The Lord's Prayer has 66 words; the Gettysburg Address 286 words; the US Declaration of Independence 1322 words; the US constitution 4543 words (including signatures); EU regulations on the sale of cabbage 26,911 words; EU constitution over 60,000 words
@@SabineHossenfelderI think the incentives are the operative variable. “Greenwashing “ is a thing because people get emotional about… well the imminent starvation of 4 billion people could be emotional… This is a thermodynamic question: What’s the most reasonable way to drag carbon uphill to get it back to … is it phosphate, or do e we have to go all the way to ATP?
Hydrogen is always about natural gas sold as green energy because it's the only viable way to get large quantities of Hydrogen. This makes it the usual suspect who wants to prevent transition to green energy.
@@SabineHossenfelder against common "wisdom" is economics a ZERO-SUM-GAME.. for some to become rich others have to get poor. This is clear once one starts to look at (finite) human lifetime that is being worked and manifests in the form of goods and services. For some to be able to consume much more than they produce, others need to produce more than they get to consume.. why (some, most?) individuals prefer to consume more than they produce is based in biology and our individual drive to survive, reproduce and exist in comfort. It becomes a big problem when the society provides a few with the means to enforce this against the 'wants' of the majority though.. which is what is happening.
@@SabineHossenfelder There are lots of good uses for Hydrogen as a fuel, its just that the effectiveness of it is often oversetated by the media. In Germany the most important uses for hydrogen aren't local energy storage but actually as energy storage for long ranged vehicles and as fuel for for the Metal industry, because they are rellying on gas since heating with electricity is not suficient. The german governments plan was also not actually short term storage, but to make energy transport from northern germany to the industry centers in the south better in the short term.
I worked in a company making burners for all kind of heating systems. They are testing with H2. They can make a working system with addition of 28% natural gas or else you'll have a bang with start up. Further, the chances of leakage is high because of the atom it's size. Producing is still expensive. I think it's saver to drink the cooling water of nuclear plants than having H2 storage throughout the country and a network through town.
Thanks that you mention the leaking problem, because of the size of the H2 molecule. If it come to a parctical use on industriel level it is essential problem no one has till now found a solution for it. When i studdied chemistry 30 years back, we allready discussed H2 and how to use it as a storrage for enegergie on industrial level. My professor explained the biggest problem like this: You can use a cloth bag to transport water from a nearby well to extinguish a fire. It works ok since it is only a short distance and for a short time. But you can not use that cloth bag to store the water for a longer time. Sadly most who discuss H2 do not know about this problem or are ignoring it. In Japan they search very hard with alot of money behind it, to find solutions for this problem. But they have still not found one.
Imagine simply having small electrolysis setups around facilities to produce H2 and O2, I'd imagine the energy bill would be massive. Maybe a way to store H2 in a more stable, less permeable yet easily dissolvable state that is not water?
@@OddWorlderer They are working on such solutions. Look at syntetic fuel or E-fuels. Synthetic methanol or ethanol are in the race and they actulaly make pogress to get the efficiency up and convert the technic up to industial usage. But they are still not where they need to be.
The serious problem with this video isn't that it says anything wrong, it's that it is missing the context that would make this a fair assessment of Hydrogen. The video only talks about the negatives of Hydrogen for energy storage but doesn't compare it to any other form of energy storage. When you do that, Hydrogen doesn't seem so bad. For example, saying that Hydrogen is only about 30% round trip efficient may be true, but how does that compare to other forms of energy storage? What if that is still twice as efficient as any other form of energy storage? (it's not, by the way). Batteries have many challenges that Hydrogen doesn't such as the use of scarce mineral resources that limit our ability to scale batteries to the levels we need. We can't dismiss a technology because it has disadvantages. If we did, we wouldn't be driving cars because so may people die in car accidents (over 40,000 per year in the US) and we wouldn't be using solar panels because they are all less than 25% efficient at turning the sun's energy to electricity (that's actually true). Hydrogen isn't perfect at energy storage, but nothing is. Other commenters here suggested the pros and cons of other technologies and that is what these videos should be doing. We can only improve as a society if we look to improve things, not try to make them perfect. As one commenter put it, isn't saving 30% of the energy better than saving 0%?
Interesting that your example of why we can't dismiss a technology is actually a perfect reason to do so. Yes, we shouldn't driving cars, because they are dangerous. And getting rid of cars would fix so many environmental and social problems. So.. let's dismiss bad technology!
@@mikolajwitkowski8093 Since people will always need mobility, getting rid of cars would simply lead to people switching to other available forms of transportation. Should we reintroduce hundreds of millions of horses as a 'natural' replacement for cars?! Would you then ride around to clean up the streets from all the sh*t?
There are much, much better options. Pumped storage in the first place. Start with Wiki 😁. The real solution of the whole CO2 emissions problem is to save energy, adapt the use to the supply (dynamic meters), build much more nuclear power plants and develop only promising storage concepts like hydro pump storage. All that simultaneously with the development of wind and solar capacity. Pump storage efficiency is up to 80% and once build it can serve for a thousand years with only minor maintenance costs. Burning money for idiotic fantasies is no solution at all
You miss on crucial point! A point that most who discuss it in theory and not on industrial level forget. It the size probem. H2 is extremly smal. It differ out of every thing. Like water out of a cloth bag. To use the gas you need to lower the volume of the gas. As higher the pressure as more it differ. SO you need store it a liquid and even then it differ to a significant ammount. This problem is till today not solved but often overseen. That makes H2 so difficult to hanlde.
...amazingly, they never propose solutions where they themselves would suffer any losses. In fact, the proposed solutions always have the effect of personal enrichment or personal gains in power.
Thanks Sabine. I have channeled my great, great, greatgrandfather, Balthazar Haas and he says "Interesting but stupid". He also says to me, "Dennis, you are a chemical engineer, ask to see the energy and material balance that they performed around the process. That will settle the matter quickly."
This is the logic of German Gentiles - always buying retail. German Jewish tailors know where to buy fabric wholesale. If you wanna solve problems, you need Jews.
Former German PhD student of chemistry here: I had performed research in the area of hydrogen storage. Apart from the issues mentioned like hydrogen embrittlement it's about storage. Even if we kept it pressurized the amount of energy stored per liter volume would still be low. So we could liquify it to increase the energy density... BUT: We would have to actively cool it all the time to keep it a liquid! That would f*** up the efficiency even more. 😉
@@genkiadrian Ammonia is a different substance.... 😉 The video has been about hydrogen and not ammonia. Those 'hydrogen-groupies' in politics want to work with hydrogen directly.
800 bar and H2 stays liquid even at RT. But this is extremely expensive and unpractical for larger quantities. Overall not an efficient way to store energy. Ammonia is also hazardous and very corrosive to materials. However one argument pro H2/Ammonia is that if your primary source of energy is abundant like the sun in some regions of ghe earth then your efficiency of conversion into something else does not matter that much.
@@tysi2011 H2's critical temperature is at 33 K.... above that temperature it cannot be liquified no matter the pressure. So hydrogen cannot be liquid at RT. 😉 Source: any basic thermodynamics lecture
@@knutritter461 You‘re right! I assumed the reason for H2-storage at 700bar is to keep it liquid! So another good reason to forget about H2 for large scale energy storage! Thanks for correcting my assumption!
I don‘t think investments in hydrogen are bad though, because methane/natural gas is used on a huge scale for concrete, steel and fertilizers. Basically anytime oxygen is reduced from a material.
Usually I like your videos for being level headed and reasonably well researched. This is not one of them. I am kind of getting sick of people oversimplifying or straight up misrepresenting complex but very important subjects just to strike a cheap point. If it seems that everybody else is stupid about something that you are not an expert in, pause and consider if it is not you who didn't entirely understand the thing. I would suggest to read actual scientific papers from reasearchers in the field (yes it is an entire field of study) instead of assuming you already know. If you dont have time for that consider interviewing some researchers that publish in the field or that helped e.g. the German government to put together their "insane" hydrogen strategy instead of just implying that they all are just stupid or morally corrupt. I usually come here to learn new things and to get well reasoned perspectives on various topics. I understand that not every video will meet the same high standard but I hope for a little more humility on big topics that are actually important.
Large-scale electricity storage is a blatant cope. Rather than come out and admit that replacing reliable electricity production with unreliable electricity production was a mistake, they'd rather invent these ridiculous plans to store vast amounts of live electricity with 10 - 30% efficiency. It would literally be cheaper to build and maintain a whole extra parallel system of traditional, reliable power generation that you only use when the wind doesn't blow. _That's_ how much of a ridiculous non-starter this whole large-scale energy storage cope is.
I don't see here where you refuted that a green economy where intermittent power sources store their energy in hydrogen is an economically uncompetitive framework.
@@naimhdden4339 Correct, and I didn't intend to. I complained about a bad video in my opinion and the lack of nuance shown in the discussion. What do you mean with economically competitive? Under which geological and political conditions? What kind of workers do you have? What kind of students and industry? How much does it matter for the price when storage is inefficient but the power production is very cheap. Renewables are embarrassingly cheap to build and run. The most expensive part about hydrogen is to develop and build the infrastructure at scale. There are no cheap mass produced solutions out there - yet. Someone has to put in a shit ton of money and brains into developing scalable solutions. Is that economically viable? Not on the short term - not for investors - not yet. Is it economically viable for wealthy countries to invest greatly into establishing a new industry to get a share if not a lead and potential jobs in this future market? Well who knows? The central problem is that we have to stop burning fossil fuels to stop climate change. There is not one silver bullet solution that fits all... Hydrogen will play it's role - just like batteries, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, heat pumps, insulation, electric transport, plant based diets and yes nuclear power. The extent will vary from country to country based on wealth, resources, education, and politics. I don't think it is productive to call people stupid and pretending they don't know what they are doing without giving them a chance to explain.
I though hydrogen would be a great energy storage media when I was an undergrad...by the time I graduated, I understood that the energy density just isn't there. That was 35 years ago. It's nuts that people are still talking about this.
Yeah, I couldn't understand why we weren't all driving around in hydrogen fueled ICEs - back when I was in high school. Hydrogen is one of the most common elements on Earth. We can make it from water! Then I got another few years of physics and chemistry and eventually it became clearer...
@@MrNullifier Orkneys are, I would argue, special case as they are (remote) islands, without it!s own source of easily accessible gas at leas in low volume and without rivers for at least small scale hydropower.
Hydrogen can be turned into ammonia using the Haber-Bosch process. Ammonia is a fundamental base product of modern chemistry and can be used to make fertilizers, explosives as well as fuel. The hydrogen itself can be generated with high efficiency using high-temperature gas-cooled reactors using the sulfur-iodine cycle. I'm surprised that Dr. Hossenfelder mentions neither of them.
We don't need the same density as Methane, because we will need far less energy out of it. Hydrogen for electricity use only has to cover around 5% of the yearly production, the rest will be covered with wind, pv and battery storage. Most of the homes currently use natural gas for heating, with a switch to heatpumps we reduce the primary energy need there to a quarter. Also around 25% of the electricity on the grid is currently produced with methane and our current natural gas storage sites cover a full winter. We have more than enough storage for the hydrogen we need over the year. The "it's too expensive" argument is also misleading. If wind and solar costs 5 cents per kwh and electricity from hydrogen costs 20, then the average exchange price of electricity with a 5% usage of H2 is 5,75 cent. For people that can adjust their energy consumption, like not charging their ev or pulling energy out of their personal battery storage, when there is currently no direct renewable production in the grid, the costs will be even lower.
The most intelligent commentator I've come across. I discovered Sabine a few months ago and her output of content amazes me. To put out a well researched video like this every day that is to the point and well researched is quite a feat. That really shows how smart she is. Hats off to her... Also I love her sense of humour. That makes it even better.
Hydrogen + lightning caused the Hindenburg to explode in 1937. No plans to safely store it at present so it’s a financial and environmental risk today. 😡
Yeah, "Sabine" is by the way a top-scientist, with lots of life-experience in the field, and does YT collaterally, so, not your typical "YT-creator for the sake of clicks"...
"In words a politician can understand, use thermodynamics to show that hydrogen can never be an energy source." This was one of the problems in my calculus-based engineering physics text my freshman year in 1966. Our professor did not assign the problem because it was too easy and self-evident to us as 18-year old thinkers. I am embarrassed to see that we've made no progress as a society in 58 years.
Batterien, Netzausbau, intelligentere Stromnutzung. Wenn all das in einem maximalen Maß vorhanden ist, kann man den Überschuss in Wasserstoff umwandeln. Bis dahin ist es eine Schnapsidee. JETZT Wasserstoff ausbauen ist wie ein Hartzi, der für 500€ einen Goldmünzensammelschatulle kauft, um sich später besser vor Inflation schützen zu können.
I worked in a US rocket propulsion company for 30+ years. I was only peripherally involved in the LOX/LH2 rocket engines (SSME) and Scramjets (X30 NASP). The plumbing/valves/tanks for handling liquid or gaseous H2 under high pressure is expensive! Special (expensive) alloys are required to mitigate hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen leakage is an issue due to the small size of the molecule and requires specialized seal designs. High pressure storage tanks are not cheap and heavy if fiber-epoxy composite over wrapped designs aren't used. Composite tanks also have issues in civilian use; they have a limited cycle life. Also, as Sabine mentioned, GH2 is explosive with air in 5% to 95% mixtures which will lead to exciting RUDs if accidents occur. What's not to love with hydrogen?
And then, in civilian infrastructure the hydrogen will flow in and out all the time through the plumbing, so even more so than in a rocket engine you need to worry about neutral gas venting, safe disposal of vented trace hydrogen, any potential surface degradation of the piping, and of course thermal cycling constantly. It's going to be even more expensive, and a nightmare to design probably. Unlike gas installations it's also going to need waaay higher end maintenance and tooling to work with
Sounds like a money is more important than nature problem. So let's keep driving with gasoline, and batteries made of lithium and forget that the mining is destroying the planet and the deposits are by far not enough to build enough batteries.
@@corbanx0809 If we need to build 3x the solar panels and turbines to facilitate the hydrogen it's not exactly an environmentally friendly option either. I think we'd be far better off betting on pure electric for vehicles as better batteries are now arriving and we're already looking beyond as well. As for energy storage for the electric grids there are plenty of alternatives to hydrogen.
