From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
It’s only taken these so-called experts two decades to work this out!
Britain must set up a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves to guard against the risk of blackouts under the net zero shift, according to the country’s premier science body.
The Royal Society has said 900 caverns filled with hydrogen will be needed to ensure the UK can keep the nation’s lights on during periods of low wind and sunshine.
he proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.
The report is perhaps the starkest warning yet of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
It warns: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated.
“Large-scale energy storage is essential to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine, particularly long-term variations in the wind, and to keep the nation’s lights on. Storing hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.”
The report finds that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, roughly equivalent to the energy contained in 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries.
The forecast is based on 37 years of weather data and the assumption that oil and gas power sources will be phased out in the coming decades. 100 TWh of backup power would be enough to power the country for weeks on end if needed but would require huge infrastructure.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, lead author of the report, said: “Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 with the electrification of heat, transport, and industrial processing, as well as increases in the use of air conditioning, economic growth, and changes in population.
“The demand will mainly be met by wind and solar. They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation, but they are volatile and will have to be complemented by large-scale supply from energy storage or other sources.”
Sir Chris said that although nuclear, hydro and other sources were likely to play a role, they are also more expensive than hydrogen storage.
Theoretically all of this may be technically possible, but at what cost.
Apart from the cost of storage (and the distribution network to take hydrogen to and from these salt caverns, electrolysis is a very expensive process. Moreover it wastes a lot of energy. Because of low energy efficiency, you would need 500 TWh of wind power to produce enough hydrogen to make 100 TWh of electricity.
And we now know that offshore wind is a lot more expensive than we were told.
And on top of all of that, we would need to build 100 GW of hydrogen burning power stations for the times when there is little wind.
What we should be building is lunatic asylums to store all the Climate Loons where they cannot harm the public.
“…proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.
While I am still interested in local or regional hydrogen storage as an idea, being threatened by “bouts of mild weather” (in the UK!) doesn’t fill me with confidence.
“Storing hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.”. True, provided you don’t start counting the cost until after you have created the salt caverns and created and stored all the hydrogen and put in place all the infrastructure for using it. Well, you might have to ignore a few other costs too, and maybe you might have to be a bit creative finding costs for other energy sources, but you can definitely end up with hydrogen being the cheapest. ……. But there’s still one teensy weensy little problem: If you don’t install any wind turbines or hydrogen caverns at all, and if you use only coal, gas and/or nuclear from the start, your electricity price will be lower still.
Just declaring that something is the cheapest option, is not proof that the something is economical.
The Stublach caverns cost about £500m to build and equip to store 4.4TWh of methane. So that’s ~£113m per TWh for methane. It seems that hydrogen has to be stored at lower pressure – say 100 bar vs 180bar, so you need 1.8 times as much storage for that, and multiply by 3 for the lower energy density of hydrogen, which is a bit over £600m per TWh. £60bn for the storage is certainly cheaper than batteries – if you can find the sites. Then you have to be able to deliver the hydrogen to them, and take it away for use which is a whole other ball of wax.
The real killer is the cost of the hydrogen and the low round trip efficiency of the whole enterprise. Of course, there will be a deadweight of cushion gas that must be supplied as hydrogen as well – perhaps 50TWh. Storage use is at best really an annual seasonal cycle, which increases the costs. Some storage is actually needed to be held in reserve on top of cushion gas against a really tough year or two. Capacity utilisation of plants becomes a serious issue: you should not make hydrogen by electrolysis at the same time as you are burning it in CCGT, because that is just like burning £50 notes – you will use more energy to produce less hydrogen than you burn, so you would do better not to make the hydrogen and save on the gas burn. So you can only operate when tehre is a surplus to demand. Those surpluses are going to be very variable, depending on how strong the wind is blowing, so the electrolysis capacity is going to suffer from lower rates of utilisation the more you build.
See this chart:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nZM72/1/
Oh, the humanity!
Who remembers that radio broadcast?
Another dumb idea from the climate loons.
The only reason they propose 100 TWh of HYDROGEN storage, is because the world has not the materials to have that storage in grid-scale battery systems.
The storage would be used in case of a lack of wind and solar.
In the UK, the SaudiArabia of wind and bureaucratic bull sh.t, a lack of wind in summer is the usual case, and 60 TWh active likely would not be enough by 2050.
Are they talking about ACTIVE storage? That would be about 60 TWh.
In California, the dysfunctional, LaLa land state, one kg of highly compressed hydrogen gas in a hydrogen car is equivalent to using about one gallon of gasoline in a high-efficiency gasoline car, but it would cost about $10 to $12, if low-cost fossil fuel electricity, at 6 c/kWh, is used for hydrolysis.
If Biden-fantasy Offshore Wind, the electricity cost to the utility would be about $15 c/kWh, plus 2 c/kWh for grid expansion/augmentation and 2 c/kWh for counter/balancing, plus 1 to 2 c/kWh for curtailments, all foisted onto hapless ratepayers and taxpayers. Good grief!
That pressurized tank would need to be made of materials not subject embrittlement, even after 10 years, and not explode, if in an accident. OMG
Addition to comment
THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY WILL BE HIGHLY UNLIKELY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hydrogen-economy
US/UK 56,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-offshore-wind-systems-by-2030-a-total-fantasy
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
There are two studies in the Lancet medical journal about mortality and temperature worldwide. One study in 2015 found that 20 times as many people die from cold weather as from hot weather each year.
The other study in 2021 found that approximately 4.6 million people die from cold weather each year compared to about 500,000 people that die from hot weather each year.
