> It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen
The only one promising that was the fossil industry, trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green" and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable for silly things like mid-term energy storage.
> If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is totally fine. At the moment natural gas is excellent for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil mix, solely because the transition mix isn't "green enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying to be holier than the pope.
If you want to present the plan as renewables and subsidized natural gas as being better than nuclear than be open about it and present it as that. It is not the same as a subsidize free renewables and storage solution.
Those 97.5% sounds very nice. Denmark has well over 100% renewables production from wind and solar, but in terms of consumption only get around 50%. The rest they need to import. 97.5 vs 50 means there is some work to be done.
I recently posted this link (https://svensksolenergi.se/statistik/elproduktion-fran-solen...) that illustrate how much energy that solar farms produce in Sweden. Getting 97.5% from that would be a nice challenge, especially around the winter months. December and January had around 3% production compared to the best previous month (which we could use as a stand-in for 100% capacity but that would be incorrect).
Natural gas is not fine. The geopolitical consequences are terrible, the environmental impact are not sustainable, and the cost are carried almost exclusively through subsidizes. Trying to sell natural gas as "saving the environment" is a political message that I do not agree with.
You're including a bunch of different generation technologies which have vastly different operating characteristics which means they are not substitutes for each other.
For example, nuclear takes days to start from cold and is really only economic if operating at a constant output. Thus you need complimentary sources to help meet changes in demand. These days, typically this means gas turbines.
Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
> Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
No, turbo-alternators 'burning' hydrogen do exist. And green hydrogen (produced by renewables) is cheaper than pink hydrogen (produced by a nuclear reactor) because the total cost of renewables' electricity is lower than nuclear's.
I don’t see the connection with my comment but hydrogen is irrelevant and contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation. The technical components for a hydrogen based energy market do exist but are simply unviable financially. Nuclear also struggles to compete on the basis of price in competitive markets but is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity. You could argue (I personally would not) that the higher cost of nuclear can be justified on this basis but the fact that hydrogen is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and is prone to leakage means it doesn’t even have that going for it.
The connection is that "it will also have natural gas capacity" seems false to me as backup turbo-alternators can 'burn' hydrogen ( => no natural gas capacity).
> hydrogen
> contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation
True, however it doesn't imply that it will remain irrelevant.
> unviable financially
For the time being, and less and less. Bloomberg NEF predicts that green hydrogen will cost approximately 1.2€/kg in 2050. Carbon taxes or oil prices may also play a role as nearly all hydrogen is now produced thanks to some fossil fuel.
> nuclear
> is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity
Green hydrogen could also be.
> prone to leakage
This is a major challenge for transportation-related usages, especially in small or not-intensively used vehicles. This isn't in the "gridpower backup" role, as mass and volume of storage isn't a major parameter.
I see what you meant now but still see little scope for hydrogen to have a role in the energy sector.
One reason for my skepticism is that I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen as an energy store for decades at this stage (I'm old) and for a long time believed them but here we are, with little to show for it. In fact, at historical scales, hydrogen's significance as an energy store today is less than it was in the 19th century. As a result, I've adopted "I'll believe it when I see it" approach so I just ignore hydrogen predictions - particularly ones 25 years into the future.
But the main reason is simple physics. It simply has NONE of the physical attributes you'd want in a gas to be used to store energy. It's like if you picked all the attributes you WOULDN'T want in such a gas.
Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult. Everything it comes into contact with needs special materials to avoid embrittlement. It's prone to leakage.
It has dreadful energy density. The worst.
It has potent green house gas effects when leaked into the atmosphere.
It's dangerous and highly explosive and burns with such high intensity (and invisibly) that it requires specialist fire-fighting equipment.
Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal - a fraction of that of batteries.
In summary, hydrogen as energy store makes no sense to me. And it's completely hypothetical. If we are going to talk about hypothetical approaches to storing energy in the form of a gas, then green methane makes a lot more sense. Not that I'd advocate for either but I see some potential for green methane but none for hydrogen given its physical attributes.
> I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen
Fair point, same here (I was born in 1967), however fossil fuels are so effective and adequate as energy sources, as long as we ignored/neglected their dubious effect on the climate, that there was no real attempt to explore other ways.
> Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult
For the "gridpower backup" application there is no transport needed, and storage doesn't have to be compact nor mobile (those are a major challenge for hydrogen in transportation).
Granted, however we are used to store huge volumes of dangerous materials, some gaseous at ambiant pressure/temp (methane...), even into salt caverns, albeit when we began to do so (in the 1950's) it was quite a challenge.
> Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal
The only one promising that was the fossil industry, trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green" and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable for silly things like mid-term energy storage.
> If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is totally fine. At the moment natural gas is excellent for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil mix, solely because the transition mix isn't "green enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying to be holier than the pope.