“The most dumb thing' for energy storage: Hydrogen

Germany, the United States, the UK, the EU, and many other countries are looking toward hydrogen to be a clean miracle fuel to power the future. It sounds good at first, but hydrogen has a bunch of problems - one of which is that it’s highly inefficient. “The most dumb thing I could possibly imagine for energy storage” Elon Musk called it. I agree.

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[cliper]

"Communication that sets out a vision for a roadmap to create a framework for an alliance that will develop an agenda" is my new favourite sentence.

[justinahole]

I though hydrogen would be a great energy storage media when I was an undergrad...by the time I graduated, I understood that the energy density just isn't there. That was 35 years ago. It's nuts that people are still talking about this.

[hanshaag]

The German principle. You buy a new coat and use the fabric to patch the holes in the old one.

[andres]

Sabine, one question. Did you checked the storage of hydrogen as ammonia and the use of ammonia as fuel? Toyota recently developed a ammonia based engine.

[Tony-omkr]

I worked in a US rocket propulsion company for 30+ years. I was only peripherally involved in the LOX/LH2 rocket engines (SSME) and Scramjets (X30 NASP). The plumbing/valves/tanks for handling liquid or gaseous H2 under high pressure is expensive! Special (expensive) alloys are required to mitigate hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen leakage is an issue due to the small size of the molecule and requires specialized seal designs. High pressure storage tanks are not cheap and heavy if fiber-epoxy composite over wrapped designs aren't used. Composite tanks also have issues in civilian use; they have a limited cycle life. Also, as Sabine mentioned, GH2 is explosive with air in 5% to 95% mixtures which will lead to exciting RUDs if accidents occur. What's not to love with hydrogen?

[knutritter]

Former German PhD student of chemistry here: I had performed research in the area of hydrogen storage. Apart from the issues mentioned like hydrogen embrittlement it's about storage. Even if we kept it pressurized the amount of energy stored per liter volume would still be low. So we could liquify it to increase the energy density... BUT: We would have to actively cool it all the time to keep it a liquid! That would f*** up the efficiency even more. 😉

[spurius]

'The issue with these strategies is that they're 99% words.'

That's fucking brilliant.

[SkinPeeleR]

I worked in a company making burners for all kind of heating systems.
They are testing with H2. They can make a working system with addition of 28% natural gas or else you'll have a bang with start up.
Further, the chances of leakage is high because of the atom it's size. Producing is still expensive.
I think it's saver to drink the cooling water of nuclear plants than having H2 storage throughout the country and a network through town.

[AndrewHincksMusic]

The most intelligent commentator I've come across. I discovered Sabine a few months ago and her output of content amazes me. To put out a well researched video like this every day that is to the point and well researched is quite a feat. That really shows how smart she is. Hats off to her... Also I love her sense of humour. That makes it even better.

[diyeana]

When it sounds too good to be true, most likely someone is getting rich in the background.

[kubhlaikhan]

My idea is to store energy as N2O so that we can all have a good laugh.

[ontopoftheroof]

"Just have a think" had a similar topic recently about the idiocy of setting fire to hydrogen, the "Hydrogen Ladder", and an interview with Paul Martin.

[aubnuwelja]

"Under pressure", thank you for that. Your services are appreciated.

[samuelandmarikaadams]

I work for a company which is providing inverters for electrolizers to a lot of these up and coming hydrogen plants in Denmark and Germany. I dont have all the information but I have not heard that the idea is to produce electricity with this hydrogen. The hydrogen produced will be used in the steel industry, for example, in place of natural gas.
I find it hard to believe that any engineers and scientists giving inputnto policy makers are seriously considering generating electricity from the stored hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is too low, especially when energy is such an expensive comodity.

[hummesse]

Everything she said is correct. I used to work in this space as well, although in battery storage, but adjacent and helping out with so called power-to-X (PtX). It just does not make sense to make hydrogen for storage and then converting it back. In fact no energy storage technology is cheap enough for this. But! There is a big but! Many, many products and services require a lot of power to make and are easy to store.

