Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient
Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient
@ooli tl/Dr "Photoncycle
Brandtzaeg holds up a chalk-looking substance: “With this, you can store electricity 20 times as densely as in a lithium battery.”
“We're locking up the hydrogen molecules in a solid to basically fix them. We're using a reversible, high-temperature fuel cell, so we're assisting a fuel cell which both can produce hydrogen and electricity in the same cell,” he says.
That means no need to cool the hydrogen down, making it non-flammable and giving it a higher density than an ion-lithium battery"
I wonder what's the volumetric energy density, historically that has been a bigger issue than gravimetric energy density.
Good question, this article is pretty fluffy, not a lot of hard data. Reads kind of like a fluffed up press release honestly.
According to their site:
A storage system of 3 m3 can store up to 10,000 kWh of energy
So about 3.33 MWh per cubic meter, 3.33 kWh per liter, or 3.33 Wh per cubic centimeter.
The article is light on details, but it claims they're storing the hydrogen as a solid - not as a gas. Solids are generally about a thousand times more compact than a gas.
That's hardly a revolutionary thing - there are hydrogen powered cars on the road and those don't use hydrogen as a gas either. Those cars don't make much sense compared to lithium, but mostly only because there's almost nowhere in the world you buy hydrogen for your car. That's not an issue if you're producing your own hydrogen at home.
This is anti-hydrogen propaganda. It is basically a marketing spiel for the battery industry. In reality, hydrogen is going to power nearly all transportation, mainly because batteries are not a sustainable solution.
And the notion that we can't build enough renewable energy capacity is a classic climate change denial argument. People who say this are unknowingly (or sometimes knowingly) trying to get everyone back onto fossil fuels.
There could not have put up a bigger sign saying, "I didn't bother to read the article."
Otherwise I don't disagree with most of what you're claiming. But most of the problems you posed do not even apply to this relatively new system.
Yet in some places there’s an excess of wind production at times and it’s economically viable to throw it into hydrogen and ammonia production. Do you think Maersk is designing ammonia powered ships for nothing?
https://hydrogenisland.dk/en https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2021/02/23/maersk-backs-plan-to-build-europe-largest-green-ammonia-facility
We already have efficient enough solar panels to make our homes self sufficient, we just can't afford to buy them.
Even if we could, the power supply industry would see it happening, bribe and persuade the government to make it illegal to go off grid (I'm sure their solicitors would come up with "good" reasons that we should be stopped), to save their poor little shareholders.
No way will they go down without a fight. Would I love to go off grid? Sure. If I had a few grand of spending money I could easily do it. But that's just one person, no way they'd let the entire country do it.
This is just storage. The article describes that the battery will use nearby solar panel for electricity.
There's a very good reason you don't want the entire country to go off-grid, and that net-metering is a plague that only serves as a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
A large chunk of electric costs are fixed costs. Wiring, power station upkeep, more wiring, transformers, storm damage, etc. Whether you personally use twice or half as much power as the median household does not matter for this. So every net-metered kWh you send on the grid, everybody ELSE ends up ponying up the infrastructure costs for (nevermind the enormous production-side costs of fighting against the duck curve).
A partial solution to make this fairer is therefore to either tax solar installations, use non-net-metering (with digital meters), or make grid connectivity a fixed cost in the electric bill.
For people who are completely off-grid (meaning not only do they not pull any electricity from the grid ever, they are not connected AT ALL and therefore do not incur infrastructure cost on everyone else), it's not as bad but sill not great because the grid operates on economies of scale. So in (semi-)urban areas it's still a net loss for society when someone goes off-grid.
We are 90% there already. In many states, solar panels and usage have extra taxes. Most solar installations are grid tied and electricity sale prices to the company are fixed at a small fraction of their sale prices from those companies. Worse, if power goes out, you can't use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Ever hear of a power invertor and an interlock switch? You're only partially right.
Worse, if power goes out, you can't use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Has this... really ever been true? We've had gas powered generators people can plug into their homes for a rather long time now, and they would be doing the exact same thing as solar installations.
It depends on where you are mainly, but I do believe the kit that prevents what you describe, is functionally mandatory to have for solar. Not certain on that, and it definitely still depends on locale, but I haven't seen any without that lockout in a loooonging time.
Worse, if power goes out, you can’t use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Your info is a bit out of date. With a single battery you can use nearly any solar system to generate and consume that energy during a grid outage. With a couple brands of gear (such as Enphase IQ8) you don't even need any battery to generate and consume energy from solar during a grid outage. The term to look for for batteryless is called "self grid forming".
I don't want my house to be self-sufficient. I want my street and neighborhood to be self-sufficient. I already use my neighbors excess solar for reasonable prices.
My city wants to be off natural gas in 2030 and my neighborhood is in the pilot to transition first. I don't necessarily want a huge heat pump attached to my house, and I don't want a huge energy storage solution in my small garden.
There is city land around our housing block with plenty of room for a solution that can serve the whole street. I hope the city is going to propose something like that for us.
Agreed. Not that i dislike people doing stuff by themself on a small scale, but i really wish the focus would be more on larger scale projects and giving people easy access to invest in those.
Dont make everyone get a small solar panel and a tiny battery in their house. Let them invest in something like a large wind turbine in their area and maybe directly reap some of those benefits.
This will hopefully be something like district heating, so a central heat pump that distributes hot water. I don't think hydrogen in on the table. They could add a flow battery to capture more solar energy locally but I don't think that'll be on the cards early on.
But in reality it'll probably be a heat pump per home and a big energy bill for us. Our street was built over 50 years ago when natural gas was plenty and cheap so insulation wasn't much of a concern. We've added insulation under the floors and in the walls, but it's never going to be as well insulated as a modern home.
They don't actually say what the efficiency of it is, only that the inneficiency is mainly heat and "70% of home energy needs are for heat" which makes sense in Scandinavia but makes less and less sense the further South you are, plus it massivelly depends on being able to capture and use that heat (can you use it for cooking or only for environmental heating?).
Ultimatelly efficiency and price are what makes almost all the difference.
That said, I hope this turns out to be a proper solution: we definitelly need home energy storage solutions which have much higher energy density and lower cost per mWh that the ones we have now.
Their stated goal is literally to sell these in areas where homes need stored energy from solar to heat their homes.
There is no single system that will solve all our energy problems.
You know what else is a solid form of hydrogen?
Ice.
I wish they went into more deatil about what kind of solid fuel cell system they're working with - they say they're trapping hydrogen molecules in some kind of molecular lattice, i.e. a crystal of some sort perhaps?
Anyway, I hate patents but understand why you need them... They just seems to slow down progress.
Patents trade public disclosure of technology for a limited time exclusive use of the technology. Without them companies are less likely to publicly disclose any technologies they develop.
We Reddit now.
Always has been. In many ways, Lemmy resembles the Reddit of 10 years ago.
I dont see any electrical units in this article
The company's website quotes a storage density of 3.5 kWh/kg and a storage system taking up 3 cubic meters beving able to store 100,000 kWh: https://www.photoncycle.com/technology
I tried to find the patent but it sounds like the application process isn't complete yet.
These are the kind of claims you hear from a startup seeking its next round of funding. I'd take it with a huge grain of salt.
the numbers do seem absurdly high. That's 5 times higher energy density than the current state-of-the-art
I'd take it with an amount of salt resembling the Dead Sea. This is absolutely fake.
This is great and a step in the right direction, roll on self-sufficient streets, villages, and towns.
Neat.
Remind me to check back in 5 years to see if this ever actually materializes.
Narrator: It didn't.
No spoiler warnings?