this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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No reason to fight the tide. Renewables and storage are enough.
People just say "storage" as if it's some simple solution. It's not. Pumped hydro can work in some places but it can also cause pretty impactful disturbances for the local ecosystem so it needs to be planned with care. Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet, it's still in the trial stage and has pretty poor performance (something like 35% round-trip efficiency), not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size. Shouldn't even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Don't get me wrong, renewables + storage is the future, aside from eventual fusion power it's the cheapest and most environmentally friendly alternative. But a lot of people talk as if there aren't enormous technical challenges in stabilizing a power grid with renewables at the moment. Remember that precisely all of the power that is put into the grid has to be pulled out of the grid, every minute of every hour of every day of the year, as soon as that equilibrium is broken in either direction we experience significant issues.
There's so much years old anti storage propaganda in your text, it's painful.
What makes a tech mature to you? We have all the components of a hydrogen storage path up and running everywhere around the world. They're not profitable, at least not without government incentives, but solarpunk is anti-capitalist, so profitability shouldn't be among our primary concerns.
That's a worst case figure for purely electrical round trip efficiency. We could use waste heat of the fuel cell process (to a lesser extent also the electrolysis process) in order to bump that number up considerably.
That has not been an issue for quite some time thanks to advances in materials science. Also, we could use methanation, of course sacrificing some more efficiency, but then we could even use old natural gas infrastructure without an issue.
Lithium-ion batteries are environmentally bad for sure, but talking about thermal runaway? Really? You need very high temperatures for that to happen. Most stationary storage applications will never see such high powers that they come even close to thermal runaway by themselves. If in a high power application, you'll have better battery management systems supervising the temperature and reducing the allowed power. It's really a non-issue if you have engineers who know what they're doing working on it.
Coming bad to environmentally bad: see sodium-ion batteries.
When significant issues have been worked out and it is, if not profitable, economically justifiable.
I'm not primarily concerned with a Lemmy instance, I'm more focused on the world that we live in.
It's a reasonable estimate, not a worst-case figure, and waste heat works well when additional heat is required and incredibly poorly when it is not. Heat storage is also an alternative but now we're talking about requiring heat storage in order to make hydrogen viable, which bumps up the cost and reduces availability even further.
So this is not entirely true, leakage represents about 2.9-5.6% and hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that can potentially have a 10 times bigger impact than CO2 over a 100-year period. Let's not fix problems by potentially causing more problems.
All that you need is bad luck with dendrite formation and the battery can combust during regular cycling. An energy storage facility in Australia caught fire a few years ago. The ship off the coast of the Netherlands that burned just weeks ago was potentially caused by brand new EV batteries combusting. It is a significant concern.
I am an engineer.
What do you mean by "Coming bad to environmentally bad"? I think sodium-ion batteries represent an exciting step forward in battery development since it would reduce the need for a material which is often environmentally disastrous to extract. There are also other storage mediums that are developing, Liquid- and Compressed Air Energy Storage, Flow Batteries, and Liquid Metal batteries to mention a few. There's also the rust battery that's under development by Form Energy. I don't know why people get so hung up on hydrogen and lithium-ion batteries as if they're the only two possible alternatives when at least one of them sacrifices safety and longevity for weight in a use-case where weight isn't an issue.
I am interested in the tech, I'm trying to keep up to date with recent developments as it's both interesting and in the same field as my degree, and I do think that it's both inevitable that it will end up as the best alternative for the grid in the future and that there are exciting opportunities today. But we don't have to ignore risks and cram other technologies into there just because fossil fuels are bad, we can phase them out and make right decisions for the future at the same time.
Not everywhere, not all the time. Were that the case we'd be much farther ahead in getting rid of fossil fuels.
For everywhere else we can count on power lines
That shows quite some misunderstanding of how power transmission works...
Also, there's a very significant part of the world population living on islands. Even disregarding efficiency losses, do you want to crisscross the oceans with power lines?
Why not? We have plenty of cables and so forth down their anyway and they are hardly that bad. Besides efficency losses for hvdc are at 3.5% for 1000km. So you could transport electricity from any place to any other place on earth with max loss of 49% using that technology. You also do not need millions of power lines and mostly not across oceans, but connecting islands with the next continent. Even then most islands with high enough population for nuclear to be even be reasonable are both large themself or close to some other continent or large islands. As for costs there is a serious private venture to built a direct undersea power line from Morroco to the UK. It is not cheap, but it certainly is not crazy. Obviously we have an electricity grid in most places in the world already, with 87% of the worlds population having electricity and nearly all who have no access are in Africa.
This is just typical reactionary absolutism.
"It has to cover every use case to be useful anywhere."
Rather than vague abstractions, make an actual case in a real place. Which island are you talking about? Guarantee there's a less costly renewable mix with higher uptime.