Ammonium: NH3 is the one that comes closest to hydrogen. It can be stored under relatively low pressure in liquid form. It is toxic, but has been handled in large quantities for many decades. We know how to handle this stuff. It is the main ingredient in fertilizer and right now this is made from splitting hydrogen off from natural gas. If this could be made green, then it could provide a large portion of the buffer needed - orders of magnitude more than batteries. And it is possible to adapt large diesel engines to run on ammonium. It is not as energy dense as diesel, and there is the problem with NOX, but for large ships this is potentially a good option, and batteries would never cut it for this purpose anyway. Same with pure hydrogen, as it is just not possible to store the quantities needed. This is a large chunk of the worlds co2 emissions right there as well.

Steel: Steel is made from oxidized ore which is then blasted with carbon mono oxide - again from natural gas - the oxygen is stripped off the ore and then produces co2. Then the ore is processed using electricity for heating in an arc furnace. The carbon mono oxide could be replaced by hydrogen. And the electricity itself could come from green sources including nuclear btw. This is again a huge chunk of the worlds co2 emissions. Storing hydrogen is difficult, but storing piles of steel is easy.

Hot water storage: In many places in europe at least there is district heating. This requires enormous amounts of energy in the form of hot water. You can build hot water storage that lasts months for two orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. In a city slightly north from where i live called Aalborg they are installing a m^3 hot water storage for that purpose. Assuming a delta T of 10 degrees C, that is 2.3 GWh of storage. That's a lot actually.

My point is that people get too fixated on the X-to-power which will never be viable. The focus should be on storing intermediate products that are very energy intensive. Then we can have all the storage we need.

[duncanwallace]

You have to factor in that the cost of electricity fluctuates massively. It might be only 30% efficient from a physics point of view, but if at times when too much energy is being generated the cost of electricity is 1/6th of what it is in peak times, economically it could still be cheaper to store inefficiently generated hydrogen and sell it when the price goes through the roof. For example where I live off-peak power costs as little as 10c per kWh and peak times as much as 60c +. So even if it cost 30c to store 1 kWh, you could sell that in peak times for 60c and double your money!!!

[SiqueScarface]

In Germany's neighboring country Austria, to be more specific in Zillertal, Tyrol, we had another example of Hydrogen for Hydrogen's sake. The narrow gauge railway Zillertalbahn is considering getting rid of their old diesel powered locomotives and DMUs, and converting to something "clean". And they came up with the idea of a hydrogen powered train. Their vendor for the new units, Stadler of Switzerland, was more or less bluntly saying: "For a 38 km long line in a region with lots of hydroelectric power, we would rather recommend going with battery powered trains, but if the customer wants hydrogen, so be it."

[youericc]

"I'm not sure what these words mean but I'm pretty sure it's why Britain left the EU."
I'm dying 🤣🤣

[MrHerrS]

Some 5 or 7 years ago, I've read a paper by an "organisation" in the UK regarding carbon reduction in HVAC systems for buildings. The idea was to use hydrogen for heating and cooling (don't know anymore what the idea for cooling was exactly). One important and really big paragraph was about reusability of already existing infrastructure. The already existing gas infrastructure in the UK would be ideal, with minor changes, to be used for hydrogen. The conclusion was that this is a great plan and should be pushed forward.
The organisation I mentioned before was btw. funded by all the big players in gas ^^. Someone mentioned that when something sound to good, someone is profiting big. It's not a direct profit, but the big gas companies are very, very concerned about their gas business and they really want their pipe network being used in the future so they can shift their business to rent their pipe(line) infrastructure to the new hydrogen industry or just take over the role of the hydrogen distributor.
I'm not trying to say it's all about big gas, but I bet my ass off, their people knocking on governments door and wanna talk.

[andreasreichwaldt]

Thank you for carefully weighing all the pros and cons of using hydrogen source. I particularly liked the explanation that renewable energies can temporarily generate electric energy for free. It has been well described that hydrogen, unlike electricity, can be stored and transported very easily and cheaply by using infrastructure that is already available.
You could have worked a little more on the part where an outlook on future technologies such as steel production or drive technologies for large vehicles such as ships and aircraft is discussed.

I particularly liked the fact that I, the viewer, could think about what was said and form my own opinion.