By P Gosselin on 22. November 2023
Never-ending green energy woes: high construction costs… uneconomical…”associated major economic risks”
Source: westkueste100
Hydrogen will be the technology that will ultimately solve all the world’s energy woes, so claim those who are finally realizing that a lithium battery powered economy is a pipe dream after all. And, so must the green economy show go on.
But not so fast. Hydrogen has its drawbacks
Blackout News reports that the green hydrogen project Westküste 100 in Heide, Germany, has been “halted prematurely”. The reason: It’s just plain uneconomical. Obviously, despite having been told hundreds of times already, planners are just finding out that energy from green hydrogen is just too expensive.
According to the Westküste 100 press release: “After intensive examination of all general conditions, the joint venture will not make a positive investment decision. This is due to the increased investment costs and the associated major economic risks.”
High costs
“The ‘Westküste 100’ electrolysis plant project was terminated prematurely three years after the start of the project. Raffinerie Heide, Ørsted Deutschland and Hynamics Deutschland have announced that they will not be building an electrolyzer,” writes Blackout News. “The main reason for the decision against the 30-megawatt plant is the high construction costs, according to the companies in a press release.”
The Westküste 100 project’s aim was to develop and implement a regional hydrogen economy on an industrial scale. Green hydrogen was supposed to be generated based on renewable sources of energy (wind power and photovoltaics), using a 30-megawatt (MW) electrolyzer, To achieve this goal, regional and international companies from industry, development and research merged, to produce, store, transport and utilize green hydrogen, according to Westküste’s website here.
Millions in subsidies wasted
Now it turns out that, despite millions in subsidies, the project is a money loser. The project was started in 2020 and was to be funded to the tune of 36 millions euros from the government.
“Despite the funding, the economic viability of the plant for green hydrogen production on an industrial scale is not given, according to the investor consortium,” summarizes Blackout News.
Yet, Environment Minister Tobias Goldschmidt (Green Party) insists that the “Hyscale 100” electrolyzer plant – which is 3 times larger than Westküste 100 – will continue with the support of the state government. It is still in the planning phase.
No market, costs not right
Jörg Kubitza, Managing Director of offshore wind company Ørsted-Germany, said there was no economic viability for the project and so the Danish company opted out. “The costs had to be right and a market had to be created, which was not the case here.”
The city utility in Heide had planned to provide “green heating” by mixing the green hydrogen with natural gas. “This project has now also been discontinued as a result of the electrolysis plant being abandoned,” reports Blackout News.
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Go figure, that crappy green energy Germany is so fond of is inefficient enough to be unable to generate an economy sufficient enough to allow them to produce more crappy green energy. Nothing like Renewables High Energy Prices to make everything unaffordable… even construction.
Back to converting natural gas to hydrogen, so as to add the produced hydrogen at 20% to natural gas for home heating.
Electrolysis to produce H2 on an industrial scale could only work if production at full capacity is essentially continuous. A process that shuts down and starts up depending on the weather cannot be operated efficiently. Now if you could hook up your electrolyzers to a reliable dispatchable source of power – ah… what’s the point?
So, let’s do a back of envelope. You want to use electrolysis, the most expensive way to make hydrogen, using intermittent energy that has already been proven by the world’s largest “pilot plant ” i.e. Europe’s electric grid, to be grossly too expensive and unreliable. Moreover, it takes 33% more energy than is contained in the hydrogen produced.
Use in hydrogen ICEs is no better than 35% efficient! And a host of problems in transport, handling, incuding embrittlement of metals in contact with it and losses in forming metal hydrides.
A small impairment-
Thyssenkrupp posts $2.3 billion impairment on steel division (msn.com)
Greener steel plant anyone?
“ArcelorMittal Dofasco would need about 27 gigawatt-hours of electricity per day to make enough “green” hydrogen — the version created without climate-harming emissions — to fuel the bayfront facility’s ambitious low-carbon steelmaking plans.
In green energy terms, the study estimates that would require a wind farm covering about 987 square kilometres — an area nearly the size of the City of Hamilton.
https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/green-hydrogen-too-costly-to-fuel-arcelormittal-dofasco-s-makeover-study/article_e93da5e4-7c60-549f-9087-4b149644e780.html
The people that work at the bayfront think this green steel making effort is quite humorous. They know how much real energy it takes to make steel. We actually use a lot of hydrogen for annealing steel over at the finishing side. Since the availability of wind power is only about 20% you would probably need 5 times that many wind generators and it still won’t work..