Welcome to politics. Where we have a couple of parties with agendas and claim it to be democracy. But instead we get corruption, and politics isn't about best policy - but the best marketing. There is also a sense of irony in people who write law, being largely unaffected by legal decisions - but the public as a whole gets stuffed... Right from the smallest decision to the largest.
And just when said lawyer in charge of a scientific research area is 'getting it' after the advisors have worked on them for a few months, they move onwards and upwards, to be replaced by another who is equally ignorant of the science.
In Norway, on sunny days in summer, the electricity spot price dips down below zero. You get paid to use power (though in practice it's eaten up by grid fees etc and you can't make money that way). The 30% efficiency / 3x power usage doesn't seem so bad when the price is zero. And there's a big potential for further building out much more solar. If hydrogen is 30% efficient but can scale, it's still valuable, as we don't have any other scalable storage systems.
This is the comment I was looking for. Great video but Sabine failed to address this important detail in the video. Efficiency is not a static measurement in economics, as it is in physics. Making money is literally buying low and selling high. Who cares if you only get 30 % energy efficiency if you can sell hydrogen for 1000x the price of the electricity used for its production?
Agreed, this is the key point Sabrina missed. If you scale wind & solar there are bound to be times when they generate much more electricity than demand. If the choice is between wasting the electricity or storing it as hydrogen (even in a very inefficient manner) then it becomes a sensible thing to do. The price difference between peak and off-peak electricity is regularly greater than 3 to 1.
@@jadahaaIn economics, there is also competition between different business models. A low-efficiency, persistently high cost all-renewables business model is not the only way humans know how to generate energy. A few hundred kilometers from Norway, Finland has just started operating a nuclear power plant that over its lifecycle will entirely undercut an all-renewables strategy. The only way a 30% efficiency is tolerated is through ideological blinkering and economic rents created through political decision-making.
You can only begin to consider hydrogen as energy storage if your energy itself is cheap. In Norway this is the case because it is almost entirely hydro power. Now think about it... Hydro power... the electricity already IS STORED. The logical conclusion to the situation you presented is to NOT introduce any more intermittent sources to your energy mix, and even better if you disconnect them.
In 2009, I was part of an energy research group that was looking for new ways to receive funding. Hydrogen from wind and solar energy was the trick. The fun thing was that everyone in that group knew that it was the most stupid idea anyway and would never make any sense, technically or economically. However, we needed money to keep the lab and institute running, keep people employed, and graduate students. So, proposals went out on a weekly basis for electrolysis, catalysis, material research for storage, economic studies, and so on. Kept the place running for another decade.
Yes. I know that feeling. The government is full of imbeciles who think are better than others and have no clue what are they doing when it comes to energy. No numbers put on papers , very little science and very superficially used to justify decisions.
Sounds highly unethical. The ends of keeping the business running does not justify the means...keeping a false and dangerous narrative going. The heroes we need today are those brave enough to use the knowledge they have been given to speak truth.
As much as I admire Sabine for her effort and knowledge, I must say that she is showing evident lack of understanding of the energy sector. As a start she claims the low overall efficiency of the hydrogen cycle set at around 35% . Whereas this figure is true, she may ignore that we run out of affordable sites for hydro pumped storage and that in many cases wind and solar plants need to be shutdown anyway either for negative prices or grid overload. Under those circumstances, storing the energy as hydrogen is a viable solution, as modest efficiency is better than throwing the energy away. The challenge is more technological along with its high operational O&M costs.
Grid overload is indeed a big problem. Other infrastrucural problems to be solved locally: 1) backup plants based on fossil fuels (under construcion/planned) 2) storage, pipelines for H2 3) offshore H2 terminals (like LNG terminals); harbour infrastructure 4) Electrolysis thingies 5) subsidies questions, workes construction/energy sector (education f.e.) 6) german balanced budget amendment (making national debts is political battleground) ..... Never mess with german bureaucrazy and dysfunctional adminisration. H2 is dead, deader than nuclear power.
@@sophrapsune The comment does not presure an "all-renewables" system. You don't need a 100% renewable system for there to be the problem of curtailment.
I work for a company which is providing inverters for electrolizers to a lot of these up and coming hydrogen plants in Denmark and Germany. I dont have all the information but I have not heard that the idea is to produce electricity with this hydrogen. The hydrogen produced will be used in the steel industry, for example, in place of natural gas. I find it hard to believe that any engineers and scientists giving inputnto policy makers are seriously considering generating electricity from the stored hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is too low, especially when energy is such an expensive comodity.
Exactly. The hydrogen is a valuable feedstock and a buffered source of energy. In the first stages no one is going to be burning the H2 to create electricity or district heating. It would be for industrial uses that currently for example have to use natural gas sources hydrogen or hydrogen would be a better replacement - if available in bulk.
Surplus electricity isn't expensive. It's actually free, zero cost. And yes, starting about 2 years ago, we have such surplus electricity at times. Wind turbines get stopped despite of good wind, because renewables generate more than society consumes. Generating hydrogen is kind of recycling of waste.
There definitely are plans to use electricity to generate hydrogen, and for very sound engineering reasons. Such as it gets very expensive to move electricity a long way' A long way being from the Dogger Bank to Germany. There are several studies that have concluded that hydrogen is more economical and has the benefit that it can be stored, including in empty oil and gas fields. Studies have also taken place to use the existing gas field infrastructure for transporting the hydrogen. I enjoy watching Sabine's videos, but there is a lot of serious engineering effort being expended on this subject.
In Germany's neighboring country Austria, to be more specific in Zillertal, Tyrol, we had another example of Hydrogen for Hydrogen's sake. The narrow gauge railway Zillertalbahn is considering getting rid of their old diesel powered locomotives and DMUs, and converting to something "clean". And they came up with the idea of a hydrogen powered train. Their vendor for the new units, Stadler of Switzerland, was more or less bluntly saying: "For a 38 km long line in a region with lots of hydroelectric power, we would rather recommend going with battery powered trains, but if the customer wants hydrogen, so be it."
That's an use case that makes sense because batteries aren't suitable due to low energy density, high costs and fire hazards (hydrogen is a more manageable hazard than Lithium despite the propaganda), and I think this still applies to short lines such as this one, and it also replaces the electric grid that follows every track (but maybe just using them instead would be more adequate), but this goes against the constant spam in social media. Now stationary energy storage is a different problem and it has other solutions and tradeoffs.
Which customer wants hydrogen ? As a customer, I am more afraid of it than anything else. It sounds like a lie. In my surroundings (I'm from France) I barely know anyone who cares about hydrogen.
Of course the guy that sells EVs and large battery installations for power generators is going to say hydrogen is dumb. Maybe renewables paired with hydrogen at 30% efficiency is the best we can do if we don't want to mine the crap out of the planet. Maybe it's a stepping stone. Maybe it is procrastination but what's a better alternative that can scale appropriately?
Henry Ford tried and failed to make a hydrogen car. It worked, but the range was abysmal...he used iron wool to absorb hydrogen; modest heating liberated the gas from the metal at a constant pressure. After a number of 'refueling' cycles, the wool tended to get brittle and fall apart. Embrittlement remains a problem when hydrogen and steel meet.
@@JukkaPekkaKeisala I actually think he decided that battery cars were not ready yet, but would eventually take over. He seems to have been right, but got the timescale off.
@@Loanshark753 - yep their heavy and bulk, a much touted FCEV for example uses three CFRP cylinders that weigh 100kg (empty) in total, and take up 250 litres of space (excluding harnesses, pipework etc.), to hold 5.6kg, 144 litres, of hydrogen at 700 bar (10,000psi). The FCEV's claimed range is 400 miles, but users are claiming their only getting 280 miles range due to not being able to fully fill the cylinders due to hydrogen fueling pumps not being able to overcome the car's storage vessel back pressure.
Doesn’t the military get to use lithium 6 hydride to keep those H bombs batteries full using solid state storage? From watching bob lazar the ufo guy I heard it’s off limits to civilians he said the fda charges thousands per hour to make our own hydride.
3:26 This sounds like: "We will talk about writing a roadmap for a conference where we talk about how we will write a framework about writing an agenda ..."
I barely graduated from my Chemical Engineering program, so I am not what you could consider an expert. I suggest people bring out the periodic table while discussing hydrogen as a fuel. We need another 100 years of material science breakthroughs just to safely handle hydrogen on a regular basis. It is ethanol hype 2.0 designed to procrastinate the exit from fossil fuels.
@@Maia_Cyclist The Haber-Bosch process is well documented and you can read up on the entire process on Wikiedia, for example. This technology has been in used for decades and is one of the legs that our chemical industry stands on. As for the hydrogen, it can be generated with very high efficiency using high-temperature gas-cooled reactors as it's being done at the HTTR in Oarai, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan.
@@Maia_Cyclistit feeds you besides providing electricity…also heating…transportation fuel…steel…most industrial chemical processes…. Like this isn’t just about a light switch
Everything she said is correct. I used to work in this space as well, although in battery storage, but adjacent and helping out with so called power-to-X (PtX). It just does not make sense to make hydrogen for storage and then converting it back. In fact no energy storage technology is cheap enough for this. But! There is a big but! Many, many products and services require a lot of power to make and are easy to store. Ammonium: NH3 is the one that comes closest to hydrogen. It can be stored under relatively low pressure in liquid form. It is toxic, but has been handled in large quantities for many decades. We know how to handle this stuff. It is the main ingredient in fertilizer and right now this is made from splitting hydrogen off from natural gas. If this could be made green, then it could provide a large portion of the buffer needed - orders of magnitude more than batteries. And it is possible to adapt large diesel engines to run on ammonium. It is not as energy dense as diesel, and there is the problem with NOX, but for large ships this is potentially a good option, and batteries would never cut it for this purpose anyway. Same with pure hydrogen, as it is just not possible to store the quantities needed. This is a large chunk of the worlds co2 emissions right there as well. Steel: Steel is made from oxidized ore which is then blasted with carbon mono oxide - again from natural gas - the oxygen is stripped off the ore and then produces co2. Then the ore is processed using electricity for heating in an arc furnace. The carbon mono oxide could be replaced by hydrogen. And the electricity itself could come from green sources including nuclear btw. This is again a huge chunk of the worlds co2 emissions. Storing hydrogen is difficult, but storing piles of steel is easy. Hot water storage: In many places in europe at least there is district heating. This requires enormous amounts of energy in the form of hot water. You can build hot water storage that lasts months for two orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. In a city slightly north from where i live called Aalborg they are installing a 200000 m^3 hot water storage for that purpose. Assuming a delta T of 10 degrees C, that is 2.3 GWh of storage. That's a lot actually. My point is that people get too fixated on the X-to-power which will never be viable. The focus should be on storing intermediate products that are very energy intensive. Then we can have all the storage we need.
I agree. However, energy storage is definitely required to make wind and solar capable of replacing fossil fuels or nuclear, unless electricity users suddenly become ok with losing power at night or when the wind isn't blowing. So pick your poison.
Useful large scale energy storage is available in many countries, with the necessary landforms and that's pump storage. with achievable round trip efficiencies of 80%. There is a preliminary scheme being investigated here in New Zealand for the world's largest pump storage scheme that will provide seasonal power reserves - we have quite a lot of hydro, but the storage dams are relatively small and depend on regular rain. A dry year can cause us a lot of problems.
I understood the Puortollano electrolyser plant is now operational (Iberdrola) . Converting mostly solar power into hydrogen into ammonium. Capacity 20 MW, so tiny compared to the EU ambitions. Spain has overcapacity solar power at the moment due to inadequate grow in electricity demand (¿) . Let's see how this project turns out in the long run....
Some 5 or 7 years ago, I've read a paper by an "organisation" in the UK regarding carbon reduction in HVAC systems for buildings. The idea was to use hydrogen for heating and cooling (don't know anymore what the idea for cooling was exactly). One important and really big paragraph was about reusability of already existing infrastructure. The already existing gas infrastructure in the UK would be ideal, with minor changes, to be used for hydrogen. The conclusion was that this is a great plan and should be pushed forward. The organisation I mentioned before was btw. funded by all the big players in gas ^^. Someone mentioned that when something sound to good, someone is profiting big. It's not a direct profit, but the big gas companies are very, very concerned about their gas business and they really want their pipe network being used in the future so they can shift their business to rent their pipe(line) infrastructure to the new hydrogen industry or just take over the role of the hydrogen distributor. I'm not trying to say it's all about big gas, but I bet my ass off, their people knocking on governments door and wanna talk.
I'm not sure about the advantages of burning hydrogen in my furnace, stove or fireplace. Natural gas lines running underground all over town do leak occasionally, often with poor consequences. If they were filled with hydrogen, those might be spectacular. (But if we ever have flying cars, asphalt companies may lobby against them .. duh, for the same reason states have begun to add extra license taxes to electric cars).
@@MrHerrS This is why the UK's National Grid Plc was split into two separate companies - National Grid for electricity distribution and National Gas Transmission for high-pressure gas distribution. NGT was sold off to private investors, like Macquarie Bank, who have bought up most of UK's other infrastructure. NGT may have issues with its business model if we are going to decarbonise. But as Sabine said, the hydrogen narrative may just be smoke-n-mirrors to hide the true intension that we will be using methane for longer than is being let on by the respective European governments.
The bulky hydrogen storage problem almost certainly destroys the idea that hydrogen fusion (H2+H3 => He4 + a neutron), is an improvement on nuclear fission, not counting the fact that although the products are not themselves radioactive, they are actually raw, ferocious radiation.
Hello Dr. Hossenfelder, Your figure of 30% for hydrogen energy storage round efficiency is very generous. The figure of 30% doesn't include the energy used to compress the hydrogen generated by the electrolysers and the storage losses. That 30% figure is 20% in reality, and become a scant 15% if the hydrogen storage is cryogenic.
@yannfaulus Have you read about the capillary fed electrolysis cells? They operate at 1.51 volts with an efficiency of 98%, at least that's the claim. Hypothetically, what would that make the round trip efficiency?
