If your intention is to get any kind of useful feedback on your message here .. I suggest you try to rephrase it or explain further what you're asking.

You know which way we will not solve the problem?

By failing to recognize technologies that are going to help solve the problem.

It's the same with CCS.

The "green" mantra of "this is all just a strategy to help the fossil industry survive and we must boycott it" is shooting in one's foot.

As long as the world's energy infrastructure can not be built solely on renewables - which will still be the case in at least 2-3 decades - it makes sense to develop/use technologies that make the footprint of fossil energy smaller.

Think about transporting peaks of renewables electricity generation that are not economically usable at the time when they're produced to times when renewables produce too little to meet demand. (Mostly in regions where generation depends significantly on seasons.)

> Didn't parse this statement, sorry. Can you rephrase?

They might have meant something like: if you process A through B to C while you could also process A to C directly, then the latter direct process will usually be more economically viable.

While this heuristic sounds broadly reasonable, it neglects so many details of any real production processes and value chains that it seems hardly applicable to real world situations.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229397

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The word "buzzphrase" implies that you think energy resilience is not as relevant as the proponents want to make it seem. Correct?

I've been thinking for years that resilience of the overall energy system is a factor that many green energy transition people appear to systematically overlook.

As I see it, chemicals based energy systems have a huge advantage over electricity based energy systems through their property of bringing large amounts of storage (and thus capacity to bridge outages) with them basically inherently.

The electrical grid is a delicate life support system and I'm convinced that it will - even in the far future - depend heavily upon chemical energy storage and transportation to give it resilience.

As far as I've heard the electrical grids in the US and Europe have come close to breaking points a lot more often over the last few years, compared to before. And even though huge sums of money are being invested in their build-out and maintenance, the supply situation with critical components such as transformers is apparently dire.

Alltogether makes me think that chemical energy storage (and thus, hydrogen, power-to-gas, ammonia, and such) will have a dead-sure place in energy systems.

Whoever made this graph doesn't seem to know what they're even looking for.

> "Liquid metals allow us to move the chemical elements around in a more dynamic way that gets everything to the interface and enables more efficient reactions, ideal for catalysis," Daeneke said. "Copper and gallium separately had both been discounted as famously bad catalysts for ammonia production, yet together they do the job extremely well."

Then the poster could later choose to selectively publish (or make them available to individuals) some of these unique keys, to make posts readable.

You're right, 300 g of meat isn't much of a challenge. The more appropriate comparison would be between 300 g of chips and an equal amount of calories in some protein rich food like meat. That should be much more challenging.

> .. people today are eating too much.

Yeah, the important question is: why are they eating too much?

I assume that a lot of it is unintentional. Overeating mostly happens because people aren't aware of a few simple mechanisms or are misunderstanding them, not because the world is hard. Mechanisms which they could quite easily use to overeat less or avoid it altogether, instead of falling prey to them.

Just telling people that they're eating to much doesn't help in any way. People need to know why and how they can quite easily change it.

Now if people choose a diet low in protein/calories ratio, they'll have a tendency to ingest more calories than people who eat protein rich diets. Try eating eating 300 g of cheese/meat/tofu in one meal, it'll be difficult. Eating 300 g of chips/fries is something many people can absolutely do, if the chips aren't too salty.

One significant difference between our modern western lives and the lives of people tens to hundreds of years ago is IMO that people back then quite automatically used up all the carb calories of their comparably protein diluted diet because life required much more physical activity and came with less home heating than today. Today, most people will just not expend much of the caloric energy of carb rich diets and thus develop metabolic diseases and such.

A carb rich diet is usually fine as long as you expend the energy via physical activity.

You don't think there will be seasonal mismatch between renewable generation and electricity demand?

Because if there _is_ a seasonal mismatch, hydrogen will be needed anyway.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40915206

Points: 9

# Comments: 8

> „Seit 2023 betreiben wir nun einen Bitcoin-Node und auch Bitcoin-Lightning-Nodes, und voller Stolz möchte ich ein kleines Geheimnis verraten: Wir werden bald in die digitale monetäre Photosynthese einsteigen“, so Röder.

deepl.com translation:

> "We have been operating a Bitcoin node since 2023 and also Bitcoin Lightning Nodes, and proudly I would like to reveal a little secret: We will soon be entering the digital monetary photosynthesis," says Röder.

