Right. Lithium batteries won't cut it. That leaves geographically-dependent hydroelectricity, which isn't so easy to build. And then proposed solutions that are still in the prototyping phase, and aren't commercially available.
I've really enjoyed reading your contribution to this discussion. To the extent I kind of wished there was a private message function.
Partially this is because we have similar views on a lot of the challenges facing a move to renewables. I think sometimes this comes across as being sceptical of the progress of renewables.
In my case, and I suspect in yours, that's not really the case. In fact I'm excited and interested in how we will solve these problems in a variety of different ways.
I think we are in agreement that lithium isn't going to be the answer to energy storage at grid scale. If for no other reason than being in direct competition with the electrification of transportation isn't ideal.
Personally I'm hopeful that Ambri's liquid metal battery will materialize.
A solar heavy network would still need 12 hours of storage to accommodate nighttime energy use. More actually, because of greater seasonal fluctuations further from the equator.
All of the Americas experience night time simultaneously for at least 8 hours a day. Even if we ran HVDC lines to the Sahara, there's still a period of time where most sunlight is shining on the pacific ocean.
> That "manipulation of hydrogen" mostly involves use in the the chemical industry. We don't use hydrogen to power gas turbines.
So, when you said hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metal it comes into contact with, that didn't include the metal that the chemical industry makes their equipment from? So, let's just put a "this is chemical industry" signs on our hydrogen storage plants, and presto! Magically protected!
Note that one of the things the chemical industry does with hydrogen-rich gases is burn them in combustion turbines, just like in a proposed hydrogen energy storage facility. Turbines for burning hydrogen have been available for decades. See, for example, what General Electric says:
"Our turbines have nearly 30 years of experience operating on a variety of fuels that contain hydrogen, totaling over 6 million operating hours as hydrogen-fueled turbines using concentrations ranging from 5% to 95% (by volume)."
> So, when you said hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metal it comes into contact with, that didn't include the metal that the chemical industry makes their equipment from? So, let's just put a "this is chemical industry" signs on our hydrogen storage plants, and presto! Magically protected!
I'd say you're being deliberately ignorant here, but I'm really not so sure. A gas turbine spins rapidly, putting huge stresses on the blades. They also operate at extremely high temperatures.
And from your link:
> The use of hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel has been demonstrated commercially, but there are differences between natural gas and hydrogen that must be taken into account to properly and safely use hydrogen in a gas turbine. In addition to differences in the combustion properties of these fuels, the impact to all gas turbine systems as well as the overall balance of plant, must be considered. In a power plant with one or more hydrogen-fueled turbines, changes may be needed to the fuel accessories, bottoming cycle components, and plant safety systems. GE’s broad field experience enables our engineers to understand the impact of using hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel.
Hmm, maybe not so simple.
And when we look at what's actually being deployed, it's not 100% hydrogen it's a mixture that's mostly natural gas with only a small portion of hydrogen:
> The new gas turbines will be commercially guaranteed capable of using a mix of 30% hydrogen and 70% natural gas fuel. Between 2025 and 2045, the hydrogen capability will be systematically increased to 100% renewable hydrogen.
These turbines still mostly burn natural gas. GE says it'll get there eventually, possibly over the course of 3 decades.
Your grumbling and desperate denial doesn't change that turbines burning hydrogen are old hat. This is not something that any reasonable person would think won't work.
None of the issues discussed there are showstoppers. They are things that should be, and have been, tweaked.
You broke the site guidelines more than once in this thread. I'm not going to ban you like the other users who were so outrageously abusive, but this is still seriously not ok and we've had to warn you about it before.
> I'd say you're being deliberately ignorant here, but I'm really not so sure. A gas turbine spins rapidly, putting huge stresses on the blades. They also operate at extremely high temperatures.
Seriously, your projection is out of control here. A gas turbine burning hydrogen does not experience any stresses that is meaningfully different from one burning natural gas or kerosene. Simply applied engineering can solve all of the issues associated with hydrogen gas turbines.
> A gas turbine burning hydrogen does not experience any stresses that is meaningfully different from one burning natural gas or kerosene. Simply applied engineering can solve all of the issues associated with hydrogen gas turbines.