@@yannfaulus you don't understand video. German government want to base whole German industry on this. The hungriest industry in Europe. They need tons of tons of energy. Thats nuts if 80% of this stored energy go away, and "thanks" to that you need to produce cosmic amount of terawatts to feed industry (when is no wind and solar power). This is the point of this video, not how we can save energy that would now be wasted (which is good idea basically).
Why no one is talking about tidal power? I do find that tidal power is a very consistent and reliable source of energy. Plus, there is no input of energy in order for it to run
And then there is the security issue. One infamous case happened right in Germany, with the explosion being the worst in the region since WWII, on October 5th of 1991 on the factory premises of Heraeus, Hanau. A friend of mine pointed out that the explanation that hydrogen had seeped out and gathered beneath the tank was unlikely as hydrogen is lighter than any other substance. That is correct. But there is actually a specific mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, that is heavier than your average air. There was another explosion in Switzerland, and a researcher managed to recreate it after a long series of experiments. This mixture is flammable, and as it is barely known, it poses an additional risk.
The density only goes down if you mix hydrogen in. It does not ever get more dense. It is a direct, almost perfectly linear correlation from pure hydrogen with the density of pure hydrogen all the way to pure oxygen with the density of pure oxygen with only extremely small deviations from a perfect line. Googling says that the explosion 1991 happened because a hydrogen tank ruptured, followed by a massive oxy-fuel explosion.
The policy is intentionally murderous and they know it. Making power expensive is one form of many eugenics programs various governments runs, in this case an attempt to eliminate the poor.
I thought the "hydrogen economy" was found unfeasible like 15-20 years ago which is why that hydrogen hype of the late 90ies and early 2000's died out. Guess I was wrong.
Some is coming from Toyota because they don't wish to transition to electric vehicles and some is coming because others don't like giving Tesla all the power in electrics and batteries
Geological hydrogen has been found in large amounts in a lot of countries pretty recently, which would bring down production costs but wouldn't do anything about distribution problems. It would knock one of the legs out from under the methane industry though, which would be nice. One project in the US that looked interesting got passed over for government subsidies, in favor of plants for making hydrogen out of methane.
It was, it died, you're not wrong. You just missed its recent resurrection... Though, as Sabine implies, it's more like a zombie. But hell, for all I know there was one between these two that we both missed. Hydrogen is like a perpetual motion machine, somebody's always coming up with a new one.
I think you're wrong on this, Sabine. Geological storage of hydrogen has been a mature technology for more than 40 years at this point, and the US today has around 450GWh of hydrogen stored in various sites around Moss Bluff. The first site actually opened in 1983 with a storage capacity of around 130GWh. Scalability is the reason why it makes sense: you can add 100GWh of geological storage at a time, and it's far easier to drill salt cavern storage or reuse old natural gas wells than it is to make that amount of batteries. At the end of the day, efficiency only really matters as a proxy for cost, and if the less efficient process costs less overall, then that's what we'll use. Geological storage also pairs well with gas turbines, since they handle impurities well, and they're reasonably efficient and scalable. There are also a number of synergies with chemical synthesis, which also needs to be decarbonized, so even if we weren't also using geological hydrogen storage for energy, we would still be using it to store feedstock for ammonia synthesis so we can make fertilizer, and methanol, so we can power cargo ships (and probably trucks). Using the same storage method for all of these needs almost certainly makes them all cheaper in aggregate just due to economies of scale. If batteries turn out to be cheaper for energy in the long run, then they'll supplant hydrogen, but that's unlikely without a step change in their scalability. That's what really matters here. Scalability always wins in the end, because it drives marginal costs to zero. I agree with you that electrolyzers have a ways to go, but that's not the only way to make hydrogen. Waste / biomass is a big one and is a low hanging fruit in many places. There are also things that can be done like deep sea electrolysis to produce compressed hydrogen, that can boost your efficiency. Most geological storage is on the scale of around 150bar, and the energy required for compression is logarithmic, so going from, say, 50 bar to 100 bar takes less energy than going from 1 bar to 50 bar. I think the only arguments against geological hydrogen storage come down to perfect being the enemy of good. It's not about the perfect or ideal solution, it's about the one that can actually be achieved, and in this regard, geological hydrogen is both necessary anyway, and infinitely more scalable than batteries.
Sabine is more wrong than right these days. In addition to your comment, I would remind us of the blue hydrogen option: on paper that could yield a large energy supply independent of renewable sources and under the IRA it is set to boom in the US over the next decade. The geological storage potential for the generated and captured CO2 is abundant in most part of the world. I know that the current literature is 'divided' about the fraction of captured CO2 in the blue hydrogen pathway, but on paper that problem should get resolved over time*. Remains the danger for greenwash windowdressing and aspects of the public perception about such CCS schemes... *I think so because the blue hydrogen is created by cooking a mixture of fossil fuel and WATER, i.e. not oxygen, so unlike other CCS schemes you don't have nitrogen from the atmosphere mixing in and polluting the whole process.
@@5th_decile Expert speaking about carbon dioxide storage... For me disucussion ends here. Pointless, stupid, only to take grants and money from uneducated lunatics.
Sabine is so right. Closing down the nuke plants was a terrible decision, pushed by panic not by logic, and ignoring Merckel's dependence at that time on Russian natural gas, a disastrous policy as we now see.
Funny that Trump warned the EU about being dependent on Russian energy and was laughed at. People so smart they ignore the obvious because an idiot said it.
No, nuclear can't be trusted, in a calamity one of those plants could meltdown and spew radiation into the air for ages. Storing the nuclear waste is an issue too
@imcbocian I watched a video where Trump said that very thing and was laughed at by the German reps. The Poles and Baltic states said it first, because it's obvious to anyone without a normalcy bias or more concerned with gdp numbers than actual reality.
The statement hopefully was meant as a joke. The Brits left the EU because they were misled and because they have a media landscape that is not fit for purpose. The fact that the author of this video liked the comment seems odd and casts a weird light on her video.
@@andreask753 The other problem is us Brits are no better at taking positive action than the EU. We have simply replaced EU red-tape and inaction with British red-tape and inaction. (And, of course, in a lot of cases we still have to deal with the EU, so we've doubled the bureaucracy /smh).
Sabine, one question. Did you checked the storage of hydrogen as ammonia and the use of ammonia as fuel? Toyota recently developed a ammonia based engine.
Smart thinking. Yeah, I figured that these countries probably had various methods of making hydrogen practical. Not saying all countries are smart, but they aren’t typically that foolish. Batteries just aren’t very economical, an alternative could help a lot. Also, ammonia could be safer than hydrogen because it might not need to be pressurized, which is nice.
Yeah it's really a battle between the corruption of the 'fossil fuel' industry, the corruption of the 'renewables' industry and the corruption of the hydrogen industry.
Politicians are stupid and are easily fooled by the green, snake oil salesmen. EG the reduction in power of vacuum cleaners, without taking into effect that larger motors are more efficient than smaller ones and the smaller ones. If they are half the power they deliver less than half the suck so take more than twice as long to do the same work. Net result is more electricity consumed. Lots more examples but my post is too long already.
My professors of the energy engineering department are all obsessed with hydrogen and also they talk about the “energy guidelines” of the EU as if they were the solution to all our problems and the ideal path to take. Yes, a bunch of bureaucrats which know nothing about energy conversion processes will tell you exactly how to generate energy. Have we become mad? Where is critical thinking?
You're forgetting that policy makers do indeed consult science and engineering to craft policy. They don't just pull it out of their ass. There's an entire industry that does nothing but advise policy makers and corporate governance on what to do, in this case regarding climate change and sustainability. They're not just inventing this out of whole cloth.
@@stevenhaas9622sorry to disappoint you but laws of the universe are universal. They are the same for all of us, including politicians, professors chasing grant money, and "engineers" chasing paychecks. In the end energy supply is very basic thermodynamics.
The only thing worse than H2 energy storage is not having any energy storage. Here in Finland, we have way too much wind energy in the market and when we get a Winter day without enough wind, the energy prices skyrocket instantly because during windy days the energy prices are low enough to push older technologies off the market. Daily fluctation can be price increases around 50x or 5000%. That's a bit more than acceptable inflation! And I fully agree that about 10-30% of end-to-end effiency of H2 as energy storage is close to receiving "worst battery ever" award. Li-ion batteries have end-to-end efficiency close to 90% which makes them clearly superior technology even if pretty expensive method.
Doesn't Finland have mountain ranges suitable for hydroelectric dams? That's still the most efficient use of seasonal power storage that can be sized into the GWh scale. Something that batteries would be hard-pressed to do.
@@MrLightZenithIt doesn’t. You shouldn’t talk about this if you know nothing about it. Hydroelectric dams are the most efficient but they are also extremely expensive, have major ecological consequences and are highly dependent on geography.
I respectfully disagree, hydrogen as a power storage system is a non-starter, butt I'd say that it makes sense as a replacement for gas in many industrial production systems, such as steel production
@@juimymary9951 Hydrogen is possibly the WORST fuel you could use for steel production, if you actually care about the quality of the steel produced. Even minor exposure to hydrogen turns good steel into little better than cardboard due to chemical embrittlement.
The skit was funny with the phone call, but just so you know, it's not legally possible for somebody born outside of the United States to become president of the United States.
Nothing in American politics is impossible. All it would take is an amendment to the constitution. We have a bunch of those. But yes, as it stands now, Elon Musk could not be the president of the United States.
@@SabineHossenfelderNo worries. Donald Trump was born in “Jersey” and he would do away with birthright citizenship, anyway. So…👀 (I’m leaving open the question of whether “Jersey” is sufficiently part of the United States, or whether merely surviving infancy is enough qualification for running a democracy….)🤪💕
I'm fast coming around to this point of view. Or if not idiots, then people whose values and concerns are extremely far removed from the needs of our nations and peoples.
Sabine, you ROCK. It is refreshing to see, that not the whole Germany has gone totally mad. I did a quick math 50l car H2 pressure tank. At 700 bars the force on the walls is roughly NINE HUNDRED metric tons !!! I would NEVER drive in such car. The problems with H2 are just a never ending string of problems, small, Medium, HUGE and UNSOLVABLE. This can drive the whole country into the ground, like a major war.
This is a case of a subject matter expert overestimating their insight into other subjects - this isn't for consumer cars, it is for industrial uses, and transported as ammonia. It isn't perfect, but much better than say electric batteries or lugging around giant flywheels.
If you tried selling people 150 years ago on the idea of driving vehicles filled with 80 L of gasoline, let alone allowing whole cities to be filled with such vehicles, they would have thought you were crazy. So much flammable liquid, in a fast moving vehicle? Will nobody think of the fire hazards to the city! Turns out it was a solvable problem. So is hydrogen storage
@@MrDael01 Interestingly, firebrigades used battery powered firetrucks in the early 20th century because they did not trust a vehicle powered by something as flammable as gasoline for fighting fires (I've seen these exhibited at the German firefighter museum / "Deutsches Feuerwehr-Museum" in Fulda; the combination of a turntable ladder, wooden wheels, a sizeable amount of lead batteries and an electric motor feels a bit like schizo tech, but these things are real :-P )
I used to think that the Germans were sensible enough to choose the most practical, well-tested solution to clean energy. Then they shut down all their nuclear power plants like morons.
They are. Sabrine doesn't understand green hydrogen. And, always misrepresents green hydrogen as she does here with sweeping conclusions which are rooted in something other than facts. Potent, safe, available to everyone, and 100% clean. All you have to do is understand it - and apply it.
@@TobyKinkaid11 Sabine doesn't understand green urea. And, always misrepresents green urea as she does here with sweeping conclusions which are rooted in something other than facts. Potent, safe, available to everyone, and 100% clean. All you have to do is understand it - and apply it. 500% better than hydrogen. And urea is still bonkers.
@@TobyKinkaid11 She raised a number of clearly articulated problems with it. You can offer counterarguments, or explain briefly (as one that understands a subject could) why she's wrong. Instead you say she's wrong because she doesn't understand green hydrogen, and leave it there. This argumentations, which amounts to personal attack and nothing more, is not convincing from your part, I hope you can see that.
@@TobyKinkaid11she did state facts, but in my opinion the video is incomplete, because she did not adress the overcapacity of solar power during some hours of the day or season... in other words, if solar power becomes too cheap, the round trip inefficiency of hydrogen storage might no matter.
Whichever is the winner, Engineers can satisfy their thirsts in R&D. I was one of them and now started start-up for next gen R&D. Profitability comes from somewhere else.
Good video but one thing needs addressing to round it off (maybe another video) - what is the alternative for stoarge? Now I might be wrong but I understand batterys are pretty good for short term storage but pretty poor for long term storage. Its completely fair to critique hydrogen but, in a werid way, it doesn't need to be 'good' it just needs to be 'least worst'. What is our long term (seasonal) storage solution actually going to be? Without viable long term storage one of 2 things will happen 1) we size generation for peak winter days - hugely oversized capacity for most of the year - very expensive and no guarantee it actually generates on peak winter days. 2) We size capacity more modestly but have insufficent energy for some parts of winter.. We need a storage solution...
There are other things that can be used to store energy that aren't as difficult to contain as hydrogen, such as pumping water to a higher altitude with extra energy and using it with turbines to generate it when needed. Though, of course, these have their own problems as well.
@@jamesvedelago834 of course, they're developing renewables, so they need storage. However, storage is kWh, not kW. You cannot pay back hydro storage if it isn't paid for daily. Look at the storage capacity of the reservoir and divide it by the 5 GW, you'll see that it amounts only to a couple of hours, no more. The general reckoning is that for the "Dunkelflaute" you need up to 2 weeks storage.
@@stefanbernardknauf467 It's not like compressed hydrogen fares all that much better volumetrically. Hydrogen at 700 bar stores about 5x as much energy per cubic meter as water raised 100m, but the overall efficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen and back is in the 30%-40% range, whereas large water pumps are in the 80%-90% range and water turbines are around 90%, which puts water at more than double the conversion efficiency, so water raised 100m would only be ~2.5x less energy-dense volumetrically, but doesn't have anywhere near as many problems involved in storing it. There's also the option of lifting solids that are MUCH denser than water to store it, though I don't know what the efficiencies involved would be for that.
