Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
JANUARY 3, 2022
By Paul Homewood
The energy study also revealed that hydrogen-fuelled boilers “will never be a cost-effective option”. According to Bloomberg, the average annual running cost for a heat pump stands at £743, compared to £2,784 for a hydrogen boiler.
————————
The Government has produced a landmark green scheme to provide families with a £5,000 grant to buy electric heat pumps for their homes.
But, in a poll of 5,605 Express.co.uk readers, held from December 24 to 30, a staggering 90 percent of voters said they would not buy a heat pump in the next five years, while six percent said they would, and four percent were undecided.
Many readers disagreed with the research produced by The European Consumer Organisation, and insisted heat pumps are a poor energy source.
The study referred to comes from the European Consumer Organisation. Although it says that heat pumps are the cheapest “green option”, they are coy about how much dearer they are than gas boilers!
It is based on four European countries, but below is the analysis for Czech Republic, which is probably the most comparable to the UK:
1758 euro equals £1465, which looks on the side, but is based on a pre-1970 home, which will no doubt be hugely energy inefficient. Presumably Czech winters will be much colder too!
We can untangle it by looking at the heat demand, which is based on 22615 KWh/yr. Given that a gas boiler works at 85% efficiency, this implies gas usage of 26605 KWh:
The average UK home uses about 15000 KWh, I believe, meaning heat demand of 12750 KWh. We can therefore infer heat pump electricity consumption of 5013 KWh – ie an efficiency factor of 2.54.
The costings seem to be based on energy prices as they were before recent rises; for instance, electricity at 184 Euro/MWh. At this level, the heat pump running cost for our average UK home would be £767 a year (close to that Bloomberg figure). However, based on 2020 gas prices of 2.5p/KWh, a gas boiler would only cost £375 a year to run.
This is broadly in line with my calculations in the last year or two.
By the way, despite the rise in gas prices, heat pumps still remain £406 more expensive to run , because electricity prices have also risen in tandem.
But what really took my eye was the cost of running a hydrogen boiler. The above example reckons 4289 Euro, but we can reduce this in line with lower heat demand. Hydrogen consumption should in theory be the same as gas in our UK example, 15000 KWh.
According to the study, the cost of hydrogen is 147 Euro/MWh, or £122. (This assumes electrolysis). This of course is more than four times the cost of natural gas, meaning annual bills would rise from £375 to £1830.
This is something which I have been highlighting for years, but most people are still blissfully unaware of it.
Finally, last year Andrew Montford published a factsheet on hydrogen, which concluded that green hydrogen would cost £190/MWh. If he is right, heating bills will rise much higher still.
The hydrogen honey’s seem to have forgotten that it was tried years ago because of its clean burning. They learned how explosive it could be. The Hindenburg was the last big hydrogen disaster,allowing for hydrogen accidents that still occur in refineries.
One reason methane(natural gas) were cheaper, safer, and much easier to handle hydrogen or water-gas(usually a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) which is made as a reactant in refineries. It once was piped out to customers for heating homes and buildings but was almost as dangerous as hydrogen.
The reason our economy is as safe as it is comes from futuristic thinkers coming up with creative solutions such as all metal airliners instead of zeppelins.
Burned? The cost and risk (Hindenburg) of using elemental hydrogen are notorious. The only sensible thing to do with hydrogen is combine it with nitrogen to make ammonia or combine it with carbon to make hydrocarbons.
Ammonia has a number of advantages.
Ammonia can be stored, and delivered at a much lower cost than hydrogen which must be kept compressed or as a cryogenic liquid. Ammonia’s energy density by volume is nearly double that of liquid hydrogen.
Ammonia has been proposed as a fuel for internal combustion engines. Its high octane rating of 120 and low flame temperature allows the use of high compression ratios without a penalty of high NOx production. Since ammonia contains no carbon, its combustion cannot produce carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, or soot.
Rocket engines have also been fueled by ammonia. The Reaction Motors XLR99 rocket engine that powered the X-15 hypersonic research aircraft used liquid ammonia.
Ammonia can be decomposed into nitrogen and elemental hydrogen, which can be turned into electricity by hydrogen fuel cells.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia
I mentioned combining the hydrogen with carbon. Clearly using carbon from coal or petroleum is an insult to Gaia. Das ist Verboten! Perhaps you could obtain carbon by cooking trash, municipal waste, agricultural by products, forest byproducts, and other organic sources. Arguably it would be “carbon neutral”.
Of course if the idea threatened to work, warmunists would condem it. Remember the knots they have tied themselves into worrying about cow farts, which are purely the product of good carbon from grass.
Incidentally, the ash from that process will have a very high content of metal oxides which will happily suck CO2 from the air to make themselves into carbonates.
Heat pumps are powered by electricity of course, what else?
So in order to be green they need renewable electricity from solar or wind, good luck with that.
Regarding the suitability of heat pumps one has to consider the required applications ;
1. Domestic hot water.
2. Domestic heating.
Naturally domestic hot water is required all year round. But heat pumps can only transfer heat from the heat exchanger located outside down to the outside temperature. In uk winter say 5-10 degC this is an issue when bath water is required at say 65 deg. The make up has to come from an immersion heater. In summer not so much of a problem.