Did you misread that comment? The point was that hydrogen's application in the chemical industry don't involve turbine blades spinning at extreme speeds at high temperatures.
Yes, the principle of combusting a gas, driving a turbine with the expanding gas, and using that turbine to drive a compressor is the same. That doesn't mean you can just feed a gasoline powered turbine hydrogen and be done with it. The turbines that can run hydrogen today can only run a small portion of it.
> The challenges of using hydrogen go beyond body shape, though. Redesigning a turbine engine to run on the stuff will be a multi-billion-dollar endeavour. Hydrogen burns faster than kerosene, and also burns hotter. That means materials exposed to its combustion experience greater stresses. It also risks increasing the pollution generated in the form of oxides of nitrogen, which would partially negate the environmental benefits of burning hydrogen. And it would be useful as well to arrange matters so that some of the energy used to compress or liquefy the hydrogen for storage could be recovered and put to work.
The Soviets built a plane that flew on hydrogen, but it only completed 100 flights. And only part of those were with hydrogen, the rest were with natural gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155
> The Soviets built a plane that flew on hydrogen, but it only completed 100 flights. And only part of those were with hydrogen, the rest were with natural gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155
So you admit this has been done since the 1980s? You seriously don't think we can improve on 33 year old technology?
How dishonest are you going to get before you will admit you were wrong?
It was done for a very short duration during the 1980s as a technology demonstrator. A prototype, not an actually commercially viable product. Yes, we can improve on a 33 year old technology, but it's not something we can just buy off the shelf. GE thinks it'll take until 2045 to make turbines that run off of 100% hydrogen.
> How dishonest are you going to get before you will admit you were wrong?
When you show me where I can buy a gas turbine that runs off of hydrogen. Not a gas turbine that runs mostly off of natural gas with a little bit of hydrogen mixed in. Not a press release of a company saying "we have experience with hydrogen turbines". If you're going to say that hydrogen gas turbines are off-the-shelf then show me the shelf off of which I can buy it.
> Take the Gibraltar-San Roque oil refinery in Spain, where the GE-made 6B.03 turbine has logged thousands of hours burning a blend of fuel gas and hydrogen. This same 6B.03 machine is also working in a South Korean refinery, where it has racked up more than 20 years burning a fuel blend containing more than 70 percent hydrogen. This turbine has even gone all the way up to a 90 percent hydrogen blend.
So even your goalpost moving argument is still wrong.
This whole thing started because no one here thought someone would seriously try to argue that hydrogen gas turbines are impossible. For some of us this was too obvious to even bother trying to debunk.
You pretty much did say that anything above 30% concentration would destroy any gas turbine, nevermind this whole goalpost moving argument of "current gas turbine already in existence." Like I said, it's time to admit you were wrong, assuming you are capable of that at all.
> Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines. The only limiting factor would be electrolysis, but that is already something people are planning to build a lot of.
This is wrong, we'd have to build new gas turbines to run on a 100% hydrogen mixture in addition to building electrolysis capacity. At this point I think it's clear you're not interested in engaging honestly, and in the other thread you'e already started to throw around ad-hominem insults [1].
So how else we're suppose to interpret this statement: "No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with. If they are interchangeable, expect drastically smaller service intervals."
And if you read actually my statement carefully I didn't say that it had to be an existing, already built gas turbine. Only that we had to modify gas turbines intended for natural gas for hydrogen. Either new or existing, this isn't a hard challenge, especially considering that we replace old turbines all the time.
And you still seem unaware that even your goal-post moving argument is wrong. We really can just run existing gas turbines at 90% concentration for years on end.
> So how else we're suppose to interpret this statement: "No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with. If they are interchangeable, expect drastically smaller service intervals."
I'm not sure why you're having trouble comprehending it. Existing gas turbines are meant to run on either oil or natural gas, not hydrogen. In addition to corrosion, hydrogen burns hotter.
You cited one specific turbine model that had a peak hydrogen mixture of 90% (average was 70%). Ignoring the fact that you're picking one specific model that's being highlighted for it's ability to accept hydrogen fuel, this still isn't viable for a carbon-neutral storage system since it still burns natural gas. No, we can't just run them at 90% for years on end because that will still advance climate change.