You would need five times that number widely separated by geography in order to assure that 20% of them are always catching sufficient wind.
One just gets Green politicians together, and have them blow?
I was in finishing when we switched from cracked ammonia (NH3) to “blue” hydrogen. Thinking that this is feasible for home heating seems ridiculous.
What a surprise.
That ENSO meter is pumping up the jam though.
It did make a jump, didn’t it.
Did someone actually run an economic analysis before mandating?
The world is slowly awaking to fantasies.
The Dutch elections:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/geert-wilders-profile-netherlands-elections-far-right
And, in passing, a new snow record where children would not know what snow was:
https://news.yahoo.com/winter-arrived-worcester-breaks-snowfall-140950645.html
Not a biggie but still a record:
Australia has given up on trying to get private enterprise to build WDGs and now robbing taxpayers – from JoNOva:
This is a concern for those of us who make their own electricity. We may be forced to pay for a grid connection even if we do not use it.
“In a political earthquake, Wilders’ Freedom party…” is the largest party.
The BBC hacks are having trouble processing that result – they favoured Timmermans.
Does BBC get their news from TikTok?
Yes Federal Labor with that Gretahead child Bowen are panicking the Greenouts are imminent with summer so they’re flinging helicopter money at their idiocy-
‘Worried about blackouts’: Government focuses on taxpayers to ‘bail out’ energy market (msn.com)
They’ve been warned by the techs in the know for some time now.
Recently Optus had a network outage for 12 hours with an IT upgrade to their mobile and fixed internet system and the backlash including Govt pile on was telling. Female CEO fell on her sword with the grilling she got in Parliament and general consumer flak so the climate changers know what to expect now with serious power Greenouts. South Australia could be most vulnerable in that respect and some of those hysterical pollies and pundits might come to regret their sanctimonious pile on with the Optus CEO. Folks in glass houses….
Electric food delivery trucks will take care of the blackout problems.
In other news, there seem to be safety concerns about piping hydrogen into homes in the Redcar trial in the UK. This is the Mail, but the story is in several other places.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12779395/hydrogen-heating-replace-natural-gas-row-homeowners.html
The problem is, it seems to be rather explosive. So one solution proposed is to just drill holes in the walls of the houses to prevent concentration. The contractor however has proposed instead installing hydrogen detectors.
The locals are not happy, wonder why? They seem to think they are being treated as lab rats. They don’t realize they are helping save the planet.
They are being moved to heat pumps if they decline hydrogen. I guess at least heat pumps don’t leak and explode.
The whole hydrogen mania is completely mad. Boris Johnson claimed the UK was going to be the Qatar of hydrogen. But in fact, there is no economically viable source of the stuff. There is nowhere to store it. If there were both, there is no pipe network to get it to the homes. If there were, you would have to replace all the in-house piping for it to be safe. Its called believing three impossible things before breakfast.
And you see one of the key problems in this case. You have to convert the whole of the area. You can’t have some on gas and some on hydrogen. So its always going to be for the chosen area, take hydrogen or move to electricity.
“one solution proposed is to just drill holes in the walls of the houses”
Like a draughty collander…
Shouldn’t the holes be in the ceiling if you’re trying to let the hydrogen out? That would make more sense because you would then lose all your warm air and the rain and snow could come in.
Start to insolate the house, than drill holes in the wall, applied green logic.
*facepalm*
Perhaps HYDROcarbons can be rediscovered or at least rebranded.
This new gaseous fuel has four HYDROGEN atoms for each carbon atom, but wait there’s more. Plant food is made when HYDROcarbons are used to generate energy.
Not only that, but if string 6-12 of them together it creates a nice compact liquid for storage and mobility usage.
Many, many years ago I remember reading a sci-fi book whose premise was about a group of private citizens leaving earth for a privately developed colony somewhere. Don’t remember if it was another planet or a habitat (no, not Ayn Rand but probably influenced by her). The reason was because government was caught in the trap of having to build ever bigger projects to justify their existence, projects that could never be finished because of the costs and the paupering of the public to pay for the extravagant projects (like building a bridge in Jupiter’s atmosphere).
At the time I thought it was just a dream by the author. But over the past 50 years the book has become a prophecy. What a sad, sad state of affairs around the globe. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We’ve been taken over by those who simply can’t do. Those who can’t do become teachers and politicians. If you can’t do then you have no idea of how things work and it leads to the delusion that every thing you can dream of is feasible – all you need is an inexhaustible money tree.
