Great video from
Sabine Hossenfelder (a German theoretical physicist)
about the practicality of hydrogen fuel cells. Spoiler: wildly impractical. I'd be investing in something else, like producing biofuels.
Hydrogen Will Not Save Us. Here's Why. https://youtu.be/Zklo4Z1SqkE
@jasonetheridge
That was an interesting watch and the subtitles are very well done (otherwise I couldn't watch it).
That aside, I believe the future is in electric vehicles. But... hydrogen can still be used for transport of energy. My country is currently preparing hydrogen transport pipes for the wind farms in the North Sea, because electric cables would lose a lot of power over vast distances.
Once the hydrogen reaches the land it'll go to power plants which then can utilize the hydrogen far more efficiently than individual little transport vehicles could. Then it could dish out the power in the form of electricity.
I wish this video would've touched upon that, because it'd be fairly green energy. We already have the wind farms, we already have the pipes, we just need to add an electricity-to-hydrogen thingy near the wind farms, transport the hydrogen over, and then put them in power plan ts. I wonder what Sabine's opinion about this would be.
I also wonder how hydrogen could be utilized as a 'battery' for the excess of solar and wind power on some days that would just get lost otherwise.
Next to hydrogen I would consider nuclear energy to be the best option.
@trinsec That's an application I'd certainly never heard of. It's a real shame she didn't cover that usage, and I'd likewise very much like to know her opinion as to its practicality.
Is your country's hydrogen pipes a done deal being constructed now, or is it more of a concept? I'm surprised that power via high voltage power lines is that lossy; we transport power in Australia over vast distances using power lines. Maybe a colder climate makes it less viable. Then again, I don't know how efficient it is, though I thought the whole point of high voltage (and zero current) was that effectively no power/heat was lost.
Storing excess power locally as hydrogen does seem like an obvious application once its pointed out; you'd need a very, very large storage area (given ~32 kWh per litre, you'd need to store a LOT to make it viable). That seems to be the only downside: the sheer volume. You could probably store more at higher pressure, though the higher the pressure, the more the engineering problem of the containing vessel.
In Australia, we're focusing on pumped hydro as a way of storing excess power, where they're not using batteries. Which works fine, as long as you've got a nice, big dam handy.
Nuclear does seem to be the obvious solution, though it has its downsides. Depends how serious we are about really combatting climate change, I guess!
@trinsec I hadn't put together the utter flatness of the Netherlands and how that would make pumped hydro impossible. :)
Regarding modular nuclear reactors, the primary reason they're a good idea is that nuclear plants have previously been bespoke, making regulatory approval a nightmare (has to be done fresh every time). With a modular, smaller design, you get the tick of approval from regulators, and then you mass produce them.
I'm guessing that biofuels will eventually be producible at scale, which are carbon neutral and will work in current internal combustion engines. Electric cars are great, but until we get a different battery technology, producing enough batteries given the raw materials required is going to be a problem. Not to discount hydrogen, but as Sabine pointed out, there are some real limitations.
@jasonetheridge
The pipes seem to be a done deal as they were used in gas extraction in the ocean before, I believe. We already have the infrastructure, we just need to repurpose them.
I think there'll always be some sort of electricity power loss over vast distances, not entirely sure the details. I merely watched a documentary/news on TV about what we're going to do with those old gas extraction plants. I think not just wind power but also ocean current power would be utilized.
Pumped hydro would be kind of impossible here in The Netherlands, we can't have dams.. after all where would we have the height difference? ;) But we have plenty of ocean and water around us and we already have wind parks.
And with regards to nuclear plants, I understand there are blueprints for smaller plants that can power a few cities at the same time. When one goes down, it's less of a danger than one huge plant. They would be a bit faster to build too and easier to maintain. I hope that it'll be an improvement and easier to build so that it can be deployed much easier and faster.