Storing surplus energy inefficiently is still better than throwing it away. I remember the old gasometers for storing town gas (over 50% hydrogen). It wasn't a problem. There is no clearly better alternative. Pumping water uphill requires major civil engineering projects on an enormous scale, batteries cost a lot and can't store anywhere near enough, and storing energy as compressed air wastes a lot of energy as heat.
The hydrogen infrastructure is also very expensive. Calling batteries expensive and the suggesting hydrogen where you lose 70% of the electricity and the infrastructure is as expensive seams a little of.
Thats why nuclear Energy is important. It provided a stable Energy source tô complement renewables...unfortunately the german goverment always find ways tô make things worse.
Pumping water uphill uses existing technology that's available in most countries and, though the projects are large, the project planning is well understood and the costs predictable.
@2ndfloorsongs Where are you putting all these reservoirs? The costs of digging out a new reservoir are unthinkable and all the easy locations are in use.
@@111BAUER111 and yet the world we live in is built and is perfected by engineers, smart people in general. I rather put my trust in them before politicians.
@@khang.ngtr487 I would disagree. One without the other would end in chaos. It always depends on the question of which of the two I would trust more. I wouldn't generalize like that.
So what is the alternative to Hydrogen? Gravity Storage? Batteries? Water Pump Storage? Are those more efficient? Bashing H2 without naming a decent alternative is pretty lame to be honest.
I'm not sure about already completed gravity storage but all the other examples you mentioned have better end-to-end efficiency than green hydrogen. Probably even molten salt storage would have better end-to-end efficiency than hydrogen. The only way hydrogen makes any sense is if you get it as a side-effect "for free" from fossil sources while doing something else. Definitely not the way forward in long run.
Hey Sabine, I’m principal you are right, but you are overseeing some crucial elements. 1) the hydrogen isn’t necessarily produced locally, but abroad. Studies show that with current technologies it is economically feasible (so speaking in terms of energy prices in cents/kWh, in Europe), to build large scale plants in Saudi Arabia for example. This would be based on solar plants with desalination and electrolyzers. While this process is very inefficient in itself, it’s still cheaper to produce hydrogen over there, and to transport it to Germany. 2) that obviously leads to the next problem of transporting the hydrogen across the globe, but the answer is pretty simple: ammonia! The process of creating ammonia is highly optimized nowadays, and the energy intensive aspect of it is to create the hydrogen in the first place. However, having such a hydrogen production site solves that issue. The best thing: there already are ship engines that can run on ammonia! So the ships can consume a small fraction of the ammonia they are transporting and are completely carbon emission free. There already are some ships built to demonstrate this. 3) now to storage: ammonia solves a bunch of the storage issues. Pressurizing it allows for a non-cryogenic liquid storage and transport. In fact, also that technology is highly developed, since ammonia is such an important element of modern processes. So, basically the problem of producing, transporting and storing hydrogen is already solved. The last element is to come up with a way of distributing and using it locally. Ideas range from distributing ammonia and catalytically converting it locally, to injecting a small amount of hydrogen (single digit %) into our current natural gas grid. Edit: to sum it up, I think hydrogen will become a big part of our energy economy. But it will take time, and I agree with you, banning nuclear was a terrible move, because we will need some technologies that bridge the gap.
You are missing the point Ms Hossenfelder is making: efficiency. The ammonia pig won't fly. Once you have: 1. A green production (solar for instance); 2. A desalination plant; 3. An electrolyzer plant; 4. An ammonia plant; In other words huge investments, why not add a little investment (it'll be the smaller investment) to have 5. An fertilizer plant And sell the stuff with the highest market value? After all you have a huge investment to pay back. Europe needs fertilizer, as does the rest of the world.
@@stefanbernardknauf467 You missed the climate doom and gloom fix for CO2 emissions. You can't have fertilizer as it is CO2 intensive. > P.S. Ammonia is seriously toxic and has high potential for creating destructive byproducts. Also see the above part about CO2 emissions in creating the stuff. > Creating CO2 and environmental destruction doesn't really constitute a solution the environmental or climate problems lol
This is what Liebreich has been saying since many years. Just look at all the fossil companies promoting the hydrogen hype. In the words of Liebreich: "If you're an oil and gas company, in a way, talking about hydrogen is kind of a two-way bet because if it works, then you're embedded in the hydrogen industry - but if it doesn't work, you've delayed the transition to the thing you don't make, which is electricity."
THANKS - yet sabine always fails to see this and instead makes up fossile vs hydrogen vs nuclear. yeah everything but god forbid we take solar power that would become increasinly cheap to produce, cause the sun is sth neoliberal capitalists cant privatise and have artificial scarcity over - so people would profit in the long run ...
@@williamwalker39Yes, but it's still a huge challenge compared to the fuels we already have (and also much less dense; at least itw not as heavy as batteries, though). My vote is that commercial aviation should transition to LNG (which is also cryogenic, but still less of a hassle) as a means of getting ready for hydrogen.
Unfortunately, this is the type of video that doesn't make a reasonable counter suggestion to the technology it criticizes: as you point out in the beginning, hydrogen is the proposed solution to longer term storage problems, where batteries will never be economical. You point out the downsides, slow expansion path and wrong political motives. but what is the alternative really? we will need to shift our energy production seasonally in temperate climates. 30% efficiency for excess solar energy in summer months to be used in winter does not sound horrible to me. at least i fail to see a regenerative alternative.
The UK is an island, with an irregular coastline. Tide comes in; tide goes out; and tides are pretty reliable, unlike sun and wind. Not to mention that the UK has some of the largest tidal ranges on Earth. For the life of me I can't understand why we don't make more of this in the form of barrages with turbines. The travel implications would also be a great benefit. Just locally, it's less than 10 miles in a direct line from Southport to Blackpool across the Ribble Estuary, yet the current road journey takes over an hour.
I know its a joke, but since jokes only land (for a particualr person), its worth mentioning that we arent talking about balloons, we're talking about combusted fuel. As fuel, hydrogen is actually safer than methane, which is safer than petroleum-based products. (That said, all of Dr. Hossenfelder's points stand; altough I wonder if the use of hydride solves the hydrogen embitterment issue - I'll need to do more research)
While I agree on the storage part, there are a ton of other uses that are being developed (to be fair, not commercially ready, but promising in some industries) like in steelmaking and ammonia for shipping which would requiere a bigger industry and logistics for hydrogen.
one thing is clear: you can locate solar power and air turbines close to the plant where hydrogen is needed. And hydrogen production efficiency is not 30% (but it depends on how you measure it). also you need minimal changes in the blast furnace if you wish to use hydrogen and not coke.
@@soaringeagle5418 one thing is the amount of carbon on steel and another the amount and type used for reduction, also depending if you are using a BF or EAF
@@eduardobustos2124 I'm aware but if you want to harden the steel later it would have to go through another process using more of the power you are trying to save.
Hydrogen doesn't have to be stored under pressure. It can be stored (or more likely transported) as ammonia. Now I'm not saying it's a miracle fuel or anything, just pointing out that the objections based on handling and storing hydrogen aren't insurmountable, there are options. As for the efficiencies of storage as some form of hydrogen, there are going to be similar problems whichever storage medium you use. And renewable's pretty much make storage a minimum requirement, not an optional extra.
@@kevinaschim8475 So are petroleum products. The sad reality is that we are already using the easiest and most efficient fuels, it's those fuels that are causing our climate problems. Anything else is going to be worse in some way, if not all ways. We need to take a deep breath, accept that no matter which direction we are going to go, it will be worse that the current fuels. But that's a bitter pill we have to swallow.
"Communication that sets out a vision for a roadmap to create a framework for an alliance that will develop an agenda" is my new favourite sentence.
Typical Bureacracyspeak.
But I was just asking if you want to go to lunch!
Huh, put back the skipped "strategic" and "work streams" just to hit the BS Bingo at once, twice.
reminds me of energy inefficiencies
where "energy" is replaced with "effort"
The Lord's Prayer has 66 words; the Gettysburg Address 286 words; the US Declaration of Independence 1322 words; the US constitution 4543 words (including signatures); EU regulations on the sale of cabbage 26,911 words; EU constitution over 60,000 words
When it sounds too good to be true, most likely someone is getting rich in the background.
I've actually been wondering about this. It seems a little strange.
@@SabineHossenfelderI think the incentives are the operative variable. “Greenwashing “ is a thing because people get emotional about… well the imminent starvation of 4 billion people could be emotional… This is a thermodynamic question: What’s the most reasonable way to drag carbon uphill to get it back to … is it phosphate, or do e we have to go all the way to ATP?
Hydrogen is always about natural gas sold as green energy because it's the only viable way to get large quantities of Hydrogen. This makes it the usual suspect who wants to prevent transition to green energy.
@@SabineHossenfelder against common "wisdom" is economics a ZERO-SUM-GAME.. for some to become rich others have to get poor. This is clear once one starts to look at (finite) human lifetime that is being worked and manifests in the form of goods and services. For some to be able to consume much more than they produce, others need to produce more than they get to consume.. why (some, most?) individuals prefer to consume more than they produce is based in biology and our individual drive to survive, reproduce and exist in comfort. It becomes a big problem when the society provides a few with the means to enforce this against the 'wants' of the majority though.. which is what is happening.
@@SabineHossenfelder There are lots of good uses for Hydrogen as a fuel, its just that the effectiveness of it is often oversetated by the media. In Germany the most important uses for hydrogen aren't local energy storage but actually as energy storage for long ranged vehicles and as fuel for for the Metal industry, because they are rellying on gas since heating with electricity is not suficient. The german governments plan was also not actually short term storage, but to make energy transport from northern germany to the industry centers in the south better in the short term.
I worked in a company making burners for all kind of heating systems.
They are testing with H2. They can make a working system with addition of 28% natural gas or else you'll have a bang with start up.
Further, the chances of leakage is high because of the atom it's size. Producing is still expensive.
I think it's saver to drink the cooling water of nuclear plants than having H2 storage throughout the country and a network through town.
Thanks that you mention the leaking problem, because of the size of the H2 molecule. If it come to a parctical use on industriel level it is essential problem no one has till now found a solution for it.
When i studdied chemistry 30 years back, we allready discussed H2 and how to use it as a storrage for enegergie on industrial level. My professor explained the biggest problem like this: You can use a cloth bag to transport water from a nearby well to extinguish a fire. It works ok since it is only a short distance and for a short time. But you can not use that cloth bag to store the water for a longer time.
Sadly most who discuss H2 do not know about this problem or are ignoring it. In Japan they search very hard with alot of money behind it, to find solutions for this problem. But they have still not found one.
Imagine simply having small electrolysis setups around facilities to produce H2 and O2, I'd imagine the energy bill would be massive. Maybe a way to store H2 in a more stable, less permeable yet easily dissolvable state that is not water?
@@OddWorlderer They are working on such solutions. Look at syntetic fuel or E-fuels. Synthetic methanol or ethanol are in the race and they actulaly make pogress to get the efficiency up and convert the technic up to industial usage. But they are still not where they need to be.
The serious problem with this video isn't that it says anything wrong, it's that it is missing the context that would make this a fair assessment of Hydrogen. The video only talks about the negatives of Hydrogen for energy storage but doesn't compare it to any other form of energy storage. When you do that, Hydrogen doesn't seem so bad. For example, saying that Hydrogen is only about 30% round trip efficient may be true, but how does that compare to other forms of energy storage? What if that is still twice as efficient as any other form of energy storage? (it's not, by the way). Batteries have many challenges that Hydrogen doesn't such as the use of scarce mineral resources that limit our ability to scale batteries to the levels we need. We can't dismiss a technology because it has disadvantages. If we did, we wouldn't be driving cars because so may people die in car accidents (over 40,000 per year in the US) and we wouldn't be using solar panels because they are all less than 25% efficient at turning the sun's energy to electricity (that's actually true).
Hydrogen isn't perfect at energy storage, but nothing is. Other commenters here suggested the pros and cons of other technologies and that is what these videos should be doing. We can only improve as a society if we look to improve things, not try to make them perfect. As one commenter put it, isn't saving 30% of the energy better than saving 0%?
Interesting that your example of why we can't dismiss a technology is actually a perfect reason to do so. Yes, we shouldn't driving cars, because they are dangerous. And getting rid of cars would fix so many environmental and social problems. So.. let's dismiss bad technology!
@@mikolajwitkowski8093 Since people will always need mobility, getting rid of cars would simply lead to people switching to other available forms of transportation. Should we reintroduce hundreds of millions of horses as a 'natural' replacement for cars?! Would you then ride around to clean up the streets from all the sh*t?
There are much, much better options. Pumped storage in the first place. Start with Wiki 😁. The real solution of the whole CO2 emissions problem is to save energy, adapt the use to the supply (dynamic meters), build much more nuclear power plants and develop only promising storage concepts like hydro pump storage. All that simultaneously with the development of wind and solar capacity. Pump storage efficiency is up to 80% and once build it can serve for a thousand years with only minor maintenance costs. Burning money for idiotic fantasies is no solution at all
@mikolajwitkowski8093 that sounds practical 😊
You miss on crucial point! A point that most who discuss it in theory and not on industrial level forget. It the size probem. H2 is extremly smal. It differ out of every thing. Like water out of a cloth bag. To use the gas you need to lower the volume of the gas. As higher the pressure as more it differ. SO you need store it a liquid and even then it differ to a significant ammount. This problem is till today not solved but often overseen. That makes H2 so difficult to hanlde.
"I'm not sure what these words mean but I'm pretty sure it's why Britain left the EU."
I'm dying 🤣🤣
I'm sorry for your impending loss.
Chuckled hard on that one myself.
Yes hearing a brexit benefit made me smile too.
I would bet money none of you even know anything about your energy policy.
@@KentonJoseph My energy policy is to pay my gas and electricity bills in full and on time :P
'The issue with these strategies is that they're 99% words.'
That's fucking brilliant.
Surely brillant, but F***Ing?
We need to harness the energy from the hot air of politicians, including politicized scientists.
@@olafborkneryep
@@olafborkner for those who aren't sure, that is an adjective modifier.
@@thomasmacdiarmid8251LOL BRO YOUR MORTAL 😂😂😂😂
Nothing is more dangerous than politicians concerned with the future of the planet.
