From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
When green fantasies hit the brick wall of cold reality!
By 2035, Germany wants to produce 100% of its power in a climate-neutral way. To back up wind turbines and solar panels, whose production is expected to dominate in the coming years, the government initially envisioned a fleet of hydrogen-fired power plants.
But these plans are now faltering amid a prolonged government budgetary crisis, said Sigfried Russwurm, the president of Germany’s powerful industry association BDI.
In early August 2023, the German government triumphantly announced that the European Commission had essentially greenlit its plan for subsidised backup power plants.
That meant 8.8 GW of dedicated hydrogen power plants, alongside 15 GW of natural gas-powered ones that ought to switch to hydrogen by 2035 at the latest, in total representing about one-third of the German peak power demand of 2023. Climate-friendly power at the press of a button.
Because these plants would likely only produce power in periods of sustained low wind and low sun – known as “kalte Dunkelflaute” – they are unlikely to make a profit without state support.
And critically, the annual €7 billion earmarked for this purpose “evaporated” following a ruling from Germany’s top court, which restricted the government’s use of credit lines approved during the COVID-19 crisis.
With no hydrogen plants available as backup, coal power will likely be needed to fill the gap, the BDI chief warned.
“As long as the prospect of new backup power plants based on hydrogen does not get off the ground […] the solution in Germany will be the continued operation of coal-fired power plants,” Russwurm told the press on Tuesday (16 January).
Given budgetary constraints, the two industry associations are urgning the government to cut corners and ditch plans for hydrogen-fired power plants.
Industry groups are now urging the government to take action. “The Federal Government must now get its act together: We need a power plant strategy with clear framework conditions,” said energy industry association BDEW on 11 January.
“At least 15 gigawatts (GW) of new secure generation capacity will be needed in Germany by 2030,” the association added.
Given budgetary constraints, the two industry associations are urging the government to cut corners and ditch plans for hydrogen-fired power plants.
“To significantly reduce complexity and costs,” BDEW stresses the need to “reevaluate” the role afforded to hydrogen peak and hybrid power plants, due to their expensive components and limited impacts on supply security.
Russwurm is of a similar mind. Outlining the BDI’s priorities for the year, he used metaphors to explain what a hydrogen-fired power plant would look like.
Existing power plants can’t run on “pure” hydrogen because the “burners would simply melt”, he explained. Addressing this would require retrofitting the plants with ceramics, which would make them look like the nose of a spaceship folded inwards – a process that can be done but is costly, the BDI chief said.
“If these turbines are only supposed to run when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, then they will be extremely expensive,” he added.
“I’m not even talking about the cost of hydrogen, which we don’t have, but only the investment costs of these new gas turbines and their new peripherals.”
Ultimately, this means Germany’s plan to entirely phase out coal power by 2030 looks unlikely to materialise. Instead, Germany will have to continue relying on gas-fired power plants to match growing demand for electricity.
As the guy from BDI notes, 7 billion euros a year is just the cost of subsidising these hydrogen back up power plants. On top of that comes the cost of actually producing the hydrogen and the question of where the electricity will come from to do it.
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Hydrogen power plants, net negative energy. Makes a lot of sense.
Very nice Paul.
Number one the government should never be in charge of power generation.
Number two the primary consideration is affordable, reliable, power on demand stand alone generation with minimal environmental costs.
There are quite a few papers showing that hydrogen production from variable power is a big no-no. Electrolysis is a process that requires stable operating conditions to deliver at the highest achievable efficiency. Production will stop if power fluctuates, so you actually need backup power to produce hydrogen from so-called surplus wind and solar.
If we give this the best figures they could possibly achieve at scale: They want an end product of 24 GW electrical power which is just shy of 210 TWh a year. The best fuel cells will get 60% efficiency (higher figures include waste heat, we are only looking at electricity). That means you need to have 210/0,6=350 TWh of hydrogen for those fuel cells. Since you are storing it between those sunlit, windy days and the overcast days of no wind, you need to account for something like 10% loss in storage and transfer. Thus you need to produce 350/0,9 = 390 TWh of hydrogen. And to produce that at the maximum efficiency of 70% you need 390/0,7 = 560 TWh of electrical energy. If you can produce that from an ideally sited offshore plant you get 50% capacity factor, meaning you need to install ((560000/8760)/0,5)= 130 GW of wind and solar. But you need to account for transmission loss before the electrolyzer, about 10%. Ending then at 130/0,9 = 145 GW installed power to get 24 GW out at the other end.
With less favourable figures it gets worse, of course. 50% FC capacity at scale, 40% conversion efficiency due to intermittent operation, 60% efficiency of storage/,4 since you probably need to store the hydrogen in a liquid or a metal matrix in order to keep it for more than the three weeks allowed by compressed or liquid storage, and 30% capacity factor for combined wind and solar. Then you need 665 GW to achieve the same.
Real figures are between those, in the range 150 – 650 GW installed to get 24 GW useful out.
I might just be a silly engineer, but isn’t water, simply put, burned hydrogen?
And, if that is so, all of the energy involved in the burning has already been released. To get energy from the hydrogen in those water molecules you have to ‘unburn’ it by putting more energy into the dissolution than it took to make it.
It’s like trying to heat your house withe ashes in your fireplace, isn’t it?
Wind power is inefficient and is therefore expensive and requires subsidies.
Using wind power to make hydrogen to burn in power stations introduces another level of inefficiency due to Hydrogen production, storage, transmission and generation losses. The costs would be enormous and crippling to the economy. It’s madness.