Thank you for everything you research for us. I'm on a fixed income and severely tight budget, and although I can't afford to financially donate, I spread the word about your channel all the time. Keeping us informed about changes that will overwhelm us over the next 20 years will be paramount, hopefully you'll be here to explain it all as we progress in an honest, easily comprehensive way. 💖
I live in Australia. We invested in roof top solar like millions of other Australians. Unfortunately governments on the left and right have overseen the price we get for our solar energy from energy companies plummet. It’s ironic that Australia is now wasting vast amounts of renewable energy because governments on both sides of politics can’t work together to capture this energy. While I’m a fan of renewables, the fact is they don’t provide enough baseline power, in-particular during the night when most homes use most of their power.
It seems politics is the problem on many levels in our societies. Politicized science and health, is contributing to divisionism and denial, leading us towards an environmental disaster.
The Politicians are just the visible actors, it is the ones behind that curtain that do the bribing, sorry campaign contributions that are the bad actors along with certain arguably evil media organisations that manipulate public perceptions and opinions
That's why gov'ts should be funding geothermal R&D post-haste. If we can accelerate 10 years of development into 5 years, that will be all we'll need for the foreseeable future.
There is more wind during night and winter. Australia should invest more on wind. Australia has enough solar energy already. They should be investing more on wind hydrogen and batteries.
As I've come to expect from your videos, this was yet another very interesting and exciting development in the green energy industry. Enjoy your week holiday!
2 Thinks! First, my wife has chemical sensitivities so I made a hydrogen cook stove (Hindenberg I with modified natural gas range) and we cooked with H2 for years. The off-grid PV system electrolyzed water and stored H2 gas in an inverted barrel in a larger water filled barrel using only the pressure from the alkaline electrolyzers. We also purchased bottled H2 gas. Results are the chef-preferred "cooking with gas" but with no CO, CO2 pollution. Second, consider "H2 gas blending with CH4" at the home / business. Solar electrolysis H2 combining with natural gas at 10-20% H2 blend can be easily used in all gas appliances with no modifications. Reduced carbon and uses renewable energy to displace fossil fuel for distributed solar fuel at the point of use in residential, commercial and even industrial processes.
hopefully it will work out better then the management of your lithium resources. I saw a video where they didn't want to have experienced engineers from outside Chile assist and it is not being run effectively. Instead of hiring outside firms (for fear of being ripped off). I don't know why they just don't hire individual consultants
@@vrillx It defines all of human history. I'm afraid its some sort of law of nature. Power hungry clowns are those who have the drive and ethics needed to rise to the top of society, so they are always our leaders. Democracy is supposed to stop that, but clearly it isn't working. We need to rethink how our system/society selects the people that rise to the top.
@bk_16 Fair enough. I am also sceptical but they have at least piqued my interest. My impression is that batteries will win the daily cycle but if the company can provide a cycle efficiency of close to 50% I would at least entertain the idea of incorporating such technology for longer outages. For areas that regularly have winter storm-related outages, coupling the waste heat energy into the home would improve overall efficiency The conundrum is that at the current price, several days worth of battery storage is economically competitive. Once one goes to 1/4 charge/discharge cycle per day the battery lifetime is approaching comparable performance to what the company is stating for the fuel cell. My desire to see at least 50% cycle efficiency is the collected solar energy is better sold to the grid than be used in a low-efficiency storage mechanism from a global warming perspective. We should prioritize more efficient processes until renewable energy has expanded to meet our full energy needs.
I'd like to be hopeful, but realistically, batteries are just getting better and better. They're already cheaper, with better efficiency, and they'll have longer lifetimes soon enough. I just don't see hydrogen technology catching up.
@@jonmichaelgalindo I tend to agree with you. I need to get off my search for seasonal storage and come to terms that renewable capacity generation capacity needs to be sized such that storage is at weather scale, not seasonal scale. Of course, the company is not promoting their product as such, but I was considering metal-hydride storage as an alternative to packing pipelines and underground formations with natural gas prior to peak season as what now occurs.
@@jonmichaelgalindo Battery technology has a lot of hard limits on what is possible, and those advances you mention are going to gain comparatively small increases in energy storage vs other mediums. Hydrogen won't need to try hard to catch up once battery tech plateaus, which it looks set to in the not too distant future.
@@hamsterminator That doesn't sound right. There are countless chemical systems that can cycle between differences in electrical bonds, possibly even systems that improve with use instead of degrading, and millions never yet synthesized. A bacterial battery would be free to manufacture, etc. I have never heard of any theoretical maximums other than 100% efficiency.
We've been using acetylene dissolved in a carrier to make it safe and manageable, for 100 years. This is probably just the first of many hydrogen storage systems using this principle.
Probably just the first to patent it, so they can make money from blocking it for the rest of the world. Capitalism really does everything anyhow possible to end humanity.
@@donalain69 True! The sick idea of trade is the root cause of ALL problems!!! Patents and money are tools to destroy the planet. Even the richest suffer!!! Wake up people and stop supporting bullshit!!!
@@stebarg I assume you farm your own food, dug your own well, make your own clothes and shoes, and built your own house and every stick of furniture with your own hands right? "Trade" is a "sick idea" that is the root cause of all problems? Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Home storage is a good idea even without windmills or solar panels as they can make the home independent for the times where there is neither wind nor sunshine to rely on or in the worst case a blackout.
@Hunzo77 How would you get water in a "Texas style" emergency?? I'm guessing those people with battery storage and solar panels probably did quite well without the need for hydrogen.
Mr Kokolore - WRONG, no wants a HINDENBURG in their Neighborhood , because it takes just ONE Hydrogen fuel cell to set the Whole Neighborhood on FIRE. SWB - Solar, Wind, Battery is the Cheapest form of Energy on Earth , you are BETTER off just getting SOLAR and a HOME lion Battery.
@@markplott4820 How on earth is a single hydrogen fuel cell(the cell is just a piece of metal where the hydrogen passes through) supposed to set an entire neighborhood on fire? Even if it was a big tank it would most likely only damage the house it is in as hydrogen isn´t napalm sticking on other houses. The worst that could (most unlikely) happen is the ignition of a close neighboring house that's it.
Excellent - such a valuable and clear video. Very much appreciated, as someone who pays quite a lot of attention to Scott Morrison's massive climate policy vacuum.
Thanks, good video. I agree with your conclusion. More competetion will lower the costs while improving the designs. Green is improving at an astronomical pace. Yeah!!!
it is indeed the HydroCarbons attempt to remain relevant and a financial force in Canada as evidenced by the Alberta Politicians statements that hydrogen technology will move forward to ensure jobs and a future for Canadas Oil and Gas Industries regardless of cost or viability.
Genius idea to combine hydrogen as a hydride instead of compressing or freezing. 50% of excess energy is a 100% gain of what would be a waste product. Great optimistic content again, well done and keep it coming.
@@richardstubbs6484 - this is FALSE , home batteries are a good Resourse as they REUSE spent BEV battery from cars , and battery Prices CONTINUE to fall each year. otherwise the Battery ends up in LANDFILL, at the END the Home battery can be RECYCLED and elements Extracted.
I would like to know how many of these units have been produced. Its one thing to make something work on a bench but its different story to build at scale.
7 months ago??? I’ve always been on lookout for anything green technology even earth batteries. This is the 1st time I saw you. Wonderful presentation. Look forward to seeing you on our “major media” news here in America.
Just don't hold your breath. What I've found, here in America, is that you *must go looking* for the information. If the powers that be don't see profit in disseminating the information ... well, you know the rest of the story.
"It takes more energy input from the fossil fuels than you get out. You can't make this up." All hydrogen production requires more energy put in than you get out. There is absolute no way around this law of physics.
Precisely. That’s why the sensible are concentrating on hydrogen as a storage method. Use as a motive fuel Only makes sense when extremely high energy densities are required and gasoline is outlawed.
Hydrogen storage in metal hydrides has been around for decades, I've even seen a large system personally in use at my university about a decade ago, feeding PEM fuel cells. This Lavo unit is just a sexy commercial version of very well established tech. The more important question is, why if it's been around for so long, has it not been widely implemented? Probably because fuel cells are generally considered as being too expensive to be practical at the moment, however, if they do become more mainstream, then hydrogen storage in metal hydrides would probably be the preferred choice imho.
My basic understanding of the metal hydride system is that it requires a high temperature to get the hydrogen back out again, which obviously uses energy which has to initially come from somewhere and will further reduce the efficiency of the whole system. For this reason it is un attractive and I do wonder if LAVO has a new chemical composition that mitigates this. There seems to be no mention of this so if I was a betting man I'd say not, luckily I'm not a betting man and I will watch this space over the next ten years.
@Nicola Toma The Gencell hydrogen fuel cell system can use ammonia for storing the hydrogen. The byproduct is nitrogen which makes up 79% of what we breathe. And the infrastructure for making ammonia is well established and produces huge amounts, but not green.
Yes, but that well established tech is optimized for different use cases. The landscape has shifted quite a bit with wind and solar costs coming down, so development of versions optimized to serve as "batteries" for that makes sense... And that sort of development/optimization isn't easy. I think where I've heard most excitement interest in metal hydride hydrogen storage in the past was around transport/cars. This application makes more sense to me, though I'm not certain about the fuel cell side of it.
