Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Australian Federal Government has expedited approval for a $53 billion project and the devastation of 78 Sq KM of wilderness, to produce green hydrogen for an export market which does not exist. All to save the planet.
Green giants: the massive projects that could make Australia a clean energy superpower
Sat 14 Nov 2020 06.00 AEDT
The Asian Renewable Energy Hub would have an energy content equivalent to 40% of Australia’s overall electricity generation
by Adam Morton
Sat 14 Nov 2020 06.00 AEDTCalled the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, its size is difficult to conceptualise. If built in full, there will be 1,600 giant wind turbines and a 78 sq km array of solar panels a couple of hundred kilometres east of Port Hedland in the Pilbara.
This solar-wind hybrid power plant would have a capacity of 26 gigawatts, more than Australia’s entire coal power fleet. The hub’s backers say the daytime sun and nightly winds blowing in from the Indian Ocean are perfectly calibrated to provide a near constant source of emissions-free energy around the clock.
Most of it will be used to run 14GW of electrolysers that will convert desalinated seawater into “green hydrogen” – a form of energy that analysts expect to be in increasing demand as a replacement for fossil fuels in the years and decades ahead.
Though still five years away from construction, the hub vaulted closer to reality in recent weeks after the federal government granted it major project status – a designation that should smooth the approval processes – and the Western Australian government greenlit its first stage.
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But most of the energy created will be exported. Because hydrogen condenses from a gas into a liquid only at very low temperatures (about -250C), it will be shipped as green ammonia, which is safer to transport and created by blending hydrogen with nitrogen.
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One of the questions hanging over the project will be its cost, but Star of the South maintains it makes economic sense – that the technology is becoming cheaper and the generation patterns of offshore wind will complement, rather than compete with, onshore renewables. It is seeking environmental approval from the Victorian government and waiting on the commonwealth to complete a legal framework for offshore clean energy developments, but has a goal of starting to generate by 2025.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/14/green-giants-the-massive-projects-that-could-make-australia-a-clean-energy-superpower
My question – if the “technology is becoming cheaper”, and the market is not expected to exist until 2035, why jump the gun? Why not wait a few years, until the costs come down even further?
The Asian Renewable Energy Hub plan has undergone several radical transformations since its inception. The original idea was an undersea cable to Asia, but this idea seems to have quietly died. Then it briefly morphed into a green hydrogen export facility but now seems to have evolved into a green ammonia production and export facility.
A 2017 CSIRO study suggested round trip efficiency for green electricity to hydrogen to ammonia and back to electricity is 25 – 39%, which means up to 75% of the already hideously expensive renewable electricity is lost just in the conversion process, without even considering shipping and distribution costs.
Ammonia production from fossil fuel sourced hydrogen is a mature industrial process, so you would have to be pretty optimistic to expect significant performance gains from that part of the process.
Any dramatic cost savings will have to come from cost savings in the manufacturing of the solar panels and wind turbines, but there is a limit to how far the price can fall. Wind turbine and solar panel production are very energy intensive industrial processes.
A final straw, somehow the project will need to source vast quantities of water, for washing the solar panels. The dust buildup in the Australian desert has to be seen to be believed. In the dry desert environment static charges build quickly, causing the dust to stick to surfaces. You can’t use unprocessed sea water to wash the panels, because heated brine is corrosive, leaves a residue, and is a very good electrical conductor – short circuits, light obstruction and corroded wiring in one easy package. You can’t use compressed air to clean the panels, because the dust particles are abrasive; compressed air would sand blast the panels. While there is ongoing research into using electrostatic methods to remove the dust, or gently brushing the dust away without water, Chemically pure water remains one of the least damaging cleaning agents.
But in the desert, clean water is a highly constrained resource.
So in addition to desalinating water for hydrogen and ammonia production, the project will need to desalinate vast quantities of water to keep the 78 sq KM of solar panels clean, by giving them a regular wash.
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The dust that’s going to cause problems for the solar panels is not going to be kind to the blades of those 1600 giant wind turbines. Once the leading edges get roughened, efficiency drops off. Deserts are dusty places.