...amazingly, they never propose solutions where they themselves would suffer any losses. In fact, the proposed solutions always have the effect of personal enrichment or personal gains in power.
Thanks Sabine. I have channeled my great, great, greatgrandfather, Balthazar Haas and he says "Interesting but stupid". He also says to me, "Dennis, you are a chemical engineer, ask to see the energy and material balance that they performed around the process. That will settle the matter quickly."
The German principle. You buy a new coat and use the fabric to patch the holes in the old one.
Every government in the world.
@@jimmyzhao2673 In the UK we buy an older coat which its self is a mass of patches and use that.
Brilliant description! I'm going to borrow that!
They could just crochet a new rain coat. How much did they spend on solar?
This is the logic of German Gentiles - always buying retail. German Jewish tailors know where to buy fabric wholesale.
If you wanna solve problems, you need Jews.
Former German PhD student of chemistry here: I had performed research in the area of hydrogen storage. Apart from the issues mentioned like hydrogen embrittlement it's about storage. Even if we kept it pressurized the amount of energy stored per liter volume would still be low. So we could liquify it to increase the energy density... BUT: We would have to actively cool it all the time to keep it a liquid! That would f*** up the efficiency even more. 😉
I assume you've heard about the Haber-Bosch process if you're a chemist. The resulting ammonia can be handled safely, it's not really rocket science.
@@genkiadrian Ammonia is a different substance.... 😉 The video has been about hydrogen and not ammonia. Those 'hydrogen-groupies' in politics want to work with hydrogen directly.
800 bar and H2 stays liquid even at RT. But this is extremely expensive and unpractical for larger quantities. Overall not an efficient way to store energy. Ammonia is also hazardous and very corrosive to materials. However one argument pro H2/Ammonia is that if your primary source of energy is abundant like the sun in some regions of ghe earth then your efficiency of conversion into something else does not matter that much.
@@tysi2011 H2's critical temperature is at 33 K.... above that temperature it cannot be liquified no matter the pressure. So hydrogen cannot be liquid at RT. 😉 Source: any basic thermodynamics lecture
@@knutritter461 You‘re right! I assumed the reason for H2-storage at 700bar is to keep it liquid! So another good reason to forget about H2 for large scale energy storage! Thanks for correcting my assumption!
I don‘t think investments in hydrogen are bad though, because methane/natural gas is used on a huge scale for concrete, steel and fertilizers. Basically anytime oxygen is reduced from a material.
Usually I like your videos for being level headed and reasonably well researched. This is not one of them.
I am kind of getting sick of people oversimplifying or straight up misrepresenting complex but very important subjects just to strike a cheap point.
If it seems that everybody else is stupid about something that you are not an expert in, pause and consider if it is not you who didn't entirely understand the thing.
I would suggest to read actual scientific papers from reasearchers in the field (yes it is an entire field of study) instead of assuming you already know. If you dont have time for that consider interviewing some researchers that publish in the field or that helped e.g. the German government to put together their "insane" hydrogen strategy instead of just implying that they all are just stupid or morally corrupt.
I usually come here to learn new things and to get well reasoned perspectives on various topics. I understand that not every video will meet the same high standard but I hope for a little more humility on big topics that are actually important.
Large-scale electricity storage is a blatant cope. Rather than come out and admit that replacing reliable electricity production with unreliable electricity production was a mistake, they'd rather invent these ridiculous plans to store vast amounts of live electricity with 10 - 30% efficiency.
It would literally be cheaper to build and maintain a whole extra parallel system of traditional, reliable power generation that you only use when the wind doesn't blow. _That's_ how much of a ridiculous non-starter this whole large-scale energy storage cope is.
I don't see here where you refuted that a green economy where intermittent power sources store their energy in hydrogen is an economically uncompetitive framework.
@@naimhdden4339 Correct, and I didn't intend to. I complained about a bad video in my opinion and the lack of nuance shown in the discussion.
What do you mean with economically competitive? Under which geological and political conditions? What kind of workers do you have? What kind of students and industry? How much does it matter for the price when storage is inefficient but the power production is very cheap. Renewables are embarrassingly cheap to build and run. The most expensive part about hydrogen is to develop and build the infrastructure at scale. There are no cheap mass produced solutions out there - yet. Someone has to put in a shit ton of money and brains into developing scalable solutions. Is that economically viable? Not on the short term - not for investors - not yet. Is it economically viable for wealthy countries to invest greatly into establishing a new industry to get a share if not a lead and potential jobs in this future market? Well who knows?
The central problem is that we have to stop burning fossil fuels to stop climate change. There is not one silver bullet solution that fits all... Hydrogen will play it's role - just like batteries, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, heat pumps, insulation, electric transport, plant based diets and yes nuclear power. The extent will vary from country to country based on wealth, resources, education, and politics. I don't think it is productive to call people stupid and pretending they don't know what they are doing without giving them a chance to explain.
I though hydrogen would be a great energy storage media when I was an undergrad...by the time I graduated, I understood that the energy density just isn't there. That was 35 years ago. It's nuts that people are still talking about this.
Yeah, I couldn't understand why we weren't all driving around in hydrogen fueled ICEs - back when I was in high school. Hydrogen is one of the most common elements on Earth. We can make it from water! Then I got another few years of physics and chemistry and eventually it became clearer...
In the Orkneys they produce more green energy than they need and did trials with producing hydrogen with that excess power. Is this still a bad idea?
@@MrNullifier Orkneys are, I would argue, special case as they are (remote) islands, without it!s own source of easily accessible gas at leas in low volume and without rivers for at least small scale hydropower.
Hydrogen can be turned into ammonia using the Haber-Bosch process. Ammonia is a fundamental base product of modern chemistry and can be used to make fertilizers, explosives as well as fuel. The hydrogen itself can be generated with high efficiency using high-temperature gas-cooled reactors using the sulfur-iodine cycle.
I'm surprised that Dr. Hossenfelder mentions neither of them.
We don't need the same density as Methane, because we will need far less energy out of it. Hydrogen for electricity use only has to cover around 5% of the yearly production, the rest will be covered with wind, pv and battery storage. Most of the homes currently use natural gas for heating, with a switch to heatpumps we reduce the primary energy need there to a quarter. Also around 25% of the electricity on the grid is currently produced with methane and our current natural gas storage sites cover a full winter. We have more than enough storage for the hydrogen we need over the year. The "it's too expensive" argument is also misleading. If wind and solar costs 5 cents per kwh and electricity from hydrogen costs 20, then the average exchange price of electricity with a 5% usage of H2 is 5,75 cent. For people that can adjust their energy consumption, like not charging their ev or pulling energy out of their personal battery storage, when there is currently no direct renewable production in the grid, the costs will be even lower.
The most intelligent commentator I've come across. I discovered Sabine a few months ago and her output of content amazes me. To put out a well researched video like this every day that is to the point and well researched is quite a feat. That really shows how smart she is. Hats off to her... Also I love her sense of humour. That makes it even better.
Hydrogen + lightning caused the Hindenburg to explode in 1937. No plans to safely store it at present so it’s a financial and environmental risk today. 😡
Have you checked out her music videos? Pretty creative!
@@freggo6604I don’t know if you are joking-or-not but you know what my next search is. Even at the risk of being Rick-Rolled…
@@christopheroconnor7659search for "A Million Miles". It's one of my favorites of hers. Not Cher or Tina Turner but way better than a Rick roll. 😂q
Yeah, "Sabine" is by the way a top-scientist, with lots of life-experience in the field, and does YT collaterally, so, not your typical "YT-creator for the sake of clicks"...
"In words a politician can understand, use thermodynamics to show that hydrogen can never be an energy source." This was one of the problems in my calculus-based engineering physics text my freshman year in 1966. Our professor did not assign the problem because it was too easy and self-evident to us as 18-year old thinkers. I am embarrassed to see that we've made no progress as a society in 58 years.
Sich zu beschweren und keine bessere Alternative anzubieten ist immer sehr einfach.
Batterien, Netzausbau, intelligentere Stromnutzung. Wenn all das in einem maximalen Maß vorhanden ist, kann man den Überschuss in Wasserstoff umwandeln. Bis dahin ist es eine Schnapsidee.
JETZT Wasserstoff ausbauen ist wie ein Hartzi, der für 500€ einen Goldmünzensammelschatulle kauft, um sich später besser vor Inflation schützen zu können.
I worked in a US rocket propulsion company for 30+ years. I was only peripherally involved in the LOX/LH2 rocket engines (SSME) and Scramjets (X30 NASP). The plumbing/valves/tanks for handling liquid or gaseous H2 under high pressure is expensive! Special (expensive) alloys are required to mitigate hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen leakage is an issue due to the small size of the molecule and requires specialized seal designs. High pressure storage tanks are not cheap and heavy if fiber-epoxy composite over wrapped designs aren't used. Composite tanks also have issues in civilian use; they have a limited cycle life. Also, as Sabine mentioned, GH2 is explosive with air in 5% to 95% mixtures which will lead to exciting RUDs if accidents occur. What's not to love with hydrogen?
Last time I checked these knuckleheads want to pipe hydrogen to homes through our leaky LNG system
And then, in civilian infrastructure the hydrogen will flow in and out all the time through the plumbing, so even more so than in a rocket engine you need to worry about neutral gas venting, safe disposal of vented trace hydrogen, any potential surface degradation of the piping, and of course thermal cycling constantly. It's going to be even more expensive, and a nightmare to design probably. Unlike gas installations it's also going to need waaay higher end maintenance and tooling to work with
5% to 95%??? In other words, hydrogen is really determined to kill you.
Sounds like a money is more important than nature problem. So let's keep driving with gasoline, and batteries made of lithium and forget that the mining is destroying the planet and the deposits are by far not enough to build enough batteries.
@@corbanx0809 If we need to build 3x the solar panels and turbines to facilitate the hydrogen it's not exactly an environmentally friendly option either. I think we'd be far better off betting on pure electric for vehicles as better batteries are now arriving and we're already looking beyond as well. As for energy storage for the electric grids there are plenty of alternatives to hydrogen.
Imagine a world where you pay lawyers to govern and come up with the stupidest ideas ever.
Surely the andwer to your comment is, ‘we don’t have to’?
I think we already have that scenario in the US. It's called the Supreme Court.
Welcome to politics. Where we have a couple of parties with agendas and claim it to be democracy. But instead we get corruption, and politics isn't about best policy - but the best marketing. There is also a sense of irony in people who write law, being largely unaffected by legal decisions - but the public as a whole gets stuffed... Right from the smallest decision to the largest.
The people that push for this seams to be companies that extract gas. That is natural gas from the ground, sometimes called fossil gas.
I wounder why.
And just when said lawyer in charge of a scientific research area is 'getting it' after the advisors have worked on them for a few months, they move onwards and upwards, to be replaced by another who is equally ignorant of the science.
In Norway, on sunny days in summer, the electricity spot price dips down below zero. You get paid to use power (though in practice it's eaten up by grid fees etc and you can't make money that way). The 30% efficiency / 3x power usage doesn't seem so bad when the price is zero. And there's a big potential for further building out much more solar. If hydrogen is 30% efficient but can scale, it's still valuable, as we don't have any other scalable storage systems.
This is the comment I was looking for. Great video but Sabine failed to address this important detail in the video. Efficiency is not a static measurement in economics, as it is in physics. Making money is literally buying low and selling high. Who cares if you only get 30 % energy efficiency if you can sell hydrogen for 1000x the price of the electricity used for its production?
Agreed, this is the key point Sabrina missed. If you scale wind & solar there are bound to be times when they generate much more electricity than demand. If the choice is between wasting the electricity or storing it as hydrogen (even in a very inefficient manner) then it becomes a sensible thing to do. The price difference between peak and off-peak electricity is regularly greater than 3 to 1.
That 30% efficiency seems attractive only talks to the very low efficiency and very high capital cost of an all-renewables strategy.
@@jadahaaIn economics, there is also competition between different business models. A low-efficiency, persistently high cost all-renewables business model is not the only way humans know how to generate energy. A few hundred kilometers from Norway, Finland has just started operating a nuclear power plant that over its lifecycle will entirely undercut an all-renewables strategy. The only way a 30% efficiency is tolerated is through ideological blinkering and economic rents created through political decision-making.
You can only begin to consider hydrogen as energy storage if your energy itself is cheap. In Norway this is the case because it is almost entirely hydro power. Now think about it... Hydro power... the electricity already IS STORED. The logical conclusion to the situation you presented is to NOT introduce any more intermittent sources to your energy mix, and even better if you disconnect them.
I think the idea is, "we may not have the technology yet, but let's see what we can do with hydrogen because it seems promising".
In 2009, I was part of an energy research group that was looking for new ways to receive funding. Hydrogen from wind and solar energy was the trick. The fun thing was that everyone in that group knew that it was the most stupid idea anyway and would never make any sense, technically or economically. However, we needed money to keep the lab and institute running, keep people employed, and graduate students. So, proposals went out on a weekly basis for electrolysis, catalysis, material research for storage, economic studies, and so on. Kept the place running for another decade.
Yes. I know that feeling. The government is full of imbeciles who think are better than others and have no clue what are they doing when it comes to energy. No numbers put on papers , very little science and very superficially used to justify decisions.
The ending of almost every research paper "...more studies are needed to...."
Did you consider the existing need for hydrogen source replacement?
This is how capitalism, a system driven by human greed, infects and infiltrates the sciences. Just one of many examples. Another is anti-depressiva.
Sounds highly unethical. The ends of keeping the business running does not justify the means...keeping a false and dangerous narrative going. The heroes we need today are those brave enough to use the knowledge they have been given to speak truth.
My idea is to store energy as N2O so that we can all have a good laugh.
Or driving fast😂
Hahaha 😂
LMAOO
but how much n2o is still funny for the atmosphere? :>
"Love you too! 🙄" made me almost spit out my drink lol. Excellent delivery.
Burning tires is more efficient and cleaner than hydrogen.
I mostly came here for that famous German Humour we keep hearing so much about. I wasn't disappointed. 🤣
right. german humor is no laughing matter.
If it is idiotic, it will be the perfect government program.
"It's why the Brits left the EU" made me laugh out loud.