Andrew Forrester a Iron Ore mining magnate, has expressed his interest into "green" hydrogen. Also making "green" steel. He is not waiting for govanostra. His company is Fortescue Metals.
Me and my team in the university of tennessee at chattanooga department of engineering used this technology to power a small “chemical” car in regional and national competitions. Presentation of the pack was 5 V output and 0.5A. Very neat and important piece of tech here
Thank you for this excellent presentation of the evolution of Hydrogen for energy. Soon (I hope) you will present us with a user-friendly-economic-green-energy system for the home.
3:55 This looks like real progress to me. I have no doubt that, ten years ago, Morrison would have simply said "There is no credible energy transiton plan," and simply omitted the rest.
3 years ago ScoMo brought a lump of coal into our parliament - now he doesn't talk about coal, only gas. Technically it is progress in the right direction, but nowhere near fast enough and we're still likely to have new gas fields, electricity generation plants and "blue" hydrogen hubs here, locking in higher emissions for decades to come. Luckily there is some momentum for the green version of hydrogen, and one of our many mining billionaires is actually putting real money behind specifically green hydrogen, saying there is no point in developing any other kind in a low emissions world. Just need the message to get through to the pollies.
@@idunnoay Oh yes, I know about ScoMo, even over here; just saw footage of him yesterday, in fact, in one of a seies of videos on the history of Tesla. We have Inhofe and his snowball, you have ScoMo and his lump of coal. You probably heard the saying that science progresses one funeral at a time. Alas, it tends to apply to politics as well.
Very nice solution. Similar to HomePowerSolutions in Berlin, Germany. Produce H2 in summer and store it for the winter - will be a key technology! Great video, thanks.
I was thinking this, but if the term "hydride" is an actual chemical term, then there's little chance it's anything other than an alkali metal, which leaves about five candidates. When you factor in cost and abundance, then that narrows it down to three, and considering prices of lithium, that would bring it to two, cheapest and lightest of which is sodium or an alloy of NaK. I'd bet my GME stocks on it.
True; presumably it will not be one of the more abundant and commonplace metals or else the hydrogen absorbing property of it would surely have been appreciated long ago. In which case, it could be something that is in short supply.
@@danyoutube7491 I posses none of the requisite knowledge to hazard a guess, however, when welding, low hydrogen rods are used because of hydrogen embrittlement of steels and iron. Perhaps it's not such an exotic material?
At a guess I would presume titanium is the most likely candidate. This isn't new technology and the idea has been kicking around for years. The trouble is that like a battery it takes time to charge and discharge. If the manafacture have managed to improve the technology then this could be a real "Game Changer" The main advantage is you don't have to store pressurised hydrogen.
@Claire H Hydrogen I am not surprised by that. As various metal hydrides have the ability to take up hydrogen. I only mentioned titanium because it is relatively cheap like aluminium. Certainly this is a good idea and I hope that it becomes reality.
I think so, posted a comment saying that in the future if this is used as a permanent power source there would be an issue down the road where there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere instead of carbon dioxide. Besides, when this thing is running, just don't have a naked flame nearby!!!... boom
So each module stores 10 kWh, and they are removable. So if the modules can be made cheaply enough, an outhouse could store a winter's worth of a Passivhaus-standard energy needs. Bit of a fiddle having to keep changing them but IMHO it's a move in the right direction.
It depends on module cost if this would be viable. At least a mechanism for exchanging modules would be quite simple and the capacity could be upscaled easily.
Or just bigger modules. Might be more practical than swapping modules out. Or swappable modules could be used for powering a vehicle or other mobile device. One big advantage this kind of system offers is long term storage, basically any arbitrary length of time. Batteries aren't real good at holding charge for long periods. Whereas this thing really dosn't have much limit on how long ot could hold energy for.
This is a great Australian invention developed into a commercial product. We are only a couple of months from the first commercial installation, so we will see how it works coupled with solar panels. It looks like a perfect fit to fill the power gap early morning and at night.
@@durwoodmaccool890 the water inside the units do get hot well normal wet cell hho`s, you could incase a wet cell in moving liquid or pipes around it and use that as a heat source
@@nitinmittal213 agreed but given you are creating hydrogen as a fuel to heat the home. This short term heat would be added to the hot water store. It would mean less hydrogen needs to be burned for heat etc. If 30% of the energy is lost to heat using it is a significant boost in efficiency.
@@market0that yeah I too love commercial Tri Gen systems! Looking at this system I suspect they already have too many components and potential points of failure, adding more on paper gives economic efficiency gains but I suspect would make the system even more unwieldy and “between” applications and all but impossible to gain domestic market penetration.
Thank you for your thoughts and knowledge. You mentioned that in Australia we can utilise millions of panels. Recently we have heard that people will be charged for uploading their excess power to the grid. I wonder if you could please investigate this recent change, thank you.
Interesting. There are some real costs related for measuring & administration of exporting electricity into the grid. More volatile energy makes it also more difficult = expensive for the lazy base load systems like coal to react. If they blame the green energy for that they have an argument to penalize them. But is it really the fault of regenerative energy production that coal firing can not be properly adjusted to demand? This argument is imo based on a big fossil power generation perspective that is disturbed and wants to remain alone in the market.
There are some complex arguments in this proposal - and it has been on the cards for a while. As a solar owner I was initially frustrated by this. It will however be scale based on what your system can feed in and you would still be making a 'profit' or credit as Origin puts it. I have heard arguments that we are effectively using an extant system to sell our produced solar and expect to be able to do so without incurring costs. My response is that the feed in tariff is lower than the purchase point which should be covering this cost. I think real and significant issue is bigger than all of this. Its that NSW State Govt could see the writing on the wall and sold off the poles and wires a few years ago to avoid it being their problem - consequently the private industry has not invested and now we have a grid incapable of dealing with the burgeoning solar during the day and supply everyone during the night (I say this as a layman and am happy to have further explanation provided to me). My personal belief is that more incentives should be put towards home solar owners purchasing battery options rather than penalizing those investing in home solar. This would relieve the grid... of course then those energy companies wouldn't be making their dollars at night.
@@nerdy1701 What do you mean they heat up? The charge controller disconnects the array by not using power from it, if batteries are full. The panels sit there obediently until needed. Using them doesn't cool them off!
Dimensions: 1680 x 1240 x 400 mm, fairly larger than the power wall (1150x760x150mm) but if you have the space and can be kept outside still practical.
Storing hydrogen in any useable form has always been a nightmare. If Lavo has solved this problem in such a small formfactor, then that is a monumental discovery on the scale of nuclear power. I'm betting it's BS.
I would like some follow-up videos to the New tech you've brought up over the years. New stuff is cool to hear about, but viability is only proven over time and I find it incredibly hard to check up on these things.
Would very useful if you could compare the Lava system to HPS - Picea a German home hydrogen system which uses hospital like oxygen gas bottles for storage, different from the Australian storage HPS was founded in 2012 ,but has existing home owner users who have surplus solar generation capacity in the summer. The Picea electrolyser uses the excess solar energy in the summer, produces hydrogen for storage and use in the winter. There are a number of videos on TH-cam showing the system working with owners comment on its efficiency and cost - it is not cheap! But one video shows a large chalet in the Swiss mountains now having all year around electricity where previously only a generator could supply electric, the house being nowhere near the local grid. Keep up the good work - your videos are always fascinating!
I think the low round-trip charge / discharge (in)efficiency won’t compensate for the high claimed cycle count. It’s a physical limit and can’t be improved much whereas cycle improvements in Li technology and further price falls will continue to improve it.
I completely agree. I don't think hydrogen makes sense in home storage and cars. This invention may have a great potential in planes/container ships where energy density is more important than efficiency and cost. And maybe grid storage, when you want to store energy for months due to seasonal abundance of a power source.
@@onur6233 , New batteries promise to allow use them as structural parts. This would allow battery replace some support structures reducing extra weight added. Chalmers University of Technology claims a breakthrough which would be good enough for products soon. They promise comparable strength to aluminium with 75Wh/kg specific energy which is close to 150-250Wh/kg for batteries in market.
Even if this storage technology can't be improved, small-scale solar and wind generation technology can, which will continue to push down the cost of the additional generation capacity needed for this storage, making the lower round-trip efficiency less relevant to anyone with enough real estate to host the additional capacity. LAVO is targeting remote off-grid applications where there is plenty of real estate for solar and wind generation and the easier transport and longer lifespan will be advantages.
Li storage is already 95% efficient so there is no room for improvement there. It's all about cost. This box claims to be cheaper than Li per kWh stored. Ultimately that's all we care about. PV is 20% efficient, Petrol engine is
@@xxwookey You've missed the point completely. Li-ion is already significantly more efficient than this technology but OP was referring to storage capacity, cycle-life, and cost of ownership, which will be on the decline thanks to the massive push for batteries in the EV market. He also mentioned that there is a limit to the round-trip efficiency of hydrogen and will be capped, thanks to heat loss, long before it reaches the 95% mark we see with Li-ion.
Good start. My future concept is to bypass solar or wind and use plasma type to electrolyse and create hydrogen. The speed of my concept will see the initial h2 go into a storage chamber and combine with O2 to make dc power. This will then be used by the eleftrolyser .