> .. that hydrogen is transferred to a 25-cm-tall (9.8-in) bottle-like container at an internal pressure of 1 MPa. Popping one of these containers into the frame of one of the company's HYRYD ebikes feeds the onboard 180-W fuel cell and offers up to 60 km (37 miles) of range. Then it's just a case of removing a spent container and replacing it with a fresh one, which is said to take just 3-10 seconds.

IMO your point is somewhat valid, though "no new business creation" is obviously an exaggeration. Every application of some technology (Bitcoin mining, to mention just one aspect, is highly technological, as are other aspects of putting the equipment somewhere and operating it) involves a very deep supply/maintenance chain, which diffuses investments through society, in part local, in part elsewhere.

I would agree that with Bitcoin mining, there may be less local investment in broader ranges of businesses on average, than with many other kinds of investments. But local development of business/society is a complex topic with many many aspects generating all kinds feedback, so it's IMO very hard to make general and yet truthful statements about this.

There's another aspect that comes to my mind: in a way, letting people invest directly in money creation, as you put it, can be a benefit to the environment. How so? Money being saved instead of being reinvested or spent immediately is effectively people taking their feet off the gas pedal of the economy. As long as the worldwide economy is still > 80 % fossil carbon based (energy wise that is, material wise it might even be more), deceleration should be mostly a benefit for the ecosphere/environment.

Assuming you can just store it as piles of iron dust (somehow shielded from air/oxygen) and assuming a gross density of 5 t/m³ for iron dust you'd get a volumetric energy density in the ballpark of 10,000 kWh/m³.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electroche...

Pumped hydro is cheaper and more efficient. But AFAIK there isn't much potential for new capacity in areas where it'd be needed. Batteries are more efficient. But cheaper per kWh stored for 6 months than power-to-gas-to-turbine? I don't think so. At say USD 500 per kWh battery, 1 GWh would cost USD 500 MM. But seasonal storage is likelier in the TWh magnitude. 500 billion then.

550 MW electrolyzers (* 0.5 a * gas turbine efficiency 0.4 = ~ 1 TWh electricity), methanation plants, 2.5 TWh salt caverns and say 5 GW gas turbine plants to store 1 TWh for the 6 months that have less solar+wind than the other 6 would cost a lot less than 500 billion I assume.

> .. ammonia is more useful as an agrochemical than as an energy storage medium.

I think this will change. You don't transport/consume the petawatts of the world's deserts via HVDC to somewhere to 100 % immediately use them. You'll ship them in the form of some molecule. Which could well be ammonia.

> With regards to seasonal storage, it isn't as big of an issue as you would think.

The combination of PV/wind isn't perfect though. The more of it there is, the larger the storage needed to flatten the seasonal fluctuations.

It comes down to whether one assumes that either (A) electricity demand will adapt to some seasonal pattern (meaning that economic activity might fluctuate in synchrony) or (B) that economic activity will drive deployment of technology such that electricity consumption can be mostly even throughout the year.

I'd guess B is more likely.

But is it really the overall best way to store hydrogen?

Methane has a rather high climate impact, compared to CO2. So if you're taking CO2 to synthesize methane from hydrogen, any leakage afterwards is much worse than leaking CO2.

Why not use salt caverns (which are used to store natural gas and AFAIK can also store hydrogen directly) for seasonal storage at relatively low pressure?

And if you're going to synthesize some other molecule from H2, why not make ammonia instead?

There's already an ammonia powered FCEV semi (amogy.co).

> .., you are going to have a bad time competing with battery storage.

According to what I read here and there, battery storage won't be able to compete with chemical storage for the seasonal aspect, unless it becomes another order of magnitude cheaper or even more. Also, for seasonal storage over months, batteries don't really make sense due to loss through discharge, right?

> The challenges are immense. Hydrogen fuel is expensive — as much as four times more expensive than gasoline or diesel fuel.

What a trash opening of an article about technology.

Expensive, according to what measuring scale? By weight? By energy content? By driven mile?

Without these questions answered, the cited sentence contains zero information.

Please just serve me LLM-generated articles (and I'll be happy as long as they contain actual information) instead of this kind of poetry.