Is there a future for hydrogen?

2 thoughts on “Is there a future for hydrogen?”

1. I don’t do “views” or indeed “points of view” – if you want those – ask somebody in the street.

   Missing from the writing of Oliver (& Lieberiech) are some realities. The most important is that surplus electricity from renewables increases in a non-linear fashion as more RES is connected to a given system. Three weeks ago I was talking to Michael Grubb – ex Ofgem chief economist. He agreed. Conventional thinking suggests that demand response will deal with surplus RES elec. Yes it will – to some extent – but if you have multi-day periods of surplus your choice then becomes constraint. X-border exports? As I write this (1300hrs 19/07/24) the pass-the-elec-parcel game has kicked off in North Europe as DK passes it to DE, who then dumps it on NL, passes it to BE – who finally gets rid of it to FR. When happens when the surplus is 80GW/hr in DE? & it has only 20GW of interconnectors? Silence from Liebreich et al. Build 4x more interconnectors? Pull the other one.

   In the case of comments on cost of H2. Let’s roll back to 2008 and PV and I make the statement “by 2018 PV will be competitive with wholesale elec” I would be laughed at (although events would prove me right).

   Furthermore, the business case for H2 tends to look only at H2. A business partner is running an electrolyser & makes more money………selling the oxygen to a local fish farm. Doubtless there are other use cases – ditto for the useful heat (@ 60c) from electrolysers which is never discussed. But I would not expect a Torygraph journo to have that sort of knowledge – liebreich? yes – begging the question – why does he not mention this aspect (or indeed the O2 aspect). But that would interupt the story & make it more complicated & let’s face it – we can’t have that can we, we can’t give space to engineers to explain what can & can’t be done – that would place them in a position of control. Can’t have that. nope.

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   1. An excellent comment. Thanks Mike

      Reply

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