Domestic heating likewise requires water temps of 65 deg to warm a room with piped radiators. Again outside air temps mean little heat is available from the heat exchanger.
Somehow I cannot see heat pumps being anthing but more expensive than gas boilers.
So, during a ‘heatwave’?
Uk heat wave is 25 degC . .
In summer. In winter, no.
I worked in a plant that produced Hydrogen as a byproduct in great amounts. Most of it was vented out of 3 ft. wide stacks into the atmosphere. Some was drawn off and sent to a Hydrogen compressor and the after it was up to pressure it was burned in an acid burner to produce HCL acid.
The first problem encountered was trying to keep this little molecule in the pipes. This gas will leak out of every flange and connection that there is. This caused a build up of gas inside the building and even though there was adequate ventilation pockets of gas would ignite and remove the walls from this building with great regularity. The solution was to insulate and heat trace all of the piping and the equipment and just leave the walls off.
Hydrogen loves to em-brittle all metals it touches. The engineers designing this Hydrogen system thought that Stainless Steel would work for a lot of the sensing lines and instrumentation. Nope these stainless lines would break after time if there was any vibration on them. Due diligence and timely line replacements were the only solution.Forget anything steel in contact as it would crack and fail quicker than the stainless.
Hydrogen has a very low explosive limit and the amount of energy that it takes to get it to light off is also very low. One winter day we had wet snow blowing around and there was a loud thump heard coming from the Hydrogen plant section. When we arrived there to see what had blown up this time we found that 3 ft exhaust stack was merrily burning away with a 20 foot tall by 3 foot blue flame from the Hydrogen vent stream. The static electricity from the wet snow hitting the stack was enough to cause ignition. The engineers had thought that lightning would be a problem and had supplied us with a 6″ steam snuff line to this stack to put out any fires. We were able to put this fire out by applying this steam snuff and then switching the vent supply to a backup stack.
I am sure that all of these useless idiots pushing Hydrogen as the next fuel to replace fossil fuels have NO clue as to what it takes to actually try and use this gas but like everything else they do virtual signaling is better than reality. it will almost be as comical as watching battery banks in electric cars catching on fire as they are charging in parking garages.
That’s a very subtle way of describing something very dramatic! 🤣
Boris- Not sure what kind of plant you worked in, but I worked in petroleum refineries, that produce and use a lot of hydrogen at very high pressures and very high purities. None of what you said bears any resemblance to how things work with hydrogen in an oil refinery. I agree that hydrogen in an enclosed space is a problem. However, hydrogen is very light so will not “pocket” as you describe it. Due to its low molecular weight in will disperse very quickly if given a chance. It does not cause embrittlement of the piping as you describe. Keeping leaks to a minimum is not a problem either.
Tom, you were working with proper materials and proper (for H2) design. I suspect Boris was dealing with a bodged together plant. You need to have venting to ensure the H2 can rise, most fuel vapors sink. Iron based pipe is always problematic, most refinery piping uses special alloys with as little iron as possible, or completely non-ferrous alloys. As far as keeping leaks to a minimum, isn’t that giving away the game? In other fluid work, you would say stopping the leaks is not a problem. Only with hydrogen (and perhaps helium) do you accept that you cannot stop the pipes from leaking.
It was a Caustic and Chlorine plant that had Hydrogen production as a byproduct of the electrolysis of Salt and water. The concentration of Hydrogen in that part of the plant was around 95% with the rest taken by water vapor. All of the main piping in that part of the plant for the Hydrogen was FRP (fiberglass reinforced pipe) pipe as most of it was at low pressure. The Hydrogen were using was very wet in all of the processes.
Combining the Hydrogen and the Chlorine in an uncontrolled manner caused a massive explosion which ripped apart two of the 180 ft long concrete “Cells” where the electrolysis process was done. A Vacuum instrument failed to register the proper vacuum inside these cells and the control valve went wide open to the point that the two gasses combined.
Citing the Hindenburg as a reason not to use hydrogen is absurd.
how warm do heat pumps make a home? is it drafty? I like my house nice and warm, using natural gas. using electricity for heating sounds like it keeps you warm enough not to be miserable but not very satisfying.
I didn’t know anyone was considering hydrogen as fuel for boilers. Even electric resistance heating would be more efficient than using the electricity to make hydrogen, then converting it back into heat. But they make heat-pump water heaters which could easily extract heat from the outside air and utilize the radiators and piping that are already in most British houses. I suspect that the most efficient solution would be to leave the gas boilers as is and simply apply external insulation (with a few other changes like recovery ventilators and optimized refrigerators to make insulated houses bearable in the summer) to the houses themselves. Gadgets like heat pumps and solar panels have a very limited lifespan while properly installed insulation can last indefinitely.
The thought of using heat pumps in northern Europe strikes me as sheer insanity. They don’t work particularly well in the mid-Atlantic states in the US. Widespread implementation significantly north of that does not seem wise.