Lavo could make sense today in a hybrid commercial system today where you use hydrogen and lithium ion. There is a portion of your storage that will need to cycle at a far higher rate so hydrogen can be used for that while the lithium ion can be used more for the medium term storage. Kind of like cache and RAM memory on a computer.
It would be the used the other way around. Batteries usually have massive cycle capability if you only use a small amount. Main question after the video is the power density. Could one unit produce 10 kW to power a home?
@Marc Jackson These units contain Lithium batteries and those batteries are used as I state. Info available in there spec. The power density is fairly low 5kW. It’s not enough to run a home. Info also available in there spec. Li-ion cells can have a million cycles if the correct circumstances are fulfilled. In these applications Li-Fe is common and they don’t suffer from thermal runaway.
@Marc Jackson Stop being a jackass and go read the spec for the product. It clearly state what I have written earlier. I tried to link it but YT won’t let me. There are some peer reviewed papers on micro cycles for Liion batteries. Read those as well. If what you say would be correct regenerative breaking in electric cars wouldn’t exist. There is no need to get offensive or have a bad attitude. Please behave as the best version of yourself.
But the commercial viability has been lacking. However if countries start putting in carbon tariffs left and right, it may definitely swing. Especially for applications where extremely high heat is required. Carbon free combustion would make a great contribution towards removing a large portion of humanity's green house gas emissions especially smelting, cement clinker production etc...
I can always spot which generation is talking to me... my Dad's generation tell me I talk too quickly, and my nephews generation tell my I talk too slowly. That tells me I've got it spot on ;-)
4:13 Mark Z. Jacobson used as a source to "comprehensively debunk" anything is an oxymoron. His work is highly contested despite his tendency to sue anyone who disagrees with him.
I am disappointed in this channel. Jacobson deserves the patent for 'fake news' and is a complete nutter. And the ideological critique the author offers for seeking to dismiss hydrogen from natural gas with or without carbon capture and storage on the grounds that the fossil fuel industry is using it as a ruse is comparable to a marxist notion of 'fellow travellers' Numerate critiques look at the numbers. Hydrogen obtained by reforming for use in home fuel cells, as they do in 300,000 homes in Japan, means that the heat can be used for hot water, instead of vented to the atmosphere as present gas turbines do. So something of the order of a 30% improvement in energy utilisation and consequently fewer carbon emissions is dismissed as not ideologically pure enough. And some carbon capture methods result in solid carbon, for easy sequestration, and also industrial use. Ideologues banging on about their hobby horses without a real understanding of the technologies or a sensible numerical evaluation of options are part of the problem, not the solution.
I'm an Aussie and I'd love to see the world have a transition plan to renewables. Having said that, I'd like to clarify a point made in this clip. It's important to understand that Australia is THE biggest exporter of coal, in the world. Accounting for 30% of the worlds coal. Therefore whilst someone could make an economic case for Australia to produce cheap renewable energy for it's domestic market, it doesn't want to discourage the world from using coal because it will devastate our huge export revenue stream. This is an important factor and an aspect that people rarely mention in their analysis of our policies.
Replace the coal exports with export of Australia designed and manufactured energy storage systems. Instead of mining coal share in the building of solar panels and windmills. Market your products by demonstrating their effectiveness Down Under.
It would be really interesting if those hydride units are easy to remove when full and, say, stick in your car, or sell to someone who needs more energy.
The typical hydride is iron oxide which is massively heavy, i.e. far to volumous and heavy for practical hydrogen storage inside an electric vehicle.........even those super heavy lithium based batteries used in e-vehicles are lighter.
While much of this is interesting, i could not help but notice a significant and unwarranted degree of implied negative bias towards the fossil fuel industries. But that is likely due to my 40+ Electrical engineering career serving a broad range of energy industries beginning with hydro and CANDU fission nuclear and ending with oil and natural gas industries with some PV solar and environmental soil remediation tossed into that mix. The devil is in the details and who could know better than the energy industry engineers who struggle with intense laws of physics, economics and budget constraints 24/7/365 days a year. “Its not so much what we don’t know that gets us into trouble but what we know for sure that just ain’t so!” - Mark Twain.....and “It is much easier to fool someone than it is to convince that person that they have been fooled!” Consult any electrical engineer who has worked in a variety of energy related industries to gain a more thorough and indepth understanding of the transition challenge ahead....preferably one who is retired as those who are still working know enough to remain silent when their career could be on the line for speaking against an obviously bad energy concept...... You will not find many engineers who manage energy projects from the top down......but wealthy business men who hire engineers to do their bidding.
@@JustHaveaThink a joke for us Australians if they are removable we could have them like a swappa bottle (8.5-9 kg gas bottles for the BBQ) we are psychologically trained to monitor the gas bottle abs swap them over
They do not have to describe the exact method used to make the storage. They just have to describe how it function. Just have a look at some of the crazy software patents that have been granted.
@@bknesheim Yes and no. Look at what happened to Pfizer with Viagra - they lost their patent because they did not describe which component was the active one - just some mixture. This resulted in loosing their patent for the active ingrediant - and in generic Viagra. Softwarepatents are a whole different can of worms - and I believe they only work because of a cold war - everybody is holding so many softwarepatents which would disrupt the other side that nobody challenges them.
The perfect home hydrogen fuel cell would get its water for electrolysis from rain water barrels, use excess solar power to convert the rain water to H2. The hydrogen fuel cell can power the house at night and warm the house during winter and run AC units during the summer. The fuel cell’s water byproduct is undrinkable without processing; you can either use that water to keep radiated heat pipes full, or filter/mineralize/soften the water for drinking. For me, I’d like to use a CO2 scrubber to turn the fuel cell’s water to soda water. Unlimited vodka club.
Hydrogen storage at home has been done but large scale hydrogen is highly problematic , clean hydrogen, only exists with renewable created. Hydrogen for. Ars is dead , buses , trucks may be possible but personally I believe it is oil industry and old school vehicle manufacturers. Storage for large scale maybe possible but it is both expensive , dangerous and energy inefficient . The lava system does look good I must say of it lives up to its hype but as you say it may have a part to play but efficiency seems it’s weakness but a larger system maybe more economic. Batteries however are becoming better and cheaper and hydrogen may have little further to go in its efficiency , great show again
So, I might be wrong here, but in addition to being more than double the cost of a tesla power wall, wouldn't you also need to double your solar capacity in order to make up for the 50% efficiency rate? I think that needs to be considered as part of the total cost of ownership for a system like Lavo, since it's roughly 50% less efficient than the battery.
It depends how much time are they able to hold power, even inefficient one. If you have double the power you need from your solar, let's say you use 2MV / year, you will need 4kWp solar array - that will cost you 149 eur / per 330 Wp panel, that mean little under 900 eur total (adition to your power plant). Also, need to know other things like max charging capacity of those new LAVO battery etc.
The latest from Australia is the power industry wants to penalize people that have PV systems at certain times of the day for putting power into the grid. This is on top of having a difference of up to 30 cents per kilowatt for PV as against power from the grid (for example 11 cents for a PV kilowatt and then charging 37-38 cents per kilowatt in return to the same customer).
Round trip efficiency isn't that important if the initial embodied energy is drawn from wind or solar. Mitigation of the intermittent nature of wind and solar is the greatest concern.
@@VinoVeritas_ Practicality is also important. as a farmer if you gave me the choice of 2 tractors one H2 and one EV i would take H2 it can be refilled in the field just as fast a diesel compared to an EV tractor that would need to be driven all the way home and take hours to recharge and we dont have time to wait around work has to be done or mother nature will leaves us behind.
another high quality well researched episode I did examine this domestic Lavo unit, but with the 50% round trip efficiency; costings came to $30,000 AUD for "stated" 20kWh storage, BUT on closer examination and reading past the fluff of the headline copy only getting half that. Works out to be $30,000AUD for only 10kWh, far far more expensive and huge bigger bulkier unit. So opted for 2x powerwall 2s, coming in at $24,000 AUD and proven TRUE 27kWh; to completement the current 11.88kWh reidental solar, excellent (so far). Maybe in a couple of years and with a few more iterations under the belt technology may be competitive, maybe .......
"Cooking on gas is one thing, Hydrogen, not so much" How does that make a difference lol! I'd rather cook on Hydrogen any day over propane lol! Hydrogen is Clean!
@@julieheath6335 Not, not really. It’s actually safer than gasoline. It is only dangerous in a confined space. It floats up and dissipates, where as Propane settles in low areas as it’s heavier than air. That “oh the humanity “ quote gets used for the wrong reasons way too much 😂
@@morteza1024 that is a lie.. hydrogen with air or oxygen burns at lower temperature than methane or most hydrocarbons. You are comparing just methane with air, vs hho which is a perfect mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.
Excellent coverage of a interesting technology. I really enjoyed how you thought through the higher order effects of how this and other tech could drive innovation/competition and ultimately lead to large scale adoption. You don't encounter a lot of people using logic/reason in the USA sustainability discussion like you do. Mostly just a lot of appeals to tradition or emotion so that no progress happens at all...
