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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

'Renewable' Energy(s) & Storage ..... ? (1 Viewer)

'Green' Hydrogen from concentrated solar .....
https://theheartysoul.com/secretive...KQxFZjLOVB6H-3ceaS54duKw5sPUR2S0KB2ePdgfMBhVg

The article doesn't mention what the hydrogen conversion process is (likely proprietary), and still has my bugbear of artificially creating heat, though I suspect a boundary analysis may (?) show less heat than that lost in even a 50% efficient ICE for example. :cat:

Would like to see the total efficiencies (and what heat is rejected to the environment), and also what temperatures these are running at in the absence of solar insolation ..... ?





Chosun :gh:
 
Interesting article Chosun, thanks for giving me another excuse for skiving this afternoon :sneaky:

I'm particularly interested in the thermal storage molecule. That is certainly a holy grail of the green energy world. Although there have been apparently revolutionary developments like this before that somehow haven't got off the ground, I will be keeping a close eye on this one.
 
Interesting article Chosun, thanks for giving me another excuse for skiving this afternoon :sneaky:

I'm particularly interested in the thermal storage molecule. That is certainly a holy grail of the green energy world. Although there have been apparently revolutionary developments like this before that somehow haven't got off the ground, I will be keeping a close eye on this one.
It's the twin problem of establishing a high-quality production method that lends itself to mass-production. All too often past projects have come up with a high-quality production method that is too expensive for mass production, or an inferior-quality production method that can be mass- produced, with an inferior product that isn't that inexpensive. Let's hope that this project succeeds, but it will have the additional hurdle of safe end-of-life disposal of the batteries.
MJB
 
It's the twin problem of establishing a high-quality production method that lends itself to mass-production. All too often past projects have come up with a high-quality production method that is too expensive for mass production, or an inferior-quality production method that can be mass- produced, with an inferior product that isn't that inexpensive. Let's hope that this project succeeds, but it will have the additional hurdle of safe end-of-life disposal of the batteries.
MJB

Yep, although that opens the question of whether something as important as mitigating climate change has to be financially profitable if it is to be considered at all - after all, see the rapid vaccine progress this year when the priorities change to "get it done at all costs".
 
Firstly, the "problem" with hydrogen producing water vapor or even ice on the road is just a misunderstanding. Burning hydrocarbon fuels also produces vast amounts of water - the actual ratio depends on the length of carbon chains in the fuel, but it's in the ballpark of 1:1 with CO2. Ever seen "smoke" coming out of a modern car's tailpipe? That's the water vapor. One can even argue that this is less of a problem in case of hydrogen-based propulsion, where the hydrogen is likely coming from water already present in the hydrosphere, whereas in hydrocarbon-based one, the hydrogen comes from oil, so it has been previously trapped in it and is being newly released to circulation.

Then I also disagree with the sweeping dismissal of nuclear power. Does it really have more "unaccounted for" costs then other power sources? With the attention and hate it receives, nuclear is actually being forced a lot to include all external costs into its operation, produce funds for future liquidation of plants etc... while the hydrocarbon industry largely avoids that and the same can be said for example for lithium production in less developed countries. The military argument is also just emotional, most modern nuclear plants don't produce anything of practical use to any military application.
While I largely agree with your points I will add this: most people's objection to nuclear power is is its inherent danger, viz. Mayak and Sellafield in the 50' via Three-Mile-Island 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 to Fukushima in 2011 (with many smaller 'accidents' omitted but easily researchable online). Added to this is the problem of nuclear waste which highly paid PR companies keep telling us ad nauseam is completely safe in salt mines and wherever else the industry hides it.
But nobody knows for sure and interestingly when it does come to selecting terminal storage locations the plant operators and politicians have an uncannily strong NIMBY attitude. One wonders why.
 
Solutions to the transition to zero carbon power will be different in different countries. The attraction of hydrogen in countries such as the UK is the potential to make use of large amounts of existing infrastructure. In the UK there are about 280,000 km of gas transmission and distribution pipelines and each year this system delivers about 3 times as much energy as the UK electricity grid (gas demand is typically 50-150 GW, electricity demand 25-50 GW depending on time of day). Even if you take account of the efficiency gains possible by using heat pumps (which are unsuitable for many older city homes), replacing this heating demand will require a huge expansion of the power grid and this which is already under pressure as electric cars start replacing petrol and diesel. All this new equipment and scrapping the gas system while it has many years of service left has a significant environmental cost.

A further difficulty is that gas usage has both daily and seasonal cycles. There are large peaks of gas usage in the morning and evening and about 4-5 times as much gas is used in winter as in summer. To meet these daily and seasonal variations with renewables is challenging unless you have very large amounts of energy storage. Gas (hydrogen or natural gas) is a good way of providing that storage. Daily variation is met by control of the pressure in the high pressure parts of the gas system (which provides the equivalent of about 220 GWh of storage) and seasonal peaks are met by additional gas imports, LNG and gas storage in salt caverns. One such facility in Cheshire (which cost £500 million to develop) stores about 4,400 GWh of gas and can deliver that to the gas system a rate of 15 GW. Compare these figures to those for a large battery storage site (Victoria plans 300MW Tesla battery to help stabilise grid as renewables increase | Energy | The Guardian) - $150million for 450 MWh of storage. If you look at these numbers in terms of capital cost per unit energy stored (and allow for the lower calorific value of hydrogen vs natural gas) the batteries work out at about 300-400 US$/kWh and storage of hydrogen in gas caverns at about 0.4 US $/kWh. Batteries are good for small-scale short term storage and smoothing out fluctuations in the power supply (which is what the system in Victoria is going to be used for) but for grid scale seasonal energy storage they have a very long way to go.
 
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