And Orwell’s 1984 was in actuality meant as a warning, not a blueprint.
“Those who can’t do become teachers and politicians. If you can’t do then you have no idea of how things work and it leads to the delusion that every thing you can dream of is feasible…”
That pretty well sums it up. We/They have been dumbing-down our education system for years and now have produced several generations that “can’t do.” Sure got a lot of teachers and politicians though.
I hope all have a happy Thanksgiving.
From the article: “Never-ending green energy woes”
All fall down.
What a fiasco this unreasonable, unwarranted fear of CO2 has turned into!
How do you say “no sh!t! “ in German? Nicht scheisse?
Close. Keine is “no” for the noun which in this case has the feminine gender.
There’s probably a better colloquial expression.
I got it wrong on the gender. Shit is actually a masculine noun. The “e” at the end in this case makes it plural. So, keine is “no” for the plural form of the noun.
In Southern Russia they say “No bullshitski, y’all!”
Video tip – YT video
Hydrogen Will Not Save Us. Here’s Why. – YouTube
This morning my wife was tuning into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and she made the comment that you could not see the port-a-potties. Funny comment, but it made me think. Most people do not realize all the behind the scenes activity that makes things work. You go to a venue to watch something without a thought to how it all was put together. Most people do not understand or even consider how things really work, all the tiny things that have to come together to make something successful Most people have no clue about power generation, transmission, maintenance etc, etc. It is certainly why so many people jump on the renewables band wagon, it all sounds so simple and worthy. Until reality sets in and they have to suffer the consequences of their ignorance. That appears to be happening now and it couldn’t come soon enough.
Hydrogen never made any energy sense, and never will. Wrote up all the reasons in essay Hydrogen Hype in ebook Blowing Smoke. Pity the Germans didn’t read it before trying this in Heide and wasting lots of money.
I keep hearing about fields of natural hydrogen, waiting to be developed. There is something to it but there’s been virtually no progress.
Still, a claim is made that natural H2 production is orders of magnitude greater than that from humans. Can we capture a significant fraction? Here’s a good article.
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-hydrogen-earth-may-hold-vast-stores-renewable-carbon-free-fuel
More shoot – ready – aim. They will never learn and in the meantime spend LOTS of our money trying to turn lead into gold.
Ironically, the threat of flying lead protects gold.
See my comment in the previous WUWT posting
Hydrogen is exotic and difficult and dangerous. Hydrogen lacks sufficient energy density to be practical.
“…Yet, Environment Minister Tobias Goldschmidt (Green Party) insists that the “Hyscale 100” electrolyzer plant – which is 3 times larger than Westküste 100 – will continue with the support of the state government. It is still in the planning phase…”
Oldest trick in the book. Soak up all of the subsidy money with “Planning” and “Engineering” and at the end of the handouts announce that the project is not economic and move on to the next grift. Engineering companies are masters at this. Lots of “work”, with zero risk of ever having to build something and make it work.
This really should not have reached this point. Shell’s REFHYNE project at its Wesseling refinery already showed that these projects are virtue signalling, not economic progress.
https://www.refhyne.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/REFHYNE-Lessons-Learnt_Aug22_PU_FV.pdf
https://refhyne.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/D7.2-report-v7.0-clean.pdf
Even in the crisis conditions of 2022 electrolysis was not competitive with Steam Methane Reforming. The whole threat of intermittency was also not resolvable.
A bit more detail on some of the subsidy money floating around these projects:
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/production/despite-being-awarded-millions-in-state-funding-this-once-pioneering-green-hydrogen-project-has-been-scrapped/2-1-1556853
“I’m angry at the federal government because in 2020 the federal government’s hydrogen strategy was implemented with a total of €7bn in funding to promote projects like the one here in Heide,” Andreas Hein, chairman of the supervisory board at Stadtwerke Heide told local news station NDR.
I’d be angry about the government tipping away €7bn. We could all use some of that.
Hynamics and Raffinerie Heide are both partners on a different 500MW green hydrogen project, HyScale 100, for which the state government of Schleswig-Holstein had already allocated €194m in subsidies in its 2023 budget, although it is unclear how much cash the project has actually received.
€194m would be quite nice too.
More good news. Remove mandates, subsidies, tax preferences and market preferences and whole renewable energy fiasco will fall apart.