You can also use process heat from nuclear powerplants to create hydrogen using thermochemical processes to produce carbon-free hydrogen as you would with renewables only more reliable.
I would think they could get the price down with economies of scale. However, I hope whatever metal they use is not an expensive one, e.g., platinum, which is used in Plug Power’s PEM fuel cells.
Any fuel cell will have both expensive materials and expensive nanotechnology to get a decent efficiency level. Still your talking electricity to gas then back to electricity. Remember KISS principle make electricity : store electricity : use electricity. No middle step = more efficient less bits to go wrong or add cost.
Found a few more contenders "Here are a few examples of metals that can absorb hydrogen to form metal hydrides: Sodium (Na) to form sodium hydride (NaH) Calcium (Ca) to form calcium hydride (CaH2) Magnesium (Mg) to form magnesium hydride (MgH2) Lithium (Li) to form LiH Aluminum (Al) which forms aluminum hydride or alane (AlH3)"
As an Australian, I declare this sentence horrific. Wombles are fictional re-cycling heroes from the 70's. Lauding the PM, or an insult in some wrong fashion? FYI : Wombles are organised, work as a team, Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean. Underground, overground, Wombling free. The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we. Wombles are awesome. SocMO not so.
"Electricity at low prices" LMAO. Prices and profits won't drop until energy companies (same for other utilities) are no longer privately owned. Maybe if Australia went on the 'green' production H2 use they could desalinate seawaterand regreen the interior.
Ownership matters little. Corruption is the biggest problem, followed by poorly maintained infrastructure. And why use solar to split water into hydrogen, recombine it for power, then use that to desalinate water? Hydrogen isn't an energy source, per se. Its a storage medium, just like how petroleum is storing energy that plants used millions of years ago. The interior has already been greened to a certain extent. The range of kangaroo has expanded tremendously, thanks to the water sources that ranchers have for their livestock
The high energy prices in Europe are mostly a result of renewable energy that won't be stored for times with no sun and no wind. So the old infrastructure is still there for this times and gets maintained. The old infrastructure produces less and costs nearly the same. At the same time more wind turbines and solar panels get build without building enough storage systems. The renewable energy gets highly supported by the state. Building storage systems is expensive and the old infrastructure is already there. So it is at least in most of Europe a result of energy politics and not of the "bad" private companies.
I've talked to lavo. They are really nice people and are working hard at this technology. I hope they can expand into the US markets sometime soon. Really nice folks!
whatever system they develop you can rest assured that either it will have a limited life (then you have to buy another) or they will make parts that have to replace, but what they will not allow you to have is a lifelong maintenance free system. Check out the new Hydrogen powered JCB that even gets its H2 from abroad in on-site storage tanks (excellent carbon footprint I must say) I have repeatedly asked them why their new engine is not HOD (Hydrogen On Demand) but have been ignored!
There's a guy in New Jersey who did this years ago in combination with solar to produce it. He has it set up so that the hydrogen is stored by itself. If it leaks or a tear happens in the tank the hydrogen just dissipates and is harmless. The danger is the gray or brown hydrogen (I think that's it's name) where it's in combination with oxygen. That's explosive. Anyway, he produces electricity with it and doesn't allow it to burn. Pretty cool stuff. Far beyond my abilities.
@@trialsted Hydrogen is NOT a green house gas. It's stored in low pressure containers. If it leaks, it dissipates so quickly it can't catch fire. The Hindenburg that so many people believe was caused by the hydrogen was actually the paint that was used. That's what caused the fire to be the way it was
Another great bit of info. I'm a massive fan of hydrogen for our future and I like the idea of Lavo but not keen on the fact that if installed for homes the water used would be fresh water which is something we all know will be another issue in the future due to the fact that humans can't stop breeding. ITM power are very advanced in electrolyser technology making green hydrogen and I still see green hydrigen as a far better and more practical solution. Just for the transport sector battery manufacture will be held up because the manufacturers can't get the materials needed and people all trying to change their cars at home every evening will cause massive logistic problems. Something green hydrogen wouldn't suffer from.
It still amazes me that the vast majority of houses in the UK are not fitted out with solar. I do realise that we just can't dispose of fossil fuels overnight in favour of electric as the amount of job losses would probably cripple the British economy, but I do think we should be progressing a lot faster than we are at present.
no joy there then. Just heard news of an electric motor being developed in Britain without permanent magnets. So that will be sold to another country to reap the benefits
Thank you for everything you research for us. I'm on a fixed income and severely tight budget, and although I can't afford to financially donate, I spread the word about your channel all the time. Keeping us informed about changes that will overwhelm us over the next 20 years will be paramount, hopefully you'll be here to explain it all as we progress in an honest, easily comprehensive way. 💖
I live in Australia. We invested in roof top solar like millions of other Australians. Unfortunately governments on the left and right have overseen the price we get for our solar energy from energy companies plummet. It’s ironic that Australia is now wasting vast amounts of renewable energy because governments on both sides of politics can’t work together to capture this energy.
While I’m a fan of renewables, the fact is they don’t provide enough baseline power, in-particular during the night when most homes use most of their power.
It seems politics is the problem on many levels in our societies. Politicized science and health, is contributing to divisionism and denial, leading us towards an environmental disaster.
heck I even read a report that the government is charging Australians for exporting this green electricity back to the grid!
The Politicians are just the visible actors, it is the ones behind that curtain that do the bribing, sorry campaign contributions that are the bad actors along with certain arguably evil media organisations that manipulate public perceptions and opinions
That's why gov'ts should be funding geothermal R&D post-haste. If we can accelerate 10 years of development into 5 years, that will be all we'll need for the foreseeable future.
There is more wind during night and winter. Australia should invest more on wind. Australia has enough solar energy already.
They should be investing more on wind hydrogen and batteries.
As I've come to expect from your videos, this was yet another very interesting and exciting development in the green energy industry. Enjoy your week holiday!
Thank you. Happy Easter to you too :-)
2 Thinks! First, my wife has chemical sensitivities so I made a hydrogen cook stove (Hindenberg I with modified natural gas range) and we cooked with H2 for years. The off-grid PV system electrolyzed water and stored H2 gas in an inverted barrel in a larger water filled barrel using only the pressure from the alkaline electrolyzers. We also purchased bottled H2 gas. Results are the chef-preferred "cooking with gas" but with no CO, CO2 pollution. Second, consider "H2 gas blending with CH4" at the home / business. Solar electrolysis H2 combining with natural gas at 10-20% H2 blend can be easily used in all gas appliances with no modifications. Reduced carbon and uses renewable energy to displace fossil fuel for distributed solar fuel at the point of use in residential, commercial and even industrial processes.
The energy ministery of my country (Chile), has started to invest a lot in green hydrogen at the north, not sure how it will develop in the next years
hopefully it will work out better then the management of your lithium resources. I saw a video where they didn't want to have experienced engineers from outside Chile assist and it is not being run effectively. Instead of hiring outside firms (for fear of being ripped off). I don't know why they just don't hire individual consultants
@@sanansa4567 because the country is ruled by clowns that only want money and status, they don't care about growing or helping people
@@lucasvillalobos6809 All countries are run by greedy power hungry clowns ....its what defines the 21 st century...
@@vrillx It defines all of human history. I'm afraid its some sort of law of nature. Power hungry clowns are those who have the drive and ethics needed to rise to the top of society, so they are always our leaders. Democracy is supposed to stop that, but clearly it isn't working. We need to rethink how our system/society selects the people that rise to the top.
This is the first application of the hydrogen cycle that has an overall efficiency that I find palatable.
@bk_16 Fair enough. I am also sceptical but they have at least piqued my interest. My impression is that batteries will win the daily cycle but if the company can provide a cycle efficiency of close to 50% I would at least entertain the idea of incorporating such technology for longer outages.
For areas that regularly have winter storm-related outages, coupling the waste heat energy into the home would improve overall efficiency
The conundrum is that at the current price, several days worth of battery storage is economically competitive. Once one goes to 1/4 charge/discharge cycle per day the battery lifetime is approaching comparable performance to what the company is stating for the fuel cell.
My desire to see at least 50% cycle efficiency is the collected solar energy is better sold to the grid than be used in a low-efficiency storage mechanism from a global warming perspective. We should prioritize more efficient processes until renewable energy has expanded to meet our full energy needs.
I'd like to be hopeful, but realistically, batteries are just getting better and better. They're already cheaper, with better efficiency, and they'll have longer lifetimes soon enough. I just don't see hydrogen technology catching up.
@@jonmichaelgalindo I tend to agree with you. I need to get off my search for seasonal storage and come to terms that renewable capacity generation capacity needs to be sized such that storage is at weather scale, not seasonal scale.
Of course, the company is not promoting their product as such, but I was considering metal-hydride storage as an alternative to packing pipelines and underground formations with natural gas prior to peak season as what now occurs.
@@jonmichaelgalindo Battery technology has a lot of hard limits on what is possible, and those advances you mention are going to gain comparatively small increases in energy storage vs other mediums. Hydrogen won't need to try hard to catch up once battery tech plateaus, which it looks set to in the not too distant future.
@@hamsterminator That doesn't sound right. There are countless chemical systems that can cycle between differences in electrical bonds, possibly even systems that improve with use instead of degrading, and millions never yet synthesized. A bacterial battery would be free to manufacture, etc. I have never heard of any theoretical maximums other than 100% efficiency.
