Govt to announce £240 million fund for funding green hydrogen.
At which point, decentralised, off grid, system.
Perovskite or other such really, really, cheap solar panel. Sort of thing that they sell in 3rd world to power a light bulb or three. Drives electrolysis. This stores H2 locally. Which is then fed back through fuel cell (SOFC) to produce ‘leccie when required.
A home system.
How do you make it really cheap?
a) Electrolysis uses DC, so no invertor required.
b) Use cheap kit to really make it cheap. For it’s cheapness that matters here, not efficiency. You’d happily give up 10% of efficiency for a 30% cost reduction.
c) Make kits. It’s the solar panels and the fuel cell that need to be made. All else is an instruction kit.
d) Ask govt for £5 million.
Seriously, if Spud can get cash why can’t we?
“This stores H2 locally”
Oh really. How?
1kg of hydrogen (about equivalent to half a gallon of diesel) requires a 100kg steel cylinder from BOC.
Just the thing to have home pressurised to 700 atmospheres. What fun for a whole city block.
Or perhaps you liquify it? Ho Ho Ho. Grow cucumbers.
So then, how do you store hydrogen, safely and responsibly, in a domestic premises?
You don’t.
In industry, it’s a b*stard and you have blast walls.
Hydrogen is the Basil Brush fuel.
Boom Boom.
NB In the Pad 39 build for Apollo, the ground crew were so frightened of invisible hydrogen fires (no flame, and bright Florida sunshine) that they moved with a broom held in front of them. If the bristles burst into flame, you stopped, and called it in.
Best way to store hydrogen is chemically combined with carbon: methane, propane, octane, decane, that sort of thing. Found that out 100-200 years ago. Comes ready made from fully recycled dinosaurs 🙂
What Tim said.
I saw a German documentary on the wonders of hydrogen. They featured a train that was powered by the stuff. It was stored in a tank at 800 bar.
That’s a lot.
We had a discussion here some months ago about this subject. The documentary also suggested using huge solar panels in the Sahara to electrlyse the sea. The problem was then to transport it to Germany. As one wag here mentioned, Graf Zeppelin had already solved the problem of transporting hydrogen gas.
“Electrolysis uses DC, so no invertor required.”
Even DC comes in different voltages. From memory, splitting water needs a few volts (and a good catalyst), solar panels produce considerably more, so unless you’re going to waste most (80%+) of the solar power you need DC/DC converters. OK, they’re cheap but not zero cost.
SOFCs operate at high temperatures (500-1000 C) so are a potential hazard, and others have pointed out the problems with hydrogen (love the Basil Brush fuel joke).
Your company is going to be paying significant money for liability insurance.
sounds like a modern take on guy fawkes!
You’re all missing the point.
The business plan isn’t to make a viable home hydrogen-powered green energy solution, it’s to harvest the cash being firehosed by the government.
The engineering challenge therefore isn’t to make something work, and work safely and efficiently. It’s to make something that looks like it might work. Remember that government is made up almost entirely of arts graduates, and thick ones at that.
I am sure this scheme for the home production of an explosive gas will be very popular with baconophobes.
First and foremost don’t put your solar panels in the UK where the climate makes the electricity output crap. Put them somewhere the sun shines reliably so you get 3 or 4 times the output for the same cost. Even better if you can hire people there for $1 per hour to maintain them. Don’t stop with the hydrogen. Convert it using CO2 extracted from sea water to manufacture “green” methane (aka green natural gas) that we are very good at transporting and storing, and burning to heat our homes and generating electricity.
Of course if “gyrotron drilling” https://www.quaise.energy works as predicted we have a great source of deep geothermal energy under out feet so will have cheap power to manufacture “green” methane anywhere in the UK and also be able to convert existing fossil fuel power stations to run on geothermal.
It’s a good thing the last step is ‘ask government for 5 million’s – because for a home kit, efficiency does matter.
Two words. Hydrogen sickness.
If you’re going to produce hydrogen, you don’t store it. You combine it with CO² via the Sabatier process to produce methane & store that.
Tim the Coder. I’m a ‘baconophobe’ but of the Red Sea Pedestrian kind which means I’m not at all into the ‘screaming and exploding’ thing. I also know enough about Hydrogen to not want too much of it bubbling away in and around my house. I’m not too bothered about compressed butane or natural gas there are established procedures for handling this stuff carefully and as one person has already mentioned hydrogen flames are virtually invisible unlike butane, methane flames or the flames from any other thing I’m likely to burn.
@Tim the coder, they halted the wet dress rehearsal for Artemis because of a stuck valve and so couldn’t guarantee that the pad could be cleared of hydrogen.
@Fahrenheit211
Ah, real world so complex. Forgot about that when referencing the meme (Eating bacon leads to a significant increase in risk of cancer. Not eating bacon….)
@SBML
Thanks for info. Sphicters must be tightly puckered in NASA now, as the Space Pork Systems enters the stage where they cannot keep dodging the issue. It all works fine in Powerpoint, best keep it there. I rather hope it blows up spectacularly, because at $4bn a shot, it’s too expensive and obsolete to ever fly for real. Though if it ever does a moon flyby, I expect SpaceX will send along a manned camera ship to film the experience 🙂
But still, it’s NASA’s ‘quick and cheap’ solution using old Shuttle bits.
