What cost Hydrogen ?

MattMattMattUK

Hydrogen will not see widespread deployment for domestic usage, there are too many issues, the costs are too high and production is either inefficient and/or not green anyway. Hydrogen has some potential uses in air travel and ships, even possibly for road vehicles under specific circumstances, but for domestic heating it is an entirely idiotic path to take, unless of course one is one of the several government ministers who are being heavily lobbied by both the boiler manufacturers and the gas installers...

Leon_W

I hope to god that todays gas pipes can take Hydrogen, if it comes to that.

If some effers come round and dig up the effing road one more time to install effing hydrogen gas pipes, effing broadband, or repair an effing water pipe leak I'm going to do my nut.

Qyburn

Hydrogen could be a way of storing energy from surplus electricity if suitable plant was developed.

But if you want to mix it with mains gas or use it as road (or rail or air) fuel then you need continuous production. Otherwise you'd have to tell people they can only fill up their car, or use their gas appliances if it's been really windy.

NedS

Qyburn said:

Hydrogen could be a way of storing energy from surplus electricity if suitable plant was developed.

That's where I see it's main utility - as a potential replacement for gas-fired power stations, meeting the demand when wind and solar are not producing and created and stored when there is a surplus from wind and solar. We need to be investing in a diverse range of energy-storage solutions (batteries, hydrogen, hydro-electric etc)

At present we do not seem to have any decent alternatives to good old fashioned gas (or oil) boilers for heating our old cold homes.

doodling

Hi,

The simple reality is that there is no commercial deployment of hydrogen for energy transfer or storage on a significant scale.  That is enough to tell us that it is not a viable technology now.

The engineering behind hydrogen storage and use is not developing at a significant rate (but I accept there is some development). That tells us that, absent a sudden leap forward in science or engineering,  hydrogen will never be viable under current market conditions.

So, the only thing that will make hydrogen viable is if market conditions change.  Things that might have that effect are:
1. Lots of spare electricity available cheaply (with the ability to make hydrogen at low prices).
2. Times of significant energy shortage (with the consequent ability to sell hydrogen, or electricity derived from it, at high prices).
3. Significant increases in the price of other energy storage mediums.

We already have (2) quite often but probably not yet at a scale that makes big hydrogen systems viable.

My understanding is that the aim is to build enough wind so that (1) occurs quite frequently also - that might be a challenge - the more wind generation you build, the less money you make from each new build because the price of electricity when it is windy will be less.

Who knows about (3).  Certainly the overall cost of things like pumped storage has increased due to increased environmental concerns. 

What would kill hydrogen (and wind come to that) is to build enough nuclear that we don't need to power the country with stored energy when the wind doesn't blow for a fortnight.

If you thought that nuclear was expensive, wait till you see how much wind and hydrogen cost together to do the same thing.

Qyburn

Nuclear still needs either storage or some supplementary generation that can handle the peaks and troughs. Hydrogen could do that, but at a low efficiency