During a real storm it’s only partly dust, much of is sand that blasts the equipment much faster
sounds like the monorail to me, reference the Simpsons. Australian taxpayers sadly footing the bill for this foolishness. We wouldn’t want to wait until things are ready and they actually make sense would we? For example I would use a solar charger for my phone, but the technology isn’t close for making solar power my car – not ready! But hey when it is people will clamour for it.
Fear mongering, wishful thinking, and ‘projects’ derived from them, to keep the promoters extremely wealthy and ‘The People’ so far in debt they can never hope to see the sunshine that powers the bulb in their cave.
What could I do with $53,000,000,000 to help mankind? If nothing else, after extracting my extremely reasonable 10% stipend, I could counter all the bad ideas being presented and forced on ‘The People’, by billionaires.
Rather than gambling billions on a project like this they should start with a very small pilot plant Where I live, we have plenty sea water, nitrogen, wind, and solar but very little demand for ammonia. Another problem is that hydrogen based fuels are not clean burning but rather they give off a greenhouse gas that, molecule per molecule, is a stronger absorber of IR than is CO2. That greenhouse gas is known as H2O.
Ok, so the exportable product of all this is liquid ammonia, which is currently selling at around $500/ton, a decrease from 2019 when it was around $600/ton. It’s already produced in large quantities to make agricultural fertilizers. So whatever ultimate market for hydrogen that exists can already buy pretty much all the liquid ammonia it wants — it just won’t be “green”.
Given that, two questions:
1) how big is the hydrogen-from-liquid-ammonia market today?
2) what will the production cost be for the new green liquid ammonia?
If you can produce liquid ammonia at less than $500/ton, success is almost guaranteed because the world is buying a lot of ammonia. From Wikipedia:
Why would anyone in Asia buy ammonia from Australia when China already produces 55.8 million tonnes of it every year? Especially if the cost is higher.
My spider senses tells me power costs are about to get more expensive. My last quarterly bill was AU$171, ~$0.29/kWh.
Get solar panels and a battery then…
“griff November 16, 2020 at 1:33 am”
What a plank! I don’t own the place I live in, like 97% of others in Australia! But we subsidies those that do.
You should come and spend a few winter months in my part of the world.
It was a cool -11C yesterday morning, the sun did finally come out for a few hours, and the snow looked nice.
Unfortunately batteries are knowing for being nigh on useless once the temperature drops that low, and with about 2-3hrs per day of useful sunshine for the 6 months of winter (won’t speak about what happens when it’s snowing hard or plain dark or dull!), the chances of getting batteries to produce anything are close to zero.
(hey just try to start a diesel engine from cold at -35C, just to see how it goes!)
Ah but Griff knows it all, unless you live close to the equator (where it’s nice and warm) most solar is crap for 1/2 the 12 months, then you don’t need the surplus power in summer .
I just wish the people spouting bollox about climate change from comfy offices would come and see how the world really works. (London/Oslo/Stockholm are full of comfy offices!)
My daughter lives on a river boat in the UK, which is powered by a solar panel.
During winter months, she reaches stages of paranoia if you so much as turn on lighting, and computers, never mind the (230V) invertor.
+
When it came to replacing the (deep cycle) batteries in the boat last year, it cost an arm and a leg.
hey presto, when she needs to charge the batteries properly, she turns on the diesel engine and lets it run for a couple of hours.
Yep those “green energy” con men sure as anything have never had to practice what they preach, – thats’s for others!
“1,600 giant wind turbines and a 78 sq km array of solar panels a couple of hundred kilometres east of Port Hedland in the Pilbara.”
Good luck with that, 200 km east of Pt Headland would place it right in the area known as “cyclone alley”
uh. maddening. Billions that could, if anything, speed up the development of fusion. or just don’t spend it you corrupt jerks.
Heaven forbid! I’ve never heard of such nonsense. Even if you only have had a primary school level of science education, you must know how dangerous hydrogen is. And I cannot believe you would be able to plant a huge, unreliable wind farm in shore from Port Hedland = it is not a desert there, but a mixture of bed-rock types ranging from granite to basalt and everything in between. Salt is easily obtained from the salt pans near Dampier, and temperatures drop below freezing overnight in the dry.
It’s the thought that counts….and sufficiently lack of due diligence.