As much as I admire Sabine for her effort and knowledge, I must say that she is showing evident lack of understanding of the energy sector. As a start she claims the low overall efficiency of the hydrogen cycle set at around 35% . Whereas this figure is true, she may ignore that we run out of affordable sites for hydro pumped storage and that in many cases wind and solar plants need to be shutdown anyway either for negative prices or grid overload. Under those circumstances, storing the energy as hydrogen is a viable solution, as modest efficiency is better than throwing the energy away. The challenge is more technological along with its high operational O&M costs.
Your comment presumes that the only strategy available is a very low-efficiency, very high cost, all-renewables system.
Grid overload is indeed a big problem. Other infrastrucural problems to be solved locally:
1) backup plants based on fossil fuels (under construcion/planned)
2) storage, pipelines for H2
3) offshore H2 terminals (like LNG terminals); harbour infrastructure
4) Electrolysis thingies
5) subsidies questions, workes construction/energy sector (education f.e.)
6) german balanced budget amendment (making national debts is political battleground)
.....
Never mess with german bureaucrazy and dysfunctional adminisration.
H2 is dead, deader than nuclear power.
@@sophrapsune The comment does not presure an "all-renewables" system. You don't need a 100% renewable system for there to be the problem of curtailment.
I work for a company which is providing inverters for electrolizers to a lot of these up and coming hydrogen plants in Denmark and Germany. I dont have all the information but I have not heard that the idea is to produce electricity with this hydrogen. The hydrogen produced will be used in the steel industry, for example, in place of natural gas.
I find it hard to believe that any engineers and scientists giving inputnto policy makers are seriously considering generating electricity from the stored hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is too low, especially when energy is such an expensive comodity.
Exactly. The hydrogen is a valuable feedstock and a buffered source of energy. In the first stages no one is going to be burning the H2 to create electricity or district heating. It would be for industrial uses that currently for example have to use natural gas sources hydrogen or hydrogen would be a better replacement - if available in bulk.
What happens in the depths of winter when the wind is not blowing for many days at a time and everyone has their heat pump running flat out?
Surplus electricity isn't expensive. It's actually free, zero cost. And yes, starting about 2 years ago, we have such surplus electricity at times. Wind turbines get stopped despite of good wind, because renewables generate more than society consumes. Generating hydrogen is kind of recycling of waste.
There definitely are plans to use electricity to generate hydrogen, and for very sound engineering reasons. Such as it gets very expensive to move electricity a long way' A long way being from the Dogger Bank to Germany. There are several studies that have concluded that hydrogen is more economical and has the benefit that it can be stored, including in empty oil and gas fields. Studies have also taken place to use the existing gas field infrastructure for transporting the hydrogen. I enjoy watching Sabine's videos, but there is a lot of serious engineering effort being expended on this subject.
That is a point of the video, hydrogen as energy storage medium
In Germany's neighboring country Austria, to be more specific in Zillertal, Tyrol, we had another example of Hydrogen for Hydrogen's sake. The narrow gauge railway Zillertalbahn is considering getting rid of their old diesel powered locomotives and DMUs, and converting to something "clean". And they came up with the idea of a hydrogen powered train. Their vendor for the new units, Stadler of Switzerland, was more or less bluntly saying: "For a 38 km long line in a region with lots of hydroelectric power, we would rather recommend going with battery powered trains, but if the customer wants hydrogen, so be it."
Hydrogen ICE you mean? Or Hydrogen power cell?
That's an use case that makes sense because batteries aren't suitable due to low energy density, high costs and fire hazards (hydrogen is a more manageable hazard than Lithium despite the propaganda), and I think this still applies to short lines such as this one, and it also replaces the electric grid that follows every track (but maybe just using them instead would be more adequate), but this goes against the constant spam in social media. Now stationary energy storage is a different problem and it has other solutions and tradeoffs.
Which customer wants hydrogen ? As a customer, I am more afraid of it than anything else. It sounds like a lie. In my surroundings (I'm from France) I barely know anyone who cares about hydrogen.
@@ingerasulffs Hydrogen power cell.
@@LuccDev The customer in this case being the Zillertalbahn board of directors.
Of course the guy that sells EVs and large battery installations for power generators is going to say hydrogen is dumb. Maybe renewables paired with hydrogen at 30% efficiency is the best we can do if we don't want to mine the crap out of the planet. Maybe it's a stepping stone. Maybe it is procrastination but what's a better alternative that can scale appropriately?
Reliable power. Fossil, nuclear, hydro.
Henry Ford tried and failed to make a hydrogen car.
It worked, but the range was abysmal...he used iron wool to absorb hydrogen; modest heating liberated the gas from the metal at a constant pressure.
After a number of 'refueling' cycles, the wool tended to get brittle and fall apart.
Embrittlement remains a problem when hydrogen and steel meet.
Henry Ford tried also to make electric car but decided that the gasoline engine had a more promising future.
@@JukkaPekkaKeisala I actually think he decided that battery cars were not ready yet, but would eventually take over. He seems to have been right, but got the timescale off.
What about carbon fiber hydrogen tanks.
@@Loanshark753 - yep their heavy and bulk, a much touted FCEV for example uses three CFRP cylinders that weigh 100kg (empty) in total, and take up 250 litres of space (excluding harnesses, pipework etc.), to hold 5.6kg, 144 litres, of hydrogen at 700 bar (10,000psi). The FCEV's claimed range is 400 miles, but users are claiming their only getting 280 miles range due to not being able to fully fill the cylinders due to hydrogen fueling pumps not being able to overcome the car's storage vessel back pressure.
Doesn’t the military get to use lithium 6 hydride to keep those H bombs batteries full using solid state storage? From watching bob lazar the ufo guy I heard it’s off limits to civilians he said the fda charges thousands per hour to make our own hydride.
"Under pressure", thank you for that. Your services are appreciated.
In the United Kingdom, our energy policy is: (1) Everybody hold hands in a big circle (2) Shut your eyes and (3) Wish VERY, VERY hard.
Sounds like a good idea to me🤗
That's how they built StoneHenge !
I have a wand that might help.
@frankupton5821 My grandpa told me this, “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up the fastest.”
... or for the Tory right, "hope and pray".
i examined a super insulated container for hydrogen transport some 30 years ago . I agree 100% with your conclusions.
3:26 This sounds like: "We will talk about writing a roadmap for a conference where we talk about how we will write a framework about writing an agenda ..."
Ahead of this we will have a 'pre-meeting' to discuss the general approach.
@@johnsmith1926 And the agenda will be for a workshop.
And charge $1.3B for our time and "brain" "power"
I barely graduated from my Chemical Engineering program, so I am not what you could consider an expert. I suggest people bring out the periodic table while discussing hydrogen as a fuel. We need another 100 years of material science breakthroughs just to safely handle hydrogen on a regular basis.
It is ethanol hype 2.0 designed to procrastinate the exit from fossil fuels.
Err, you can just process hydrogen to ammonia and you have something that can be handled safely and easily.
@@genkiadrianwere do you get the energy for that? How much is lost in the process ?
@@Maia_Cyclist The Haber-Bosch process is well documented and you can read up on the entire process on Wikiedia, for example. This technology has been in used for decades and is one of the legs that our chemical industry stands on.
As for the hydrogen, it can be generated with very high efficiency using high-temperature gas-cooled reactors as it's being done at the HTTR in Oarai, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan.
@@Maia_Cyclistit feeds you besides providing electricity…also heating…transportation fuel…steel…most industrial chemical processes…. Like this isn’t just about a light switch
@@genkiadrian read about free H embrittlement and containment strategies, then you will realise that we are behind in tech for that
Everything she said is correct. I used to work in this space as well, although in battery storage, but adjacent and helping out with so called power-to-X (PtX). It just does not make sense to make hydrogen for storage and then converting it back. In fact no energy storage technology is cheap enough for this. But! There is a big but! Many, many products and services require a lot of power to make and are easy to store.
Ammonium: NH3 is the one that comes closest to hydrogen. It can be stored under relatively low pressure in liquid form. It is toxic, but has been handled in large quantities for many decades. We know how to handle this stuff. It is the main ingredient in fertilizer and right now this is made from splitting hydrogen off from natural gas. If this could be made green, then it could provide a large portion of the buffer needed - orders of magnitude more than batteries. And it is possible to adapt large diesel engines to run on ammonium. It is not as energy dense as diesel, and there is the problem with NOX, but for large ships this is potentially a good option, and batteries would never cut it for this purpose anyway. Same with pure hydrogen, as it is just not possible to store the quantities needed. This is a large chunk of the worlds co2 emissions right there as well.
Steel: Steel is made from oxidized ore which is then blasted with carbon mono oxide - again from natural gas - the oxygen is stripped off the ore and then produces co2. Then the ore is processed using electricity for heating in an arc furnace. The carbon mono oxide could be replaced by hydrogen. And the electricity itself could come from green sources including nuclear btw. This is again a huge chunk of the worlds co2 emissions. Storing hydrogen is difficult, but storing piles of steel is easy.
Hot water storage: In many places in europe at least there is district heating. This requires enormous amounts of energy in the form of hot water. You can build hot water storage that lasts months for two orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. In a city slightly north from where i live called Aalborg they are installing a 200000 m^3 hot water storage for that purpose. Assuming a delta T of 10 degrees C, that is 2.3 GWh of storage. That's a lot actually.
My point is that people get too fixated on the X-to-power which will never be viable. The focus should be on storing intermediate products that are very energy intensive. Then we can have all the storage we need.
Good examples and good point 👍
I agree. However, energy storage is definitely required to make wind and solar capable of replacing fossil fuels or nuclear, unless electricity users suddenly become ok with losing power at night or when the wind isn't blowing. So pick your poison.
Useful large scale energy storage is available in many countries, with the necessary landforms and that's pump storage. with achievable round trip efficiencies of 80%. There is a preliminary scheme being investigated here in New Zealand for the world's largest pump storage scheme that will provide seasonal power reserves - we have quite a lot of hydro, but the storage dams are relatively small and depend on regular rain. A dry year can cause us a lot of problems.
Do you by any chance have an opinion on how viable is it to crack ammonia into hydrogen before burning it?
I understood the Puortollano electrolyser plant is now operational (Iberdrola) . Converting mostly solar power into hydrogen into ammonium. Capacity 20 MW, so tiny compared to the EU ambitions. Spain has overcapacity solar power at the moment due to inadequate grow in electricity demand (¿) . Let's see how this project turns out in the long run....
From scientific to economic adviser without even a shower... Wow! Such a talented commentator. Of course, just comment, no receipts or research.
Engineers/ scientists call H2 and electricity 'carriers'. They transport the energy. It is not an energy source.
Of course they aren't energy sources.
Neither of those are naturally occurring (other than lighting strikes).
this makes complete sense. oil companies know it won't work so there's no lobbyists pushing back. nice. love the humans.
This is the real reason for the hydrogen economy
I assume there are not only no lobbyists pushing back, but fossil fuel lobbyists supporting this plan ...
Some 5 or 7 years ago, I've read a paper by an "organisation" in the UK regarding carbon reduction in HVAC systems for buildings. The idea was to use hydrogen for heating and cooling (don't know anymore what the idea for cooling was exactly). One important and really big paragraph was about reusability of already existing infrastructure. The already existing gas infrastructure in the UK would be ideal, with minor changes, to be used for hydrogen. The conclusion was that this is a great plan and should be pushed forward.
The organisation I mentioned before was btw. funded by all the big players in gas ^^. Someone mentioned that when something sound to good, someone is profiting big. It's not a direct profit, but the big gas companies are very, very concerned about their gas business and they really want their pipe network being used in the future so they can shift their business to rent their pipe(line) infrastructure to the new hydrogen industry or just take over the role of the hydrogen distributor.
I'm not trying to say it's all about big gas, but I bet my ass off, their people knocking on governments door and wanna talk.
I'm not sure about the advantages of burning hydrogen in my furnace, stove or fireplace. Natural gas lines running underground all over town do leak occasionally, often with poor consequences. If they were filled with hydrogen, those might be spectacular. (But if we ever have flying cars, asphalt companies may lobby against them .. duh, for the same reason states have begun to add extra license taxes to electric cars).
natural gas pipes can't hold hydrogen, they'll have to be replaced
@@MrHerrS This is why the UK's National Grid Plc was split into two separate companies - National Grid for electricity distribution and National Gas Transmission for high-pressure gas distribution. NGT was sold off to private investors, like Macquarie Bank, who have bought up most of UK's other infrastructure. NGT may have issues with its business model if we are going to decarbonise. But as Sabine said, the hydrogen narrative may just be smoke-n-mirrors to hide the true intension that we will be using methane for longer than is being let on by the respective European governments.
As a consolation, at least anyone who can be called "big gas", in an English speaking country, has an uphill PR battle.
The natural gas pipelines can't handle hydrogen due to its small molecules, not to mention the enormous safety risks. Former OIM speaking.
The bulky hydrogen storage problem almost certainly destroys the idea that hydrogen fusion
(H2+H3 => He4 + a neutron), is an improvement on nuclear fission, not counting the fact that although the products are not themselves radioactive, they are actually raw, ferocious radiation.
Excellent. This is the kind of educational video we really need. I plan to share it widely.
That "under pressure" 😮 I thought we hit an advert.😂
Sabine is just unable to say that phrase, like a curse or something)
Hello Dr. Hossenfelder,
Your figure of 30% for hydrogen energy storage round efficiency is very generous.
The figure of 30% doesn't include the energy used to compress the hydrogen generated by the electrolysers and the storage losses. That 30% figure is 20% in reality, and become a scant 15% if the hydrogen storage is cryogenic.
yeah it’s much better to just throw away excess renewable energy instead of converting some 20% of it for later use
@yannfaulus Have you read about the capillary fed electrolysis cells? They operate at 1.51 volts with an efficiency of 98%, at least that's the claim. Hypothetically, what would that make the round trip efficiency?
Heat isn't wasted energy. District heating exists.
Compression is not required if underground storage in suiable geological structures is used.
@@yannfaulus you don't understand video. German government want to base whole German industry on this. The hungriest industry in Europe. They need tons of tons of energy. Thats nuts if 80% of this stored energy go away, and "thanks" to that you need to produce cosmic amount of terawatts to feed industry (when is no wind and solar power). This is the point of this video, not how we can save energy that would now be wasted (which is good idea basically).