We've been using acetylene dissolved in a carrier to make it safe and manageable, for 100 years.
This is probably just the first of many hydrogen storage systems using this principle.
CSIRO has a patented storage as Ammonia, hydrogen is stripped out with a special membrane filter
Probably just the first to patent it, so they can make money from blocking it for the rest of the world. Capitalism really does everything anyhow possible to end humanity.
@@donalain69 True!
The sick idea of trade is the root cause of ALL problems!!!
Patents and money are tools to destroy the planet. Even the richest suffer!!!
Wake up people and stop supporting bullshit!!!
@@donalain69 Wow. Conspiracist trolls at work. They have already licensed it to three countries including South Korea.
@@stebarg I assume you farm your own food, dug your own well, make your own clothes and shoes, and built your own house and every stick of furniture with your own hands right? "Trade" is a "sick idea" that is the root cause of all problems? Methinks thou doth protest too much.
I love your videos.
Happy Easter!
Home storage is a good idea even without windmills or solar panels as they can make the home independent for the times where there is neither wind nor sunshine to rely on or in the worst case a blackout.
@Claire H Hydrogen It´s always nice to meet like-minded people.
@Hunzo77 How would you get water in a "Texas style" emergency?? I'm guessing those people with battery storage and solar panels probably did quite well without the need for hydrogen.
@@colconn57 I have a well... and putting it in was a lot cheaper than buying energy storage.
Mr Kokolore - WRONG, no wants a HINDENBURG in their Neighborhood , because it takes just ONE Hydrogen fuel cell to set the Whole Neighborhood on FIRE.
SWB - Solar, Wind, Battery is the Cheapest form of Energy on Earth , you are BETTER off just getting SOLAR and a HOME lion Battery.
@@markplott4820 How on earth is a single hydrogen fuel cell(the cell is just a piece of metal where the hydrogen passes through) supposed to set an entire neighborhood on fire? Even if it was a big tank it would most likely only damage the house it is in as hydrogen isn´t napalm sticking on other houses. The worst that could (most unlikely) happen is the ignition of a close neighboring house that's it.
Excellent - such a valuable and clear video. Very much appreciated, as someone who pays quite a lot of attention to Scott Morrison's massive climate policy vacuum.
Thanks, good video. I agree with your conclusion. More competetion will lower the costs while improving the designs. Green is improving at an astronomical pace. Yeah!!!
I didn’t get notified for this episode but stumbled here a day late. I have my bell on and had been eagerly awaiting to watch.
Wtf TH-cam
it is indeed the HydroCarbons attempt to remain relevant and a financial force in Canada as evidenced by the Alberta Politicians statements that hydrogen technology will move forward to ensure jobs and a future for Canadas Oil and Gas Industries regardless of cost or viability.
Genius idea to combine hydrogen as a hydride instead of compressing or freezing. 50% of excess energy is a 100% gain of what would be a waste product. Great optimistic content again, well done and keep it coming.
This isn’t new technology and it’s awesome to see it being pursued commercially finally.
NOPE, too late . SWB - Solar , Wind, Battery is Already the Cheapest Power on Earth, Displacing Hydrogen, CNG and ALL Fossil fuels.
@@markplott4820 solar and wind yes, but batteries are not very environmentally friendly and are expensive ....
@@richardstubbs6484 - this is FALSE , home batteries are a good Resourse as they REUSE spent BEV battery from cars , and battery Prices CONTINUE to fall each year.
otherwise the Battery ends up in LANDFILL,
at the END the Home battery can be RECYCLED and elements Extracted.
I would like to know how many of these units have been produced. Its one thing to make something work on a bench but its different story to build at scale.
@@markplott4820 hey maybe throw some more capslock in there
7 months ago??? I’ve always been on lookout for anything green technology even earth batteries. This is the 1st time I saw you. Wonderful presentation. Look forward to seeing you on our “major media” news here in America.
Just don't hold your breath. What I've found, here in America, is that you *must go looking* for the information. If the powers that be don't see profit in disseminating the information ... well, you know the rest of the story.
"It takes more energy input from the fossil fuels than you get out. You can't make this up."
All hydrogen production requires more energy put in than you get out. There is absolute no way around this law of physics.
Precisely. That’s why the sensible are concentrating on hydrogen as a storage method. Use as a motive fuel Only makes sense when extremely high energy densities are required and gasoline is outlawed.
I absolutely love this channel :)
11:07 small mistake. You can't pressurise hydrogen to liquify it at "normal" temperatures. It's critical point is 32K.
Yes which makes the process even worse
Did u mean ref. at 5:07? "(hydrogens) volume is enormous at normal temperature ...has to cryrogenically cooled to minus 250° Celsius" ?
Good to see that there are arising so many options to store hydrogen
Hydrogen storage in metal hydrides has been around for decades, I've even seen a large system personally in use at my university about a decade ago, feeding PEM fuel cells. This Lavo unit is just a sexy commercial version of very well established tech. The more important question is, why if it's been around for so long, has it not been widely implemented? Probably because fuel cells are generally considered as being too expensive to be practical at the moment, however, if they do become more mainstream, then hydrogen storage in metal hydrides would probably be the preferred choice imho.
Technology is only considered advancement when it serves capital. "Where will we put our meters?"
My basic understanding of the metal hydride system is that it requires a high temperature to get the hydrogen back out again, which obviously uses energy which has to initially come from somewhere and will further reduce the efficiency of the whole system. For this reason it is un attractive and I do wonder if LAVO has a new chemical composition that mitigates this. There seems to be no mention of this so if I was a betting man I'd say not, luckily I'm not a betting man and I will watch this space over the next ten years.
@Nicola Toma
The Gencell hydrogen fuel cell system can use ammonia for storing the hydrogen. The byproduct is nitrogen which makes up 79% of what we breathe. And the infrastructure for making ammonia is well established and produces huge amounts, but not green.
Yes, but that well established tech is optimized for different use cases. The landscape has shifted quite a bit with wind and solar costs coming down, so development of versions optimized to serve as "batteries" for that makes sense... And that sort of development/optimization isn't easy.
I think where I've heard most excitement interest in metal hydride hydrogen storage in the past was around transport/cars. This application makes more sense to me, though I'm not certain about the fuel cell side of it.
Because it doesn't make much sense without home solar or similar, which were very uncommon until recently.
Thanks for explaining this for the average consumer. 😊
Andrew Forrester a Iron Ore mining magnate, has expressed his interest into "green" hydrogen. Also making "green" steel.
He is not waiting for govanostra. His company is Fortescue Metals.
Was seeing if anyone was going to mention Fortescue. Massive plan and hopefully the WA government can back it up
Me and my team in the university of tennessee at chattanooga department of engineering used this technology to power a small “chemical” car in regional and national competitions. Presentation of the pack was 5 V output and 0.5A. Very neat and important piece of tech here
"Me and my team used this technology....." Even grade schooler has better English.
@@bogtrotter5110 you bored?
@@gutundu Nah, just disgusted. We are engineering our planet to death.
@@bogtrotter5110 Seems like it. hopefully this tech helps us use more renewables though
I am hopeful for the technologies but skeptical because of the link to fossil fuels. Great video :>
It can start on fossil fuels but can eventually transfer to just using water as well when we find an easier way that's less energy intensive.
Remember this Lavo system has 0 connection with the fossil fuel, it's just a different kind of battery for the home.
@@autohmae True, I have no problem with the battery itself, just the production of the fuel it uses (hydrogen).
@@AndPennyThought well, for this product the production only happens near the battery, so at home. No external fuel company involved.
@@autohmae Oh geeze I think I misunderstood. For some reason I thought that tanks would have to be refilled! Thanks for pointing it out!
Thank you for this excellent presentation of the evolution of Hydrogen for energy. Soon (I hope) you will present us with a user-friendly-economic-green-energy system for the home.
Interestingly pretty much all of the state governments in Australia are at odds with the federal government in regards to carbon targets🙄
great vid! Every country needs this!
3:55 This looks like real progress to me. I have no doubt that, ten years ago, Morrison would have simply said "There is no credible energy transiton plan," and simply omitted the rest.
3 years ago ScoMo brought a lump of coal into our parliament - now he doesn't talk about coal, only gas. Technically it is progress in the right direction, but nowhere near fast enough and we're still likely to have new gas fields, electricity generation plants and "blue" hydrogen hubs here, locking in higher emissions for decades to come.
Luckily there is some momentum for the green version of hydrogen, and one of our many mining billionaires is actually putting real money behind specifically green hydrogen, saying there is no point in developing any other kind in a low emissions world. Just need the message to get through to the pollies.
@@idunnoay Oh yes, I know about ScoMo, even over here; just saw footage of him yesterday, in fact, in one of a seies of videos on the history of Tesla. We have Inhofe and his snowball, you have ScoMo and his lump of coal. You probably heard the saying that science progresses one funeral at a time. Alas, it tends to apply to politics as well.
Very nice solution. Similar to HomePowerSolutions in Berlin, Germany. Produce H2 in summer and store it for the winter - will be a key technology! Great video, thanks.
The metal sponge is the way Acetylene is stored.