> Either new or existing, this isn't a hard challenge, especially considering we replace old turbines all the time.
It's good that you're admitting that it's not a simple matter of modifying existing turbines, and that new turbines have to be developed. But it is an additional bottleneck, it's not just a matter of electrolysis we also have to build the generation infrastructure to turn that hydrogen back into electricity.
Likewise if you interpreted my original comment as saying that it's impossible to run a gas turbine with hydrogen that is indeed incorrect. Though I'm rather unsure of how you reached this interpretation given that I even provided an example of a soviet experiment with hydrogen jet engines (albeit with significantly shorter flight time).
Why would it count in the context of climate change? It's still emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And again, this is one specific model. Many gas turbines are only capable of much smaller concentrations: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/news/magazine/2019/...
You're going from "we can just run existing gas turbines with hydrogen" to "this one specific gas turbine can use mostly hydrogen fuel but still needs 30% natural gas". Again 90% was peak not average hydrogen concentration.
Companies are looking at developing natural gas turbines that run on 100% hydrogen. But they're targeting 2030 or 2040. Are you going to tell GE and Seimens to shove their head up their ass, too?
Even more moving of the goalposts... Now it's every single gas turbine out there needs to be upgradable to 100% hydrogen, and "peak" blends don't count.
Keep fucking that chicken.
Hell, your own source says:
> Similarly, the goal of 100 percent hydrogen combustion capability will be achieved step by step, test by test. “With hydrogen-fired gas turbines we can easily avoid the ‘valley of death’ where brilliant inventions die before they even scale to full potential,” says Larfeldt. “The same turbines can be used with different percentages of hydrogen in the fuel mix, with brown or green hydrogen. Existing gas turbines can be retrofitted to the latest standards. It’s an organic evolution.”
The goalpost never moved. If you want to use hydrogen storage in a carbon neutral grid you need 100% hydrogen fuel. We're not there there yet. And we won't be there for the better part of a decade, or longer.
I guess I'll keep "fucking that chicken" along with GE and Siemens and the companies that actually build gas turbines.
Why? Electric cars don't use a mixture of gas and batteries. Those cars do exist and we call them "hybrids". But those are not carbon neutral and we don't pretend they are.
That link you provided doesn't encompass gas turbines. Gas turbines capable of burning hydrogen do exist, but only at smaller concentrations, 70% methane and 30% hydrogen or less.
In addition to what I said in the other post regarding gas turbines, you also don't need a gas turbine to generate power. As long as you can boil water the rest follows logically.
Honestly, you should learn some thermodynamics and chemistry before accusing others of being ignorant.
Right, but then we're not talking about combined-cycle gas turbines to convert hydrogen back into electricity. If we're going to boil water than that's much less efficient than the ~66% efficiency we get out of combined cycle gas turbines.
Also, in case you weren't aware a combined cycle turbine also involves boiling water and spinning a turbine. The reason why they're so efficient is because energy is extracted both from the gas turbine (basically a jet engine) and a steam turbine driven by the heat from the exhaust from the gas turbine.
>Honestly, you should learn some thermodynamics and chemistry before accusing others of being ignorant.
Sure, we could burn hydrogen and drive a boiler like a coal plant. But that's not where this comment thread started.
> Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines
Sure, if you just want to run them for a short period of time and generate a lot more wear. If these turbines are so simple to modify, why does GE say that it won't be until 2045 that their turbines will be able to run 100% hydrogen gas?
Then repurpose old coal plants for the same reason. None of this needs to be hard.
This whole debate started when you were caught making ignorant statements regarding basic chemistry and thermodynamics. You're not going to win by just doubling on everything or moving goalposts. It's past time to admit you were wrong.
> Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines.
> It's past time to admit you were wrong.
Follow your own advice. You can't just feed a gas turbine hydrogen and run it as normal. Existing gas turbine manufacturers don't plant to offer 100% hydrogen gas turbines for decades.
You repeatedly, outrageously violated HN's rules in this thread. I've pretty much seen it all here and even I was shocked. However wrong someone else is or you feel they are, you absolutely cannot post like this on this site.
