Quote:
Originally Posted by Astro
Use it yes, waste it, no. Using lots of energy to create a little hydrogen just because the energy would otherwise be wasted doesn't sound like a good idea. That excess energy could be channelled into other processes that unavoidably need lots of energy. Like say aluminium production or water desalination.
Or even powering the manufacture of additional green technology.
And if electric cars were commonplace then there probably wouldn't be that excess geothermal energy available to throw away.
|
There IS an excess of electricity in my region and regions such as Iceland. Electric cars are nice for you if you don't expect to go much more than 200 Km or so. Can you show me the numbers for taking an 80,000 lb tractor trailer 600 miles in a day using batteries? A disproportionate amount of that load would have to be batteries. How about airliners? No dice with batteries of ANY formulation. You can store hydrogen in hydrocarbons and power both.
Care to argue that point? Because truthfully, you have not provided a solution for heavy load transport. Trains can only go where tracks go.
Iceland has a disproportionate amount of geothermal and hydro electric power. The politics being what they are, they embarked several decades ago on a hydrogen pathway. They built out their power production to embrace the hydrogen buses and vehicles that were to be powered by hydrogen from electrolysers. Currently, they only have one electrolyzer feeding a handful of buses as the power has been turned to aluminum production and ammonium nitrate. The failure is not hydrogen so much as the politics of money. The local population could continue to use expensive imported gasoline and diesel just as long as they could export more valuable nitrate and aluminum. But, it doesn't change their ability to produce hydrogen in abundance and, like the nitrates, they could store it as hydrocarbons to be used in local ships and boats and aircraft. If the price for such products was high enough , they could export it. Can they export the electricity? No, but they could switch the majority of their personal vehicles to batteries and their larger vehicles could use hydrogen or hydrocarbons. There is simply no battery that can match hydrocarbons for energy density. Call it a waste of energy? It is a necessity.