I was thinking this, but if the term "hydride" is an actual chemical term, then there's little chance it's anything other than an alkali metal, which leaves about five candidates. When you factor in cost and abundance, then that narrows it down to three, and considering prices of lithium, that would bring it to two, cheapest and lightest of which is sodium or an alloy of NaK. I'd bet my GME stocks on it.
thanks, didn't realise Acetylene was absorbed into a metal
I thought Acetylene was dissolved in an Acetone / kieselguhr slurry?
@@tedf1471 yes in a metal sponge and the cylinder should never be laid on it’s side because of the Acetone
I could be wrong but I think the filling is more like a porous cementitious product. It used to be asbestos, but no longer I think.
Brilliant, so helpful. I appreciate the links in the video description.
Without knowing which metal is hydrated, it's hard to know if this is just trading one problem for another one down the road.
True; presumably it will not be one of the more abundant and commonplace metals or else the hydrogen absorbing property of it would surely have been appreciated long ago. In which case, it could be something that is in short supply.
@@danyoutube7491 I posses none of the requisite knowledge to hazard a guess, however, when welding, low hydrogen rods are used because of hydrogen embrittlement of steels and iron.
Perhaps it's not such an exotic material?
At a guess I would presume titanium is the most likely candidate.
This isn't new technology and the idea has been kicking around for years. The trouble is that like a battery it takes time to charge and discharge. If the manafacture have managed to improve the technology then this could be a real "Game Changer" The main advantage is you don't have to store pressurised hydrogen.
@Claire H Hydrogen I am not surprised by that. As various metal hydrides have the ability to take up hydrogen. I only mentioned titanium because it is relatively cheap like aluminium.
Certainly this is a good idea and I hope that it becomes reality.
I think so, posted a comment saying that in the future if this is used as a permanent power source there would be an issue down the road where there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere instead of carbon dioxide. Besides, when this thing is running, just don't have a naked flame nearby!!!... boom
Thanks for the insight in Australia's storage abilities and technology, great to hear that Australia can compete with the rest of the world🥸
So each module stores 10 kWh, and they are removable. So if the modules can be made cheaply enough, an outhouse could store a winter's worth of a Passivhaus-standard energy needs. Bit of a fiddle having to keep changing them but IMHO it's a move in the right direction.
It depends on module cost if this would be viable.
At least a mechanism for exchanging modules would be quite simple and the capacity could be upscaled easily.
Or just bigger modules. Might be more practical than swapping modules out.
Or swappable modules could be used for powering a vehicle or other mobile device.
One big advantage this kind of system offers is long term storage, basically any arbitrary length of time. Batteries aren't real good at holding charge for long periods. Whereas this thing really dosn't have much limit on how long ot could hold energy for.
Wow so you can fill up the modules abs easily swap them out. If the modules are cheap why not have larger racks of modules.
The video suggested the modules need to be kept pressurised to stop the H leaching out, though perhaps the pressures required aren't too onerous?
This is a great Australian invention developed into a commercial product. We are only a couple of months from the first commercial installation, so we will see how it works coupled with solar panels. It looks like a perfect fit to fill the power gap early morning and at night.
I wonder they had considered using the heat from the electroliser as past of the domestic water heating.
That would raise the operating efficiency.
There's an idea.
@@durwoodmaccool890 the water inside the units do get hot well normal wet cell hho`s, you could incase a wet cell in moving liquid or pipes around it and use that as a heat source
It is not a continuous process. Once the electricity storage is done, no heat will be produced. I doubt if it would be viable to add the complexity.
@@nitinmittal213 agreed but given you are creating hydrogen as a fuel to heat the home. This short term heat would be added to the hot water store. It would mean less hydrogen needs to be burned for heat etc.
If 30% of the energy is lost to heat using it is a significant boost in efficiency.
@@market0that yeah I too love commercial Tri Gen systems! Looking at this system I suspect they already have too many components and potential points of failure, adding more on paper gives economic efficiency gains but I suspect would make the system even more unwieldy and “between” applications and all but impossible to gain domestic market penetration.
Great vid, just commenting for the algorithm
Thank you for your thoughts and knowledge. You mentioned that in Australia we can utilise millions of panels. Recently we have heard that people will be charged for uploading their excess power to the grid. I wonder if you could please investigate this recent change, thank you.
Interesting. There are some real costs related for measuring & administration of exporting electricity into the grid. More volatile energy makes it also more difficult = expensive for the lazy base load systems like coal to react. If they blame the green energy for that they have an argument to penalize them. But is it really the fault of regenerative energy production that coal firing can not be properly adjusted to demand? This argument is imo based on a big fossil power generation perspective that is disturbed and wants to remain alone in the market.
Sounds like bollox to me.
Who would actually pay to provide excess energy to the grid when they could just disconnect and supply nothing ?
@@massimookissed1023 solar panels disconnected from a load don't fair too well. They heat up pretty dramatically but I suppose you could cover them
There are some complex arguments in this proposal - and it has been on the cards for a while. As a solar owner I was initially frustrated by this. It will however be scale based on what your system can feed in and you would still be making a 'profit' or credit as Origin puts it. I have heard arguments that we are effectively using an extant system to sell our produced solar and expect to be able to do so without incurring costs. My response is that the feed in tariff is lower than the purchase point which should be covering this cost. I think real and significant issue is bigger than all of this. Its that NSW State Govt could see the writing on the wall and sold off the poles and wires a few years ago to avoid it being their problem - consequently the private industry has not invested and now we have a grid incapable of dealing with the burgeoning solar during the day and supply everyone during the night (I say this as a layman and am happy to have further explanation provided to me). My personal belief is that more incentives should be put towards home solar owners purchasing battery options rather than penalizing those investing in home solar. This would relieve the grid... of course then those energy companies wouldn't be making their dollars at night.
@@nerdy1701 What do you mean they heat up? The charge controller disconnects the array by not using power from it, if batteries are full. The panels sit there obediently until needed. Using them doesn't cool them off!
It's always been a reality. But the tank you need is impracticably large. This is amazing.
Dimensions: 1680 x 1240 x 400 mm, fairly larger than the power wall (1150x760x150mm) but if you have the space and can be kept outside still practical.
Storing hydrogen in any useable form has always been a nightmare. If Lavo has solved this problem in such a small formfactor, then that is a monumental discovery on the scale of nuclear power. I'm betting it's BS.
Thanks again, and enjoy your well deserved holiday..
Thank you :-)
Awesome content 👍👍
Agreed. This was a good video.
Why didn't anyone else think to use solar for the electrolysis? So obvious, good job Lavo!
"Why didn't anyone else think to use solar for the electrolysis?" Many, many, many people have discussed it.
I would like some follow-up videos to the New tech you've brought up over the years. New stuff is cool to hear about, but viability is only proven over time and I find it incredibly hard to check up on these things.
The sad truth is most don't go anywhere, not because of some fossil fuel bogeyman but because an engineering hurdle that has yet to be overcome.
@@letsgosurfing1786 I would be more specific: because they couldn't bring the price down for mass-production or some other mass-production problem.
Good idea!
Would very useful if you could compare the Lava system to HPS - Picea a German home hydrogen system which uses hospital like oxygen gas bottles for storage, different from the Australian storage
HPS was founded in 2012 ,but has existing home owner users who have surplus solar generation capacity in the summer.
The Picea electrolyser uses the excess solar energy in the summer, produces hydrogen for storage and use in the winter. There are a number of videos on TH-cam showing the system working with owners comment on its efficiency and cost - it is not cheap! But one video shows a large chalet in the Swiss mountains now having all year around electricity where previously only a generator could supply electric, the house being nowhere near the local grid. Keep up the good work - your videos are always fascinating!
I think the low round-trip charge / discharge (in)efficiency won’t compensate for the high claimed cycle count. It’s a physical limit and can’t be improved much whereas cycle improvements in Li technology and further price falls will continue to improve it.
I completely agree. I don't think hydrogen makes sense in home storage and cars.
This invention may have a great potential in planes/container ships where energy density is more important than efficiency and cost. And maybe grid storage, when you want to store energy for months due to seasonal abundance of a power source.
@@onur6233 , New batteries promise to allow use them as structural parts. This would allow battery replace some support structures reducing extra weight added. Chalmers University of Technology claims a breakthrough which would be good enough for products soon. They promise comparable strength to aluminium with 75Wh/kg specific energy which is close to 150-250Wh/kg for batteries in market.
Even if this storage technology can't be improved, small-scale solar and wind generation technology can, which will continue to push down the cost of the additional generation capacity needed for this storage, making the lower round-trip efficiency less relevant to anyone with enough real estate to host the additional capacity. LAVO is targeting remote off-grid applications where there is plenty of real estate for solar and wind generation and the easier transport and longer lifespan will be advantages.
Li storage is already 95% efficient so there is no room for improvement there. It's all about cost. This box claims to be cheaper than Li per kWh stored. Ultimately that's all we care about. PV is 20% efficient, Petrol engine is
@@xxwookey You've missed the point completely. Li-ion is already significantly more efficient than this technology but OP was referring to storage capacity, cycle-life, and cost of ownership, which will be on the decline thanks to the massive push for batteries in the EV market. He also mentioned that there is a limit to the round-trip efficiency of hydrogen and will be capped, thanks to heat loss, long before it reaches the 95% mark we see with Li-ion.