The earth is still in a 2.6 million year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation(4th ice age), in a warmer interglacial period between cold glacial periods. It is so cold that on most of the earth humans couldn’t live without lots of technology in the form of warm clothes, warm houses, warm transportation and warm workplaces.
Why do the environmentalist want to keep 4.6 million people dying from this cold environment the earth is in? Why are politicians and the media doing the same? I guess they are probably unaware of the great number of deaths cold weather causes. The cold air when breathed causes or blood vessels to constrict causing increased strokes and heart attacks in the winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
The Royal Society has become a breakfast club for science fiction writers.
IMO the UK is like a starving person ignoring perfectly good food that’s right out in front of them. All while desperately searching for something marginally edible….
The perfectly good “food” is nuclear energy. It takes a while to prepare before it can be “consumed”, but once prepared, it will deliver lots of energy and will last a long time.
But nope, it seems that the PTB in the UK will continue to scrounge around for energy sources that can’t stave off eventual starvation.
And as for hydrogen – where are they going to get this cheap and easily obtainable gas to fill all these caves?
In the UK we built nearly 17GW of nukes, and have closed all but 5.8GW. The last UK designed reactor was connected in 1988 and is due to close in 2028. The only younger one is a US design due to close in 2035.
Been there, eaten the loaf, forgot to plant next years crop…
SMR, factory built and placed at old coal plant locations, COULD provide the electrical baseload within 10 years IF the government was behind instead of obstructing the progress.
https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/
In the US it is NuScale
https://www.nuscalepower.com/en
The US built over 50 aircraft carriers in a little over 3 years in the 40s, while also manufacturing tens of thousands of tanks and planes and etc. in addition to providing Russa with a massive portion of the steel they used to build their tanks.
Completely replacing ALL baseload electrical generation with SMR factor built capacity by 2050 is easily doable, both in the US and in the UK.
2 years to build the factories and foundries and at the same time recreate the North American infrastructure to provide the raw materials to those locations.
Simultaneously begin prepping the sites and building the most time intensive parts of the plants, especially the containment tanks, etc.
Site properly sized units (for NuScale 4 6 or 12 reactor installations) at existing coal plant sites to utilize existing electrical infrastructure which also already have the rail lines to deliver the reactor vessels to site.
Co-locate industries that can use the excess steam and/or electricity. Ex, Coal gasification if economically feasible since coal delivery systems already are in place and usually natural gas and or oil pipelines are in place.
The only question I have is do we have enough Uranium enriched as ONLY 5%, to provide the heat source? Hillary DID sell much of the US uranium industry to Russia when she was Secretary of State.
“SMR, factory built and placed at old coal plant locations, COULD provide the electrical baseload within 10 years IF the government was behind instead of obstructing the progress.”
As you say. France built 56 reactors between ’74 and ’89. We would need maybe 40 of RR’s offering. RR are the only company undergoing UK type approval at the moment, but the Govt want to hold a beauty contest to see if they should choose another company. Left hand, right hand.
And here in the UK we have the world’s largest stock of plutonium apparently (140t), but we closed the MOX plant that could convert it into fuel for reactors in 2011. So we may choose to just bury it instead.
Are you forgetting something, such as the 20 years of litigation by “environmental” groups?
As per the times of true monarchies, the environmental (any) law suits are only allowed IF allowed by the government (crown).
If congress removes all the “justifications” for the suits such as ending the endangered species act, EPA enabling legislation, etc. etc. and adds loser pays to frivolous suits requiring lawyers to be equally responsible as the “plaintiff” then there will be no more such problems.
It is amazing how many “other things” have to be added to wind and solar in order to make this allegedly cheap source of power even marginally workable.
Tandem Computers solved the backup problem my using 16 identical machines for both production and backup. In this fashion 1 backup machine could back up 15 production machines.
The problem comes when your backup doesn’t match production you need 15 backups for 15 production machines, making the solution uneconomical.
Greenies used to handwave away renewables intermittency with claims of battery back up. Well, greenies, the Royal Society says
The report finds that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, roughly equivalent to the energy contained in 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries.
A source gives the cost of a basic Tesla battery at £5,220, So doing it this way would cost 1,200,000,000 x £5,220 = £6,264,000,000,000,
Perhaps Elon could give us a bulk order discount, greenies.
The idea that V2G will keep the lights on is made a complete mockery by the need for 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries just for the UK.
If storing gaseous hydrogen in caves was a good idea, then nature would have already done this, since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Since there are no hydrogen storing caves to be found anywhere in the world, it’s a silly idea because it wont work.
Start up all fossil fuel and nuclear plants, build new fossil fuel and nuclear plants and we won’t need caves full of hydrogen, we won’t need wind or solar energy, we won’t need massive new transmission lines and most important we will have abundant, affordable, reliable energy with almost no threat of blackouts. There fixed it for you, quit being so damn stupid.
As has been the case of ‘global warming’ morphing several times to become ‘global boiling’, the supposed benefits of ruinables has changed from ‘the lowest cost electricity generation’ to “They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation“ (my bold).
I expect the Oz Minister for (lack of) energy, Blackout Bowen, to start using this revised term in the near future
Nature long ago gave us the best way to store and transport hydrogen safely, just combine it with carbon. Those amazingly usable and plentiful hydrocarbons. When I see reference to hydrogen I see idiots that likely cannot even tie their own shoelaces.
Hydrogen caves? That German zeppelin that caught fire & exploded in New Jersey back in 1937 was filled with hydrogen.
Stop letting all those illegals invade your nation to cut back on the amount of electricity needed or is that too much common sense?