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[–] 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (17 children)

This was a peak situation, but long term with even more renewable energy, that's when Hydrogen becomes relevant.
And when we have enough surplus production of electricity to produce cheap hydrogen the sky is the limit. Because cheap hydrogen can replace oil and gas everywhere.

We are not there yet, but I think it's not too far away.

the Danish Energy Agency is spearheading an ambitious plan to produce even more wind power for both export and domestic use.

And we are far from alone in this, all European countries are working towards more renewables. Which is why I think the above will become reality soon. Hydrogen is wasteful and cost a lot of electricity to make, but when electricity becomes plentiful enough that renewable production goes to waste, that's when hydrogen becomes really really relevant, and can replace everything that can't be replaced with electricity and batteries.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 hours ago* (5 children)

    doesn't hydrogen have way worse round-trip efficiency than batteries, even before things like embrittlement? i've heard as low as 45%, with the rest just becoming heat.

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  • [–] 1 point 42 minutes ago

    Hydrogen has other uses too. Currently we use gas which results in carbon emissions. But with cheap enough energy, you can get hydrogen from water. There is also an option to not emit the carbon when using gas, but you get less hydrogen for the same input so no one is going to do that at scale.

    Another major use for hydrogen is the haber-bosch process.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

    Yes, but it can be stored where batteries lose power over time. And a lot of the infrastructure doesn't need to be build but can be converted from natural gas use.

    In the end batteries and hydrogen fill two very different gaps. You can use batteries to shift the renewable production peak at noon (thanks solar) to the demand peak in the evening, maybe even flatten fluctuation (in production and demand) over a few days. But they are entirely useless as seasonal long-term storage.

    Also plans to produce green hydrogen exist independently. It's a requirement to decarbonise a lot of industry processes where direct use of electricity doesn't work. It's also a raw material in chemical industry.

    So if decarbonisation of more than just electricity production is the goal, large scale hydrogen production is a given. As is large scale storage as production from renewable energy will always have seasonal fluctuations. From there having it also double as long-term on-demand stored energy means just scaling up what is already there.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago (1 child)

    i don't remember if you and i spoke about this before but i did talk to someone on here about the fact that hydrogen can't really be stored for long periods either. whoever it was linked a statement from a german gas company claiming that their existing infrastructure could handle hydrogen without modification, and i remember coming away from that entirely unconvinced.

    i'd be happy to be proved wrong but i don't believe green hydrogen is going to play a big part of the grid. i'm personally hoping for pumped hydro and thermal storage.

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  • [–] 1 point 36 minutes ago

    Ammonia is used for fertiliser and could be used as fuel. About 1/3rd the energy density of petrol and much easier to store than hydrogen.

    Probably wouldn't want to plan to run the grid extensively on it. But if you are just having it to cover rare occasions then it could work well.

    Also gotta make a shitload of it for fertiliser production anyway. Cheap excess wind/solar power could make it economically practical.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 hours ago* (7 children)

    Before using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, you need to ensure that no fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity. Otherwise you would increase carbon emissions, not reduce them. I don't see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

    The world is currently at 42.6% green electricity. Also 100years are a very long time.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 hours ago*

    This statistic includes nuclear and bioenergy. I'm unsure about bioenergy, but nuclear certainly can not qualify as green. Unless you mean green glowing stuff, like nuclear waste is often depicted.

    Also 100years are a very long time

    Yes and humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    I'm gonna be a bit nit-picky here. You linked the "Low-carbon" source, which includes nuclear energy. Granted, long discussions can be had, whether nuclear counts as green energy, but besides that, I'd argue that nuclear should not be used to generate hydrogen - if at all it should be used the same as hydrogen would be used: to bridge gaps when not enough renewable energy is available.

    If you switch to renewables-only in the source just above that graph, the world is, according to latest data (2025), at 33.76% electricity generation from renewables. So when it comes to share of electricity generation with renewables we're on par with sometime around the 1950s. If you switch that graph to absolute generation and fossil fuels, you can see that electricity generation from fossil fuels has not yet started to decline.

    On top of all that, this is electricity generation, not primary energy use. For primary energy use we're currently at 8.59% world-wide.

    I'm not saying this to make us give in, I'm just saying that there is a long way to go - 100 years are (hopefully) a bit too much, but it's definitely not around the corner. And as an aside maybe also highlight that reductions in (primary) energy consumption are as important as ever.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

    True, but with a constant 100% plus generation from renewable, there obviously wouldn't be any fossil fuel burned to generate electricity. Here we are already at 80% of our total yearly electricity generated by renewables.
    When that reaches 100%, it can be done by utilizing surplus at peaks to generate hydrogen, exactly to completely prevent any use of fossil fuels.

    I don’t see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.

    100 years is a very long time, back in the 70's it was considered a lofty goal to achieve even 10%, and now we are at 80!!
    I don't think you have historical perspective.
    Personally I think within another decade we will surpass 100% here, and have the ability to export a lot of surplus renewable energy.
    I was also mostly thinking about civilized countries, not so much for instance USA.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 hours ago* (2 children)

    "here" is nice and good, but "here" is not global. This is not about a local incident. It's easy to have "too much green energy" in one place, just build a single wind turbine and don't connect it to a grid. But using that excess power to produce an inefficient expensive fuel in one part of the world doesn't solve the global energy- and emmission- problem. It's cheaper and more efficient to transport energy all over the world and shut down local fossil fuel power plants than to produce hydrogen, ship that all over the world and burn that.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    It's not as easy to ship electricity around as you might think. Electricity attenuates over distance, and when green sources are far from population centers, that effect is higher. To use electricity, you have to be physically tied to the power grid, or carry batteries. Those are heavy and require a bunch of heavy metals sourced from questionable places.

    Hydrogen is more portable and transferable than electricity. It can be used for off-grid purposes, like vehicles and wherever you'd use propane now. And its efficiency compared to electricity doesn't really matter if you're producing it using waste voltage from surplus.

    Both have their places. Converting away from fossil fuels isnt going to have a monolithic solution.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (2 children)

    but I think it’s not too far away.

    It could be not far away. That's the reason we see such a big uptick in funding and publicity for basically every right-wing moron on the planet fighting against (among other stuff) renewables.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago

    One of the reasons. The other ones are Russia and China wanting to split the West and low birth rates meaning the low cost workers are harder to come by(2/3of the growth in the 25-64 year old population will be in Africa in the next 25years and the richer the country the more likely a shrinking workforce, so imagine unions lowering the work week or similar).

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