And using LH2 fuel, absolutely daft. The SI advantage over Methane is minor, and more than outweighed by the need to run fuel rich (to get the temperature down, so the exhaust isn’t uncombined) and the enormous size of the tank. Best that was available in 1958 (Centaur), but 64 years later, well really. Bureaucrats gotta trough.
MMM, there’s your scam Tim: solar powered hydrogen rockets!
Pondering the above comments about the inflammability of H², I reckon we should get behind this project with all speed. It would seem a guaranteed way of conducting a massive cull of environmentalists. And remarkably cheap. A little seed money, a bit of help from the government but they’d largely be paying for their “home green electricity production kit” themselves.
I have seen proposals to store hydrogen by combining it with nitrogen. Ammonia’s certainly easier to store than pure hydrogen. But of course has less energy density than hydrocarbon fuels.
And it’d produce plenty of NOx when burnt, so the Greens’d hate it anyway.
So I’d have to agree with the general argument that hydrocarbon fuels are the way to go!!!
From memory, splitting water needs a few volts (and a good catalyst), solar panels produce considerably more, so unless you’re going to waste most (80%+) of the solar power you need DC/DC converters. OK, they’re cheap but not zero cost.
There is a minimum voltage to split water. 1.23 Volts. In practice you would want to run at 2 V or so (overpotential, technically) to allow for the chemical equivalent of friction.
After that any increasing voltage is wasted, the efficiency comes from your ampage. You need to get the largest current you can at 2 V.
I presume solar panels run at a fixed voltage, and excess sun produces more current, not higher voltage. That means even a trickle on non-sunny days would work.
“MMM, there’s your scam Tim: solar powered hydrogen rockets!”
Which is actually do-able if you do it right.. 😛
And peeps are tossing away almost half the potential energy, because the other bit of the electrolysis equation produces O2…
It’s actually relatively easy to store the H2 and O2 as peroxyde and/or acid. And use that for cyclic generation. Or catalytic reactions. Or…
Trickiest bit would be to set something up that’s self-contained and mostly maintenace-free. Not necessarily idiot-proof though. Darwinism has its place.
@Tim the Coder, April 7, 2022 at 1:45 pm
“Hydrogen is the Basil Brush fuel. Boom Boom”
Good post. Hydrogen leaks, embrittles metal, less energy dense, expensive. Futile to even contemplate it can replace HCs
“In the Pad 39 build for Apollo, the ground crew were so frightened of invisible hydrogen fires”
Yep, same as the methanol fuelled cars in USA Indy races – invisible fire. At least water extinguishes, unlike “green” lithium fires
“Home production of an explosive gas”
Oh yes, I experienced that when 17. Battery on MC being charged, working on other side reached over to grab a tool and disloged croc-clip. Boom – battery exploded & acid spewed everywhere.
@bis, April 7, 2022 at 6:50 pm
Sounds good to me. We could start with this lot
They should never have closed the lunatic asylums
This is what our education system & msm have done
https://youtu.be/8mxZlyt7b64?t=95
£240m.
Little more than half the cost of repatriating a single ungrateful Iranian.
Priorities.
Please, if you are going to use chemical formulae, type them correctly- the numbers in CO2 & H2 are subscripts not superscripts.
I must confess I ‘researched’ the Basil Brush joke from a commenter on “Not a Lot of People Know That” and thought it so good it should be distributed.
@Pcar. Likewise, some buddies: a 2L lemonade bottle and a weekend. Both gasses collect in same bottle. DO NOT REPEAT: Captain Scarlet is indigestible, you are not, etc. God favours the drunk student. Once.
Andy,
I confidently predict that widespread use of geothermal will result in complaints from the green lobby that we are cooling the earth.
Regarding producing hydrogen by hydrolysis of sea-water… ISTR from experimenting in the distant past when I were but a nipper, that the output gases are hydrogen and chlorine (rather than oxygen) – which isn’t terribly nice stuff, albeit in a different way from H2.
@Baron jackfield
Indeed, and it bleaches the apparatus. Also, erodes the ex-dry cell carbon rod electrodes, into a curious green sludge. Sigh, happy days.
For hydrogen production, you need to add some acid, eg sulphuric, which isn’t consumed, so you just keep adding pure water.
If you want to ‘play’ wuth hydrogen at home, it’s far easier to use some takeaway dishes (aluminium) and caustic soda drain cleaner: but don’t fool around: eye googles, gloves, welder apron or similar. It’s very exothermic and highly dangerous.
But if you have a party goer who likes popping the party balloons with a cigarette…
“That the output gases are hydrogen and chlorine (rather than oxygen)”
Well yes… Because what you’re electrolysing initially in seawater is not H2O , but Na/K/MgCl in solution…
So you get the Cl2 directly, and the H2 from hydrolysis of the rather reactive metals into their hydroxydes + H2.
Totally different reactions..