Another problem: Reforming natural gas into hydrogen results in hydrogen with impurities that tend to poison fuel cells.
Why no one is talking about tidal power? I do find that tidal power is a very consistent and reliable source of energy. Plus, there is no input of energy in order for it to run
And then there is the security issue. One infamous case happened right in Germany, with the explosion being the worst in the region since WWII, on October 5th of 1991 on the factory premises of Heraeus, Hanau. A friend of mine pointed out that the explanation that hydrogen had seeped out and gathered beneath the tank was unlikely as hydrogen is lighter than any other substance. That is correct.
But there is actually a specific mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, that is heavier than your average air. There was another explosion in Switzerland, and a researcher managed to recreate it after a long series of experiments. This mixture is flammable, and as it is barely known, it poses an additional risk.
The density only goes down if you mix hydrogen in. It does not ever get more dense. It is a direct, almost perfectly linear correlation from pure hydrogen with the density of pure hydrogen all the way to pure oxygen with the density of pure oxygen with only extremely small deviations from a perfect line.
Googling says that the explosion 1991 happened because a hydrogen tank ruptured, followed by a massive oxy-fuel explosion.
I hate it when politicians screw up science. I feel I am going sane in a crazy world.
What if they screwed up climate science too and this is all nonsense in the first place?
The policy is intentionally murderous and they know it. Making power expensive is one form of many eugenics programs various governments runs, in this case an attempt to eliminate the poor.
I love the "under pressure" cuts lol. Queen is such a good band.
I thought the "hydrogen economy" was found unfeasible like 15-20 years ago which is why that hydrogen hype of the late 90ies and early 2000's died out. Guess I was wrong.
Some is coming from Toyota because they don't wish to transition to electric vehicles and some is coming because others don't like giving Tesla all the power in electrics and batteries
Geological hydrogen has been found in large amounts in a lot of countries pretty recently, which would bring down production costs but wouldn't do anything about distribution problems. It would knock one of the legs out from under the methane industry though, which would be nice. One project in the US that looked interesting got passed over for government subsidies, in favor of plants for making hydrogen out of methane.
Who knows, it all could have been a lie. Can't know anymore with all the tangled interests
It was, it died, you're not wrong. You just missed its recent resurrection... Though, as Sabine implies, it's more like a zombie. But hell, for all I know there was one between these two that we both missed. Hydrogen is like a perpetual motion machine, somebody's always coming up with a new one.
Back then we were smarter than now, so it became feasible to sell the idea for political clout. When it won't work, blame Russia.
..."Love you too", followed by the best massive eye roll! 😅🤣😂
My notebook won't fix anything after all
It’s a problem when politicians try to do engineer jobs🤦🏻♂️
Japan has had a hydrogen roadmap for 10-15 years. What happened to that?
I think you're wrong on this, Sabine.
Geological storage of hydrogen has been a mature technology for more than 40 years at this point, and the US today has around 450GWh of hydrogen stored in various sites around Moss Bluff. The first site actually opened in 1983 with a storage capacity of around 130GWh. Scalability is the reason why it makes sense: you can add 100GWh of geological storage at a time, and it's far easier to drill salt cavern storage or reuse old natural gas wells than it is to make that amount of batteries. At the end of the day, efficiency only really matters as a proxy for cost, and if the less efficient process costs less overall, then that's what we'll use. Geological storage also pairs well with gas turbines, since they handle impurities well, and they're reasonably efficient and scalable. There are also a number of synergies with chemical synthesis, which also needs to be decarbonized, so even if we weren't also using geological hydrogen storage for energy, we would still be using it to store feedstock for ammonia synthesis so we can make fertilizer, and methanol, so we can power cargo ships (and probably trucks). Using the same storage method for all of these needs almost certainly makes them all cheaper in aggregate just due to economies of scale.
If batteries turn out to be cheaper for energy in the long run, then they'll supplant hydrogen, but that's unlikely without a step change in their scalability. That's what really matters here. Scalability always wins in the end, because it drives marginal costs to zero. I agree with you that electrolyzers have a ways to go, but that's not the only way to make hydrogen. Waste / biomass is a big one and is a low hanging fruit in many places. There are also things that can be done like deep sea electrolysis to produce compressed hydrogen, that can boost your efficiency. Most geological storage is on the scale of around 150bar, and the energy required for compression is logarithmic, so going from, say, 50 bar to 100 bar takes less energy than going from 1 bar to 50 bar.
I think the only arguments against geological hydrogen storage come down to perfect being the enemy of good. It's not about the perfect or ideal solution, it's about the one that can actually be achieved, and in this regard, geological hydrogen is both necessary anyway, and infinitely more scalable than batteries.
I read it as "perfect being the enemy of god" several times!
Love comments like this where expertise being shown and even content creators get educated
Sabine is more wrong than right these days. In addition to your comment, I would remind us of the blue hydrogen option: on paper that could yield a large energy supply independent of renewable sources and under the IRA it is set to boom in the US over the next decade. The geological storage potential for the generated and captured CO2 is abundant in most part of the world. I know that the current literature is 'divided' about the fraction of captured CO2 in the blue hydrogen pathway, but on paper that problem should get resolved over time*. Remains the danger for greenwash windowdressing and aspects of the public perception about such CCS schemes...
*I think so because the blue hydrogen is created by cooking a mixture of fossil fuel and WATER, i.e. not oxygen, so unlike other CCS schemes you don't have nitrogen from the atmosphere mixing in and polluting the whole process.
@@5th_decile Expert speaking about carbon dioxide storage... For me disucussion ends here.
Pointless, stupid, only to take grants and money from uneducated lunatics.
Thank you for being educated, seems even Sabine is becoming click-baitey these days
Sabine is so right. Closing down the nuke plants was a terrible decision, pushed by panic not by logic, and ignoring Merckel's dependence at that time on Russian natural gas, a disastrous policy as we now see.
As many people saw and said at the time of closing those plants.
Funny that Trump warned the EU about being dependent on Russian energy and was laughed at. People so smart they ignore the obvious because an idiot said it.
No, nuclear can't be trusted, in a calamity one of those plants could meltdown and spew radiation into the air for ages. Storing the nuclear waste is an issue too
@W1ldSm1le not Trump but Poles and baltics. Long before Trump even considered running for a presidency
@imcbocian I watched a video where Trump said that very thing and was laughed at by the German reps. The Poles and Baltic states said it first, because it's obvious to anyone without a normalcy bias or more concerned with gdp numbers than actual reality.
Of course an owner of an elelectric car company will say everything else is stupid
I remember seeing the design for a hydrogen fuel cell for the first time and was immediately reminded that we used to make bombs from the stuff.
"That's why the Brits left the EU." - wonderful statement! We need words-burning power plants, we never will have any problems with energy supply.
And the hot air generated from those words!
The statement hopefully was meant as a joke. The Brits left the EU because they were misled and because they have a media landscape that is not fit for purpose. The fact that the author of this video liked the comment seems odd and casts a weird light on her video.
@@andreask753 The OP is just continuing the joke Sabine made, so nothing odd in her liking it.
@@andreask753 I was not misled.
@@andreask753 The other problem is us Brits are no better at taking positive action than the EU. We have simply replaced EU red-tape and inaction with British red-tape and inaction.
(And, of course, in a lot of cases we still have to deal with the EU, so we've doubled the bureaucracy /smh).
When politicians use terms like "communication" & "vision", we know we're well & truly scr*wed....
3:15 Now we know. Good to see someone figured this out. 🎉🎉🎉
Sabine, one question. Did you checked the storage of hydrogen as ammonia and the use of ammonia as fuel? Toyota recently developed a ammonia based engine.
Smart thinking. Yeah, I figured that these countries probably had various methods of making hydrogen practical. Not saying all countries are smart, but they aren’t typically that foolish.
Batteries just aren’t very economical, an alternative could help a lot. Also, ammonia could be safer than hydrogen because it might not need to be pressurized, which is nice.
You missed out a third option in why countries would go for it - corruption. A *few* people will get very very rich from taxpayers money.
climate scientists are all noble and pure of heart though
@@crawfish7286 I challenge you to name a single climate scientist who is currently raking in truckloads of money.
Yeah it's really a battle between the corruption of the 'fossil fuel' industry, the corruption of the 'renewables' industry and the corruption of the hydrogen industry.
Politicians are stupid and are easily fooled by the green, snake oil salesmen. EG the reduction in power of vacuum cleaners, without taking into effect that larger motors are more efficient than smaller ones and the smaller ones. If they are half the power they deliver less than half the suck so take more than twice as long to do the same work. Net result is more electricity consumed. Lots more examples but my post is too long already.
@@originalprecursor All of them that have salaries and a job.
My professors of the energy engineering department are all obsessed with hydrogen and also they talk about the “energy guidelines” of the EU as if they were the solution to all our problems and the ideal path to take. Yes, a bunch of bureaucrats which know nothing about energy conversion processes will tell you exactly how to generate energy. Have we become mad? Where is critical thinking?
Professors know how and where to get grants, and what keywords need to be used for success of application
They are visionaries, critical thinking is for other people 😳🙄
Or perhaps you might consider the possibility that your engineering professors know some things that you and Sabine don't.
You're forgetting that policy makers do indeed consult science and engineering to craft policy. They don't just pull it out of their ass. There's an entire industry that does nothing but advise policy makers and corporate governance on what to do, in this case regarding climate change and sustainability. They're not just inventing this out of whole cloth.
@@stevenhaas9622sorry to disappoint you but laws of the universe are universal. They are the same for all of us, including politicians, professors chasing grant money, and "engineers" chasing paychecks. In the end energy supply is very basic thermodynamics.
30% with Hydrogen? Might aswell just turn excess energy into E-Fuel instead.
yes, that would be the alternative.
This isn't just dumb, it is evil. They are making things more expensive for no reason
The only thing worse than H2 energy storage is not having any energy storage. Here in Finland, we have way too much wind energy in the market and when we get a Winter day without enough wind, the energy prices skyrocket instantly because during windy days the energy prices are low enough to push older technologies off the market. Daily fluctation can be price increases around 50x or 5000%. That's a bit more than acceptable inflation!
And I fully agree that about 10-30% of end-to-end effiency of H2 as energy storage is close to receiving "worst battery ever" award.
Li-ion batteries have end-to-end efficiency close to 90% which makes them clearly superior technology even if pretty expensive method.
Wikipedia said pumped-storage hydroelectricity get a round-trip efficiency of 70% to 80%.
Doesn't Finland have mountain ranges suitable for hydroelectric dams? That's still the most efficient use of seasonal power storage that can be sized into the GWh scale. Something that batteries would be hard-pressed to do.
@@MrLightZenithIt doesn’t. You shouldn’t talk about this if you know nothing about it. Hydroelectric dams are the most efficient but they are also extremely expensive, have major ecological consequences and are highly dependent on geography.
Then stop this useless wind and build nuclear power plants.
@@billyswongIt does but the available capacity is limited by terrain and basically exhausted.
I thought that hydrogen was a non-starter... I'm glad someone agrees.
It's ok. You'll have it shoved down your throat anyway.
I respectfully disagree, hydrogen as a power storage system is a non-starter, butt I'd say that it makes sense as a replacement for gas in many industrial production systems, such as steel production
I told you that several years ago. Don't you remember?
@@juimymary9951 Hydrogen is possibly the WORST fuel you could use for steel production, if you actually care about the quality of the steel produced. Even minor exposure to hydrogen turns good steel into little better than cardboard due to chemical embrittlement.
The world would be such a better place if scientists would agree unanimously so now and then.
Fortunately they can't make up the laws of physics.
Hydrogen is not explosive, it is flammable.
And you'd think the Germans, above all other countries, would remember the fate of the Hindenburg.
The skit was funny with the phone call, but just so you know, it's not legally possible for somebody born outside of the United States to become president of the United States.
Nothing in American politics is impossible. All it would take is an amendment to the constitution. We have a bunch of those. But yes, as it stands now, Elon Musk could not be the president of the United States.
Ah right, I had forgotten he was born in South Africa.
@@SabineHossenfelderNo worries. Donald Trump was born in “Jersey” and he would do away with birthright citizenship, anyway. So…👀 (I’m leaving open the question of whether “Jersey” is sufficiently part of the United States, or whether merely surviving infancy is enough qualification for running a democracy….)🤪💕
@@blinkingmanchannelsurviving infancy might not be enough, but It's certainly a start in the right direction.
everyone does. @@xt5181
Nuclear Nuclear Nuclear it's that simple. I will throw all my physics and chemistry credentials behind this simple response. 😂
(Eternal) Waste, dangers of operation, etc … nuclear is not the solution- and never was
I'm a fan of concentrated solar thermal power, with heat storage. :P
Agree… but the leftists will never understand the new nuclear and will make a lot of noise over it.
@@alexanderdekeuyper2990 Those problems have been solved. Please stop listening to the fossil fuel industry spin doctors.
@@alexanderdekeuyper2990 Not eternal, just centuries.
Say it loud: We are ruled and ruined by Idiots! Thats our main Problem.
I'm fast coming around to this point of view. Or if not idiots, then people whose values and concerns are extremely far removed from the needs of our nations and peoples.
The greatest thing I learned in all my years of chemistry is Gibbs free energy. It explains soooooo much.
Sabine, you ROCK. It is refreshing to see, that not the whole Germany has gone totally mad.
I did a quick math 50l car H2 pressure tank. At 700 bars the force on the walls is roughly NINE HUNDRED metric tons !!!
I would NEVER drive in such car. The problems with H2 are just a never ending string of problems, small, Medium, HUGE and UNSOLVABLE. This can drive the whole country into the ground, like a major war.
This is a case of a subject matter expert overestimating their insight into other subjects - this isn't for consumer cars, it is for industrial uses, and transported as ammonia. It isn't perfect, but much better than say electric batteries or lugging around giant flywheels.