Good start. My future concept is to bypass solar or wind and use plasma type to electrolyse and create hydrogen. The speed of my concept will see the initial h2 go into a storage chamber and combine with O2 to make dc power. This will then be used by the eleftrolyser .
Lavo could make sense today in a hybrid commercial system today where you use hydrogen and lithium ion. There is a portion of your storage that will need to cycle at a far higher rate so hydrogen can be used for that while the lithium ion can be used more for the medium term storage. Kind of like cache and RAM memory on a computer.
It would be the used the other way around. Batteries usually have massive cycle capability if you only use a small amount.
Main question after the video is the power density. Could one unit produce 10 kW to power a home?
@Marc Jackson These units contain Lithium batteries and those batteries are used as I state. Info available in there spec.
The power density is fairly low 5kW. It’s not enough to run a home. Info also available in there spec.
Li-ion cells can have a million cycles if the correct circumstances are fulfilled. In these applications Li-Fe is common and they don’t suffer from thermal runaway.
@Marc Jackson Stop being a jackass and go read the spec for the product. It clearly state what I have written earlier. I tried to link it but YT won’t let me.
There are some peer reviewed papers on micro cycles for Liion batteries. Read those as well. If what you say would be correct regenerative breaking in electric cars wouldn’t exist.
There is no need to get offensive or have a bad attitude. Please behave as the best version of yourself.
Always great videos, logical and no BS!
Metal hydrides for storing hydrogen have been a known technology since the late 80's
But the commercial viability has been lacking. However if countries start putting in carbon tariffs left and right, it may definitely swing. Especially for applications where extremely high heat is required. Carbon free combustion would make a great contribution towards removing a large portion of humanity's green house gas emissions especially smelting, cement clinker production etc...
Exactly right, but they are heavy and they get really hot.
This is exactly what I've been looking for for my rural home and a wind turbine.
TLDW: Unlikely
edit: glad you addressed the link to fossil fuel companies
I can always spot which generation is talking to me... my Dad's generation tell me I talk too quickly, and my nephews generation tell my I talk too slowly. That tells me I've got it spot on ;-)
@@JustHaveaThink yup. I sense paper publishing worthy research)
Hydrogen is just Gasoline wearing a dress.
I love your videos! Great info and well delivered
4:13
Mark Z. Jacobson used as a source to "comprehensively debunk" anything is an oxymoron. His work is highly contested despite his tendency to sue anyone who disagrees with him.
Probably a mistake.
@@davitdavid7165 Yeah I just feel the need to call out anything that references Mark Z. Jacobson because of the damage his "work" does
@@doritoification dont know who he is,but from what i heard from you he deserves to be called out. Thank you
I am disappointed in this channel.
Jacobson deserves the patent for 'fake news' and is a complete nutter.
And the ideological critique the author offers for seeking to dismiss hydrogen from natural gas with or without carbon capture and storage on the grounds that the fossil fuel industry is using it as a ruse is comparable to a marxist notion of 'fellow travellers'
Numerate critiques look at the numbers.
Hydrogen obtained by reforming for use in home fuel cells, as they do in 300,000 homes in Japan, means that the heat can be used for hot water, instead of vented to the atmosphere as present gas turbines do.
So something of the order of a 30% improvement in energy utilisation and consequently fewer carbon emissions is dismissed as not ideologically pure enough.
And some carbon capture methods result in solid carbon, for easy sequestration, and also industrial use.
Ideologues banging on about their hobby horses without a real understanding of the technologies or a sensible numerical evaluation of options are part of the problem, not the solution.
I'm an Aussie and I'd love to see the world have a transition plan to renewables. Having said that, I'd like to clarify a point made in this clip. It's important to understand that Australia is THE biggest exporter of coal, in the world. Accounting for 30% of the worlds coal. Therefore whilst someone could make an economic case for Australia to produce cheap renewable energy for it's domestic market, it doesn't want to discourage the world from using coal because it will devastate our huge export revenue stream. This is an important factor and an aspect that people rarely mention in their analysis of our policies.
Replace the coal exports with export of Australia designed and manufactured energy storage systems. Instead of mining coal share in the building of solar panels and windmills. Market your products by demonstrating their effectiveness Down Under.
This could lead to a real EXPLOSION in home storage.. ;)
Well I wouldn't want to store much at home.
only if the people working in the system are as idiots as you.
Lol
1 reason why lithium ion based home batteries scare the shit out of me.
Its actually safe. Hydrogen tanks can be shot and leak out and not cause a fire.
Extremely thought and experiment worthy!
Brilliant concept open up a very healthy contest in storage intuitive and inventive product is wait will save humanity dispute politics
Fascinating stuff - thanks Dave!
It would be really interesting if those hydride units are easy to remove when full and, say, stick in your car, or sell to someone who needs more energy.
Or store them on a shelf for future need.
The typical hydride is iron oxide which is massively heavy, i.e. far to volumous and heavy for practical hydrogen storage inside an electric vehicle.........even those super heavy lithium based batteries used in e-vehicles are lighter.
While much of this is interesting, i could not help but notice a significant and unwarranted degree of implied negative bias towards the fossil fuel industries. But that is likely due to my 40+ Electrical engineering career serving a broad range of energy industries beginning with hydro and CANDU fission nuclear and ending with oil and natural gas industries with some PV solar and environmental soil remediation tossed into that mix.
The devil is in the details and who could know better than the energy industry engineers who struggle with intense laws of physics, economics and budget constraints 24/7/365 days a year.
“Its not so much what we don’t know that gets us into trouble but what we know for sure that just ain’t so!” - Mark Twain.....and “It is much easier to fool someone than it is to convince that person that they have been fooled!” Consult any electrical engineer who has worked in a variety of energy related industries to gain a more thorough and indepth understanding of the transition challenge ahead....preferably one who is retired as those who are still working know enough to remain silent when their career could be on the line for speaking against an obviously bad energy concept......
You will not find many engineers who manage energy projects from the top down......but wealthy business men who hire engineers to do their bidding.
They are removable, and I think the company does hope to use them for different applications. Nott sure about a car though.
@@JustHaveaThink a joke for us Australians if they are removable we could have them like a swappa bottle (8.5-9 kg gas bottles for the BBQ) we are psychologically trained to monitor the gas bottle abs swap them over
Interesting to see how this will develop.
If it's patented it's the opposite of "held close to the chest" - in fact, it's then public information
They do not have to describe the exact method used to make the storage. They just have to describe how it function.
Just have a look at some of the crazy software patents that have been granted.
@@bknesheim Yes and no. Look at what happened to Pfizer with Viagra - they lost their patent because they did not describe which component was the active one - just some mixture. This resulted in loosing their patent for the active ingrediant - and in generic Viagra.
Softwarepatents are a whole different can of worms - and I believe they only work because of a cold war - everybody is holding so many softwarepatents which would disrupt the other side that nobody challenges them.
@@multimedia8729 I would say that this is basically what i meant. You have to describe what makes it work, but not how you make the part/ingrediant.
Excellent summation, thanks!
The perfect home hydrogen fuel cell would get its water for electrolysis from rain water barrels, use excess solar power to convert the rain water to H2. The hydrogen fuel cell can power the house at night and warm the house during winter and run AC units during the summer. The fuel cell’s water byproduct is undrinkable without processing; you can either use that water to keep radiated heat pipes full, or filter/mineralize/soften the water for drinking. For me, I’d like to use a CO2 scrubber to turn the fuel cell’s water to soda water. Unlimited vodka club.
Hydrogen storage at home has been done but large scale hydrogen is highly problematic , clean hydrogen, only exists with renewable created. Hydrogen for. Ars is dead , buses , trucks may be possible but personally I believe it is oil industry and old school vehicle manufacturers. Storage for large scale maybe possible but it is both expensive , dangerous and energy inefficient . The lava system does look good I must say of it lives up to its hype but as you say it may have a part to play but efficiency seems it’s weakness but a larger system maybe more economic. Batteries however are becoming better and cheaper and hydrogen may have little further to go in its efficiency , great show again
So, I might be wrong here, but in addition to being more than double the cost of a tesla power wall, wouldn't you also need to double your solar capacity in order to make up for the 50% efficiency rate? I think that needs to be considered as part of the total cost of ownership for a system like Lavo, since it's roughly 50% less efficient than the battery.
It depends how much time are they able to hold power, even inefficient one.
If you have double the power you need from your solar, let's say you use 2MV / year, you will need 4kWp solar array - that will cost you 149 eur / per 330 Wp panel, that mean little under 900 eur total (adition to your power plant). Also, need to know other things like max charging capacity of those new LAVO battery etc.
The latest from Australia is the power industry wants to penalize people that have PV systems at certain times of the day for putting power into the grid. This is on top of having a difference of up to 30 cents per kilowatt for PV as against power from the grid (for example 11 cents for a PV kilowatt and then charging 37-38 cents per kilowatt in return to the same customer).
11 cents is better than the WA government give - they only pay 7.135 cents per unit
Thank you for your ever so comprehensive video and information 🙏 love, from Portugal
Nice overview, thanks!
