In reality, hydrogen is going to power nearly all transportation, mainly because batteries are not a sustainable solution.
And the notion that we can't build enough renewable energy capacity is a classic climate change denial argument. People who say this are unknowingly (or sometimes knowingly) trying to get everyone back onto fossil fuels.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. Well done.
Absolutely, I see no problem with using excess energy to produce hydrogen or other stuff. Maybe it's arguably better to put that into battery storage or something, but it takes time to build all of that, and diversity isn't a bad thing in most cases.
Like I said, we do need hydrogen for some things - what I'm saying is that we should be focusing on using it for things that have no other option, rather than trying to grow the hydrogen consumption market by moving anything that can be over to it, regardless of whether or not that is a good idea. Particularly if we're basing long term predictions on the current rates of hydrogen production, primarily black hydrogen ie produced from petrochemicals, which would be expected to decline and rise in price alongside a decline in petrochemical use.
And where did I say we can't build enough renewable capacity? I said we would need at least 3x the current renewable capacity dedicated to producing hydrogen to meet our current demand with green hydrogen for things that have no other option. The point I'm making is that running everything on hydrogen will drastically increase this demand, thus delaying the path to net zero as we'll need to use fossil fuels for longer while we build even more renewables than if we were just aiming to meet our current, essential hydrogen demand.
They don't actually say what the efficiency of it is, only that the inneficiency is mainly heat and "70% of home energy needs are for heat" which makes sense in Scandinavia but makes less and less sense the further South you are, plus it massivelly depends on being able to capture and use that heat (can you use it for cooking or only for environmental heating?).
Ultimatelly efficiency and price are what makes almost all the difference.
That said, I hope this turns out to be a proper solution: we definitelly need home energy storage solutions which have much higher energy density and lower cost per mWh that the ones we have now.
Their stated goal is literally to sell these in areas where homes need stored energy from solar to heat their homes.
There is no single system that will solve all our energy problems.
I don't want my house to be self-sufficient. I want my street and neighborhood to be self-sufficient. I already use my neighbors excess solar for reasonable prices.
My city wants to be off natural gas in 2030 and my neighborhood is in the pilot to transition first. I don't necessarily want a huge heat pump attached to my house, and I don't want a huge energy storage solution in my small garden.
There is city land around our housing block with plenty of room for a solution that can serve the whole street. I hope the city is going to propose something like that for us.
Agreed. Not that i dislike people doing stuff by themself on a small scale, but i really wish the focus would be more on larger scale projects and giving people easy access to invest in those.
Dont make everyone get a small solar panel and a tiny battery in their house. Let them invest in something like a large wind turbine in their area and maybe directly reap some of those benefits.
How far way is that city land? When a house has a natural gas explosion, it takes out the house. When you have a hydrogen explosion it potentially could take out the block.
This will hopefully be something like district heating, so a central heat pump that distributes hot water. I don't think hydrogen in on the table. They could add a flow battery to capture more solar energy locally but I don't think that'll be on the cards early on.
But in reality it'll probably be a heat pump per home and a big energy bill for us. Our street was built over 50 years ago when natural gas was plenty and cheap so insulation wasn't much of a concern. We've added insulation under the floors and in the walls, but it's never going to be as well insulated as a modern home.
We already have efficient enough solar panels to make our homes self sufficient, we just can't afford to buy them.
Even if we could, the power supply industry would see it happening, bribe and persuade the government to make it illegal to go off grid (I'm sure their solicitors would come up with "good" reasons that we should be stopped), to save their poor little shareholders.
No way will they go down without a fight. Would I love to go off grid? Sure. If I had a few grand of spending money I could easily do it. But that's just one person, no way they'd let the entire country do it.
This is just storage. The article describes that the battery will use nearby solar panel for electricity.
There's a very good reason you don't want the entire country to go off-grid, and that net-metering is a plague that only serves as a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
A large chunk of electric costs are fixed costs. Wiring, power station upkeep, more wiring, transformers, storm damage, etc. Whether you personally use twice or half as much power as the median household does not matter for this. So every net-metered kWh you send on the grid, everybody ELSE ends up ponying up the infrastructure costs for (nevermind the enormous production-side costs of fighting against the duck curve).
A partial solution to make this fairer is therefore to either tax solar installations, use non-net-metering (with digital meters), or make grid connectivity a fixed cost in the electric bill.For people who are completely off-grid (meaning not only do they not pull any electricity from the grid ever, they are not connected AT ALL and therefore do not incur infrastructure cost on everyone else), it's not as bad but sill not great because the grid operates on economies of scale. So in (semi-)urban areas it's still a net loss for society when someone goes off-grid.
We are 90% there already. In many states, solar panels and usage have extra taxes. Most solar installations are grid tied and electricity sale prices to the company are fixed at a small fraction of their sale prices from those companies. Worse, if power goes out, you can't use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Worse, if power goes out, you can’t use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Your info is a bit out of date. With a single battery you can use nearly any solar system to generate and consume that energy during a grid outage. With a couple brands of gear (such as Enphase IQ8) you don't even need any battery to generate and consume energy from solar during a grid outage. The term to look for for batteryless is called "self grid forming".
Worse, if power goes out, you can't use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Has this... really ever been true? We've had gas powered generators people can plug into their homes for a rather long time now, and they would be doing the exact same thing as solar installations.
It depends on where you are mainly, but I do believe the kit that prevents what you describe, is functionally mandatory to have for solar. Not certain on that, and it definitely still depends on locale, but I haven't seen any without that lockout in a loooonging time.
You know what else is a solid form of hydrogen?
Ice.
I wish they went into more deatil about what kind of solid fuel cell system they're working with - they say they're trapping hydrogen molecules in some kind of molecular lattice, i.e. a crystal of some sort perhaps?
Anyway, I hate patents but understand why you need them... They just seems to slow down progress.
Patents trade public disclosure of technology for a limited time exclusive use of the technology. Without them companies are less likely to publicly disclose any technologies they develop.
We Reddit now.
Always has been. In many ways, Lemmy resembles the Reddit of 10 years ago.
The good Reddit.
I dont see any electrical units in this article
The company's website quotes a storage density of 3.5 kWh/kg and a storage system taking up 3 cubic meters beving able to store 100,000 kWh: https://www.photoncycle.com/technology
I tried to find the patent but it sounds like the application process isn't complete yet.
These are the kind of claims you hear from a startup seeking its next round of funding. I'd take it with a huge grain of salt.
I'd take it with an amount of salt resembling the Dead Sea. This is absolutely fake.
the numbers do seem absurdly high. That's 5 times higher energy density than the current state-of-the-art
This is great and a step in the right direction, roll on self-sufficient streets, villages, and towns.
yeah, some of us are way behind on infrastructure. For example, here it's normal to see 270v on the powerline, instead of the subposed 230v. And it's because the grid isn't designed to handle panels at any kind of real scale yet.