At that point, you could just use a bleeder valve in the tank to rocket your car around. 😅
If you tried selling people 150 years ago on the idea of driving vehicles filled with 80 L of gasoline, let alone allowing whole cities to be filled with such vehicles, they would have thought you were crazy. So much flammable liquid, in a fast moving vehicle? Will nobody think of the fire hazards to the city! Turns out it was a solvable problem. So is hydrogen storage
@@MrDael01 Interestingly, firebrigades used battery powered firetrucks in the early 20th century because they did not trust a vehicle powered by something as flammable as gasoline for fighting fires (I've seen these exhibited at the German firefighter museum / "Deutsches Feuerwehr-Museum" in Fulda; the combination of a turntable ladder, wooden wheels, a sizeable amount of lead batteries and an electric motor feels a bit like schizo tech, but these things are real :-P )
@@MrDael01good point!
I used to think that the Germans were sensible enough to choose the most practical, well-tested solution to clean energy.
Then they shut down all their nuclear power plants like morons.
They are. Sabrine doesn't understand green hydrogen. And, always misrepresents green hydrogen as she does here with sweeping conclusions which are rooted in something other than facts. Potent, safe, available to everyone, and 100% clean. All you have to do is understand it - and apply it.
And since they shut down nuclear completely, electricity mix is greener and prices went down.
@@TobyKinkaid11 Sabine doesn't understand green urea. And, always misrepresents green urea as she does here with sweeping conclusions which are rooted in something other than facts. Potent, safe, available to everyone, and 100% clean. All you have to do is understand it - and apply it. 500% better than hydrogen. And urea is still bonkers.
@@TobyKinkaid11 She raised a number of clearly articulated problems with it. You can offer counterarguments, or explain briefly (as one that understands a subject could) why she's wrong. Instead you say she's wrong because she doesn't understand green hydrogen, and leave it there. This argumentations, which amounts to personal attack and nothing more, is not convincing from your part, I hope you can see that.
@@TobyKinkaid11she did state facts, but in my opinion the video is incomplete, because she did not adress the overcapacity of solar power during some hours of the day or season... in other words, if solar power becomes too cheap, the round trip inefficiency of hydrogen storage might no matter.
Whichever is the winner, Engineers can satisfy their thirsts in R&D. I was one of them and now started start-up for next gen R&D. Profitability comes from somewhere else.
As my old boss used to say "Hydrogen is, was and always will be the fuel of the future"
Good video but one thing needs addressing to round it off (maybe another video) - what is the alternative for stoarge? Now I might be wrong but I understand batterys are pretty good for short term storage but pretty poor for long term storage. Its completely fair to critique hydrogen but, in a werid way, it doesn't need to be 'good' it just needs to be 'least worst'. What is our long term (seasonal) storage solution actually going to be? Without viable long term storage one of 2 things will happen 1) we size generation for peak winter days - hugely oversized capacity for most of the year - very expensive and no guarantee it actually generates on peak winter days. 2) We size capacity more modestly but have insufficent energy for some parts of winter..
We need a storage solution...
There are other things that can be used to store energy that aren't as difficult to contain as hydrogen, such as pumping water to a higher altitude with extra energy and using it with turbines to generate it when needed. Though, of course, these have their own problems as well.
@@gimmethegepgunnot good for more than a couple of hours storage, so only work for daycycle.
@@stefanbernardknauf467 Australia is producing a pumped Hydro Plant at 5GW.
@@jamesvedelago834 of course, they're developing renewables, so they need storage. However, storage is kWh, not kW. You cannot pay back hydro storage if it isn't paid for daily. Look at the storage capacity of the reservoir and divide it by the 5 GW, you'll see that it amounts only to a couple of hours, no more. The general reckoning is that for the "Dunkelflaute" you need up to 2 weeks storage.
@@stefanbernardknauf467 It's not like compressed hydrogen fares all that much better volumetrically. Hydrogen at 700 bar stores about 5x as much energy per cubic meter as water raised 100m, but the overall efficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen and back is in the 30%-40% range, whereas large water pumps are in the 80%-90% range and water turbines are around 90%, which puts water at more than double the conversion efficiency, so water raised 100m would only be ~2.5x less energy-dense volumetrically, but doesn't have anywhere near as many problems involved in storing it.
There's also the option of lifting solids that are MUCH denser than water to store it, though I don't know what the efficiencies involved would be for that.
Storing surplus energy inefficiently is still better than throwing it away. I remember the old gasometers for storing town gas (over 50% hydrogen). It wasn't a problem. There is no clearly better alternative. Pumping water uphill requires major civil engineering projects on an enormous scale, batteries cost a lot and can't store anywhere near enough, and storing energy as compressed air wastes a lot of energy as heat.
The hydrogen infrastructure is also very expensive. Calling batteries expensive and the suggesting hydrogen where you lose 70% of the electricity and the infrastructure is as expensive seams a little of.
Thats why nuclear Energy is important. It provided a stable Energy source tô complement renewables...unfortunately the german goverment always find ways tô make things worse.
Pumping water uphill uses existing technology that's available in most countries and, though the projects are large, the project planning is well understood and the costs predictable.
@2ndfloorsongs Where are you putting all these reservoirs? The costs of digging out a new reservoir are unthinkable and all the easy locations are in use.
@@PerErikKarlssonbatteries use rare earth materials that are hazardous. Batteries aren't going to scale well
Politicians never see problems under an engineering set of eyes. It's all about EFFICIENCY!
Just use the word money instead of efficiency and politicians understand
The real answer is the all plentiful oil and natural gas!!!! Don't know why Sabine keeps missing this.
But on the other hand engineers never see political problems in their theoretical clever concepts.
@@111BAUER111 and yet the world we live in is built and is perfected by engineers, smart people in general. I rather put my trust in them before politicians.
@@khang.ngtr487 I would disagree. One without the other would end in chaos. It always depends on the question of which of the two I would trust more. I wouldn't generalize like that.
I think, there is something more stupid to store energy, this is e-fuel.
So what is the alternative to Hydrogen? Gravity Storage? Batteries? Water Pump Storage? Are those more efficient?
Bashing H2 without naming a decent alternative is pretty lame to be honest.
I'm not sure about already completed gravity storage but all the other examples you mentioned have better end-to-end efficiency than green hydrogen.
Probably even molten salt storage would have better end-to-end efficiency than hydrogen.
The only way hydrogen makes any sense is if you get it as a side-effect "for free" from fossil sources while doing something else. Definitely not the way forward in long run.
her only answer is nuclear - ALWAYS
demand response, networking, renewable overbuild and renewable mix
It's all been calculated already for almost all countries, read Jacobson.
The alternative is nuclear.
Water.. from all those tears ->😥
I love it how straightforward your videos are !
Extremely well said, thank you for making this video!! Not enough people understand why it is not just simpler to store the energy as electricity...
It's never about the thing.
It's about how much control and wealth extraction we can spin off from the thing.
Hey Sabine,
I’m principal you are right, but you are overseeing some crucial elements.
1) the hydrogen isn’t necessarily produced locally, but abroad. Studies show that with current technologies it is economically feasible (so speaking in terms of energy prices in cents/kWh, in Europe), to build large scale plants in Saudi Arabia for example. This would be based on solar plants with desalination and electrolyzers. While this process is very inefficient in itself, it’s still cheaper to produce hydrogen over there, and to transport it to Germany.
2) that obviously leads to the next problem of transporting the hydrogen across the globe, but the answer is pretty simple: ammonia! The process of creating ammonia is highly optimized nowadays, and the energy intensive aspect of it is to create the hydrogen in the first place. However, having such a hydrogen production site solves that issue. The best thing: there already are ship engines that can run on ammonia! So the ships can consume a small fraction of the ammonia they are transporting and are completely carbon emission free. There already are some ships built to demonstrate this.
3) now to storage: ammonia solves a bunch of the storage issues. Pressurizing it allows for a non-cryogenic liquid storage and transport. In fact, also that technology is highly developed, since ammonia is such an important element of modern processes.
So, basically the problem of producing, transporting and storing hydrogen is already solved. The last element is to come up with a way of distributing and using it locally. Ideas range from distributing ammonia and catalytically converting it locally, to injecting a small amount of hydrogen (single digit %) into our current natural gas grid.
Edit: to sum it up, I think hydrogen will become a big part of our energy economy. But it will take time, and I agree with you, banning nuclear was a terrible move, because we will need some technologies that bridge the gap.
Ammonia is a poor fuel, extremely toxic, and produces corrosive acids when it does burn. Not really a good plan.
your first sentence
You are missing the point Ms Hossenfelder is making: efficiency. The ammonia pig won't fly. Once you have:
1. A green production (solar for instance);
2. A desalination plant;
3. An electrolyzer plant;
4. An ammonia plant;
In other words huge investments, why not add a little investment (it'll be the smaller investment) to have
5. An fertilizer plant
And sell the stuff with the highest market value? After all you have a huge investment to pay back.
Europe needs fertilizer, as does the rest of the world.
@@stefanbernardknauf467 You missed the climate doom and gloom fix for CO2 emissions. You can't have fertilizer as it is CO2 intensive.
>
P.S. Ammonia is seriously toxic and has high potential for creating destructive byproducts. Also see the above part about CO2 emissions in creating the stuff.
>
Creating CO2 and environmental destruction doesn't really constitute a solution the environmental or climate problems lol
@@axle.student green fertilizer produced with green ammonia of course. The nr 5 is there for a reason.
This is what Liebreich has been saying since many years. Just look at all the fossil companies promoting the hydrogen hype.
In the words of Liebreich: "If you're an oil and gas company, in a way, talking about hydrogen is kind of a two-way bet because if it works, then you're embedded in the hydrogen industry - but if it doesn't work, you've delayed the transition to the thing you don't make, which is electricity."
THANKS - yet sabine always fails to see this and instead makes up fossile vs hydrogen vs nuclear. yeah everything but god forbid we take solar power that would become increasinly cheap to produce, cause the sun is sth neoliberal capitalists cant privatise and have artificial scarcity over - so people would profit in the long run ...
Hydrogen in space is the energy storage medium of the universe.
One problem is semantics. Calling hydrogen a fuel is misleading.
As a chemical engineer with a couple decades experience working with hydrogen, I concur both Sabine and Elon are correct.
But it makes sense for aviation since it is green, energy dense, and light compared to batteries.
Correct? Perhaps you're not as great an engineer as you think.
@@TobyKinkaid11Where's your engineering degree?
@@williamwalker39Yes, but it's still a huge challenge compared to the fuels we already have (and also much less dense; at least itw not as heavy as batteries, though). My vote is that commercial aviation should transition to LNG (which is also cryogenic, but still less of a hassle) as a means of getting ready for hydrogen.
Wrangling the smallest atom into confined spaces seems like a waste of energy
Unfortunately, this is the type of video that doesn't make a reasonable counter suggestion to the technology it criticizes: as you point out in the beginning, hydrogen is the proposed solution to longer term storage problems, where batteries will never be economical.
You point out the downsides, slow expansion path and wrong political motives. but what is the alternative really? we will need to shift our energy production seasonally in temperate climates. 30% efficiency for excess solar energy in summer months to be used in winter does not sound horrible to me. at least i fail to see a regenerative alternative.
The UK is an island, with an irregular coastline. Tide comes in; tide goes out; and tides are pretty reliable, unlike sun and wind. Not to mention that the UK has some of the largest tidal ranges on Earth. For the life of me I can't understand why we don't make more of this in the form of barrages with turbines. The travel implications would also be a great benefit. Just locally, it's less than 10 miles in a direct line from Southport to Blackpool across the Ribble Estuary, yet the current road journey takes over an hour.
You don’t store Hydrogen you store Ammonia NH3, 3 times more Hydrogen per volume…
Germany and Hydrogen...
LZ Hindenburg asks: "What could possibly go wrong?"
😂🤷🏻♂
I shouldn't have laughed so much with this comment...
Much ado about nothing. When it does "bad badaboom" that it's still only water. 💥 🚰
I knew somebody somewhere must have had the same thought when viewing this. I didn't even have to scroll down that far to find this comment.
I know its a joke, but since jokes only land (for a particualr person), its worth mentioning that we arent talking about balloons, we're talking about combusted fuel. As fuel, hydrogen is actually safer than methane, which is safer than petroleum-based products.
(That said, all of Dr. Hossenfelder's points stand; altough I wonder if the use of hydride solves the hydrogen embitterment issue - I'll need to do more research)
While I agree on the storage part, there are a ton of other uses that are being developed (to be fair, not commercially ready, but promising in some industries) like in steelmaking and ammonia for shipping which would requiere a bigger industry and logistics for hydrogen.
one thing is clear: you can locate solar power and air turbines close to the plant where hydrogen is needed. And hydrogen production efficiency is not 30% (but it depends on how you measure it). also you need minimal changes in the blast furnace if you wish to use hydrogen and not coke.
@@janami-dharmam It's not used for the heat as such but for the reduction of iron ore.
There are more cost effective ways of producing ammonia and you have to have some carbon in your steel or it has low tensile strength and hardness.
@@soaringeagle5418 one thing is the amount of carbon on steel and another the amount and type used for reduction, also depending if you are using a BF or EAF
@@eduardobustos2124 I'm aware but if you want to harden the steel later it would have to go through another process using more of the power you are trying to save.
It's sad when governments fall for pipedreams.
Germany: we will run on hydrogen.
Me: CH4 is not hydrogen.
Germany: well, it has Hydrogen in it, duh...
Hydrogen doesn't have to be stored under pressure. It can be stored (or more likely transported) as ammonia. Now I'm not saying it's a miracle fuel or anything, just pointing out that the objections based on handling and storing hydrogen aren't insurmountable, there are options.
As for the efficiencies of storage as some form of hydrogen, there are going to be similar problems whichever storage medium you use. And renewable's pretty much make storage a minimum requirement, not an optional extra.
Ammonia is another toxic flammable nightmare. Not as bad as hydrogen of course.
@@kevinaschim8475Eh, I'd say ammonia is worse from a safety perspective since it's toxic (unlike hydrogen). That said, it is much easier to store.
For a ground-based system, solid hydride might be better.
Safest storage option is to combine with C02 and create Methane .
@@kevinaschim8475 So are petroleum products. The sad reality is that we are already using the easiest and most efficient fuels, it's those fuels that are causing our climate problems. Anything else is going to be worse in some way, if not all ways.
We need to take a deep breath, accept that no matter which direction we are going to go, it will be worse that the current fuels. But that's a bitter pill we have to swallow.