Love the cycle life. Hopefully they can get round trip efficiency up and cost down. . . .
Round trip efficiency isn't that important if the initial embodied energy is drawn from wind or solar. Mitigation of the intermittent nature of wind and solar is the greatest concern.
@@VinoVeritas_ Some energy lost > all energy lost.
@@iwiffitthitotonacc4673 Exactly!
@@VinoVeritas_ Practicality is also important. as a farmer if you gave me the choice of 2 tractors one H2 and one EV i would take H2 it can be refilled in the field just as fast a diesel compared to an EV tractor that would need to be driven all the way home and take hours to recharge and we dont have time to wait around work has to be done or mother nature will leaves us behind.
Great Presentation ---very professional ans balanced
Have you considered making a video on the environmental impact of NFTs?
I guess most of it is linked to crypto mining, but in that case, a video on that would also be great
another high quality well researched episode
I did examine this domestic Lavo unit, but with the 50% round trip efficiency; costings came to $30,000 AUD for "stated" 20kWh storage, BUT on closer examination and reading past the fluff of the headline copy only getting half that.
Works out to be $30,000AUD for only 10kWh, far far more expensive and huge bigger bulkier unit.
So opted for 2x powerwall 2s, coming in at $24,000 AUD and proven TRUE 27kWh; to completement the current 11.88kWh reidental solar, excellent (so far).
Maybe in a couple of years and with a few more iterations under the belt technology may be competitive, maybe .......
Hi Leopold - incidentally, the LAVO unit is 40 KWh of USABLE storage - i.e. post the 51% roundtrip efficiency loss.
"Cooking on gas is one thing, Hydrogen, not so much"
How does that make a difference lol! I'd rather cook on Hydrogen any day over propane lol! Hydrogen is Clean!
Hydrogen burns so hot it melts anything
H2 does tend to explode if there's a leak. Kind of a negative.
Don't forget the "Oh, the humanity!" Quote from the Hindenburg explosion...
@@morteza1024 the make Hydrogen stoves.
@@julieheath6335 Not, not really. It’s actually safer than gasoline. It is only dangerous in a confined space. It floats up and dissipates, where as Propane settles in low areas as it’s heavier than air. That “oh the humanity “ quote gets used for the wrong reasons way too much 😂
@@morteza1024 that is a lie.. hydrogen with air or oxygen burns at lower temperature than methane or most hydrocarbons.
You are comparing just methane with air, vs hho which is a perfect mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.
Excellent coverage of a interesting technology. I really enjoyed how you thought through the higher order effects of how this and other tech could drive innovation/competition and ultimately lead to large scale adoption. You don't encounter a lot of people using logic/reason in the USA sustainability discussion like you do. Mostly just a lot of appeals to tradition or emotion so that no progress happens at all...
you mean like when the Wright brothers built the airplane or Thomas Edison perfecting the light bulb or Benjamin Franklins MANY inventions?
You can also use process heat from nuclear powerplants to create hydrogen using thermochemical processes to produce carbon-free hydrogen as you would with renewables only more reliable.
Exploring technology opportunities is part of the discovery of what works best under varied conditions.
I would think they could get the price down with economies of scale. However, I hope whatever metal they use is not an expensive one, e.g., platinum, which is used in Plug Power’s PEM fuel cells.
Good point made. That would explain why the price tag is so high.
Any fuel cell will have both expensive materials and expensive nanotechnology to get a decent efficiency level. Still your talking electricity to gas then back to electricity. Remember KISS principle make electricity : store electricity : use electricity. No middle step = more efficient less bits to go wrong or add cost.
H2 in a metal could bee Platnium, becource of its big surface area, that was big in the 1990's
Thanks for sharing your video to all of us
Found a few more contenders
"Here are a few examples of metals that can absorb hydrogen to form metal hydrides:
Sodium (Na) to form sodium hydride (NaH)
Calcium (Ca) to form calcium hydride (CaH2)
Magnesium (Mg) to form magnesium hydride (MgH2)
Lithium (Li) to form LiH
Aluminum (Al) which forms aluminum hydride or alane (AlH3)"
FYI, as an Australian I would like to declare that ScoMo is an absolute Womble.
As an American could you please translate that for us? Lol
As an Australian, I declare this sentence horrific. Wombles are fictional re-cycling heroes from the 70's. Lauding the PM, or an insult in some wrong fashion?
FYI : Wombles are organised, work as a team, Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean. Underground, overground, Wombling free.
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Wombles are awesome. SocMO not so.
ScoMo is short for Scott Morrison, Australia's current Prime Minister.
Without him you would’ve seen far more COVID deaths. Labor’s Dictator Dan’s COVID performance was responsible for 90% of Australia’s COVID deaths.
Yep it will be a game changer as houses go BOOM!
I want to go like grandpa quietly in my sleep; not like the kids kicking and screaming in the back seat of the car
I heard it grandpa was a pilot for 40 years who died peacefully in his sleep....his passengers on the other hand died screaming.
Sounds amazing 👏 😍
"Electricity at low prices" LMAO. Prices and profits won't drop until energy companies (same for other utilities) are no longer privately owned. Maybe if Australia went on the 'green' production H2 use they could desalinate seawaterand regreen the interior.
You sure you ment privately owned?
UK has had negative wholesale prices in the last couple years, and paying people to charge their cars.
Ownership matters little. Corruption is the biggest problem, followed by poorly maintained infrastructure.
And why use solar to split water into hydrogen, recombine it for power, then use that to desalinate water? Hydrogen isn't an energy source, per se. Its a storage medium, just like how petroleum is storing energy that plants used millions of years ago.
The interior has already been greened to a certain extent. The range of kangaroo has expanded tremendously, thanks to the water sources that ranchers have for their livestock
The high energy prices in Europe are mostly a result of renewable energy that won't be stored for times with no sun and no wind. So the old infrastructure is still there for this times and gets maintained. The old infrastructure produces less and costs nearly the same. At the same time more wind turbines and solar panels get build without building enough storage systems.
The renewable energy gets highly supported by the state. Building storage systems is expensive and the old infrastructure is already there.
So it is at least in most of Europe a result of energy politics and not of the "bad" private companies.
Wow!!! that is amazing news. I hope the same technology can be enhanced to use as an aviation fuel. Thx. for the video.
I'm guessing it'll be way too heavy for that...
"RedFlow" 😂
I mean, I get it, redox flow -> RedFlow, but it just evokes menstruation imagery ^^
When he said that name, my immediate thought was "Do they realize what that sounds like?!"
Lol the power of my pissed off wife
@@citationsloth If we could harness that, this channel would be out of a job! 😁
Yeah, that name is... uh... not real good.
Love this. Do like your channel.
I've talked to lavo. They are really nice people and are working hard at this technology. I hope they can expand into the US markets sometime soon. Really nice folks!
I just love your videos...absolutely fantastic
Enjoy your easter JHAT!
Love the direction this technology is taking!
whatever system they develop you can rest assured that either it will have a limited life (then you have to buy another) or they will make parts that have to replace, but what they will not allow you to have is a lifelong maintenance free system. Check out the new Hydrogen powered JCB that even gets its H2 from abroad in on-site storage tanks (excellent carbon footprint I must say) I have repeatedly asked them why their new engine is not HOD (Hydrogen On Demand) but have been ignored!
Metalhydride storage of hydrogen is well known and widely used in modern German submarines for instance.
i don't get why people are so focussed on how hydrogen is produced, but ignore the environmental impact of producing batteries
There's a guy in New Jersey who did this years ago in combination with solar to produce it. He has it set up so that the hydrogen is stored by itself. If it leaks or a tear happens in the tank the hydrogen just dissipates and is harmless. The danger is the gray or brown hydrogen (I think that's it's name) where it's in combination with oxygen. That's explosive.
Anyway, he produces electricity with it and doesn't allow it to burn.
Pretty cool stuff. Far beyond my abilities.
I mean if you mean not harmful because it won't explode then maybe but it's still a very potent greenhouse gas
@@trialsted Hydrogen is NOT a green house gas.
It's stored in low pressure containers. If it leaks, it dissipates so quickly it can't catch fire.
The Hindenburg that so many people believe was caused by the hydrogen was actually the paint that was used. That's what caused the fire to be the way it was
Great vid as always!!!
The waste heat from the conversion could be used for heating water and the house using a heat pump.
Another great bit of info. I'm a massive fan of hydrogen for our future and I like the idea of Lavo but not keen on the fact that if installed for homes the water used would be fresh water which is something we all know will be another issue in the future due to the fact that humans can't stop breeding. ITM power are very advanced in electrolyser technology making green hydrogen and I still see green hydrigen as a far better and more practical solution. Just for the transport sector battery manufacture will be held up because the manufacturers can't get the materials needed and people all trying to change their cars at home every evening will cause massive logistic problems. Something green hydrogen wouldn't suffer from.
It still amazes me that the vast majority of houses in the UK are not fitted out with solar. I do realise that we just can't dispose of fossil fuels overnight in favour of electric as the amount of job losses would probably cripple the British economy, but I do think we should be progressing a lot faster than we are at present.
no joy there then. Just heard news of an electric motor being developed in Britain without permanent magnets. So that will be sold to another country to reap the benefits