Although both of you were at fault, your comments were so aggressive and vicious that I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
"Demand shaping" is a nice euphemism for energy shortages. And if we demand shaping we're just externalizing the cost to consumers that need to buy their own energy storage or change their energy usage patterns to accommodate the unreliable supply.
Overproduction helps but doesn't eliminate intermittency. And pumped hydroelectricity is geographically dependent. The irony is that most places with extensive hydroelectric storage potential don't need wind and solar in the first place because they get their energy from hydroelectric generation.
>Demand shaping" is a nice euphemism for energy shortages.
It's a euphemism for storage heaters, storage air-conditioning, aluminium smelters that dial usage up and down and smart car chargers.
Lithium ion batteries are useful too, of course, but they cost more.
This is a problem where market based solutions shine. The only reason that fact isn't getting rammed down our throats by lobbyists is that the people who got religion about markets tended to be oil/gas people, who have since been thrashing the "renewables are unreliable" drum.
>Overproduction helps but doesn't eliminate intermittency.
Why should the goal be to eliminate it when we can adapt to it and thrive?
Personally, I'm more excited for applications of periodic free/-ve priced electricity than I am worried about shortages.
Isn't demand shaping things like discounts during certain periods? My electricity provider lets me set a 'free hour of power' every day, as long as that hour is off peak.
Yes, those incentives exist to try and shape demand. But in practice, people rarely take advantage of them. And some things really can't be shaped. The pumps that deliver your water cannot have their demand shaped, unless you're willing to go without running water for some hours of the day.
>in practice, people rarely take advantage of them
Overproduction is still not that common. These days wind and solar mostly just provide power that would have otherwise been produced by natural gas even when operating at peak capacity.
It is getting off the ground though. The UK has an energy tarriff popular with electric car owners for this reason. They can occasionally get paid to charge their cars. This type of thing will only become more common.
>And some things really can't be shaped.
Obviously not. Nonetheless pretending that all renewable intermittency has to be made up for with expensive lithium ion batteries is backwards thinking.
Then our transition to solar + wind needs to include the cost of installing a septic tank and water reservoir in every household. And a thermal battery for heating. And an electric battery for lighting. And all the other things we'll need to do to accommodate an unreliable energy grid.
There is always a shortage of electricity. Someone could always use more if it were free to do so. Economics is the study of the allocation of resources in the face of scarcity -- that is, all allocation of resources except perhaps breathable air. There's no need for a euphemism here because limitations on the consumption of energy are ever-present -- demand shaping is simply about making the signal stronger.
There are rarely shortages of electricity in the US. There were some in California during Covid, and the state had to do rolling blackouts. But no, there are rarely shortages of electricity.
Yes, someone could use more of it than we could supply. But they don't. The existing supply is sufficient to meet demand. And when demand changes, we are capable of increasing supply.
You're conflating "expensive" with "unreliable". Even with infinite batteries, buying stored energy will always be more expensive than direct solar/wind.
None of those other battery chemistries are seeing the massive growth that lithium ion batteries have experienced. The nuclear "stans" are just pointing out that these are potential solutions, not actual solutions. If iron oxide batteries, or some other chemistry, suddenly becomes cheap and easily deployed at the TWh scale, great. But until then they're not a solution.
Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument. It's profoundly reactionary, and also hypocritical, because nuclear itself is dead without great improvement. Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources, so either massive seawater uranium extraction or breeding cycles would be needed.
Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small scale. Now that the potential market has become so clear this is happening, in many companies.
> Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument.
No, we're engaging in the "this has been resistant to being invented so far, so let's not bet everything on it showing up tomorrow" argument.
> Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources
You could quadruple the present rate of uranium use, representing in a major contribution to mankind's energy use, and have 35 years of supply, just using known reserves and no breeding.
And if you were using that much uranium, more reserves would be quickly proven. Do you think we've found all the uranium we'll ever find, even if market prices go up significantly?
And breeding is possible, and understood. Yes, there's proliferation concerns, but that's not the end of the world.
And seawater extraction is practical without much increase in cost.
No one is saying "no renewables" or "no battery storage" or "no pumped storage". Or "no power to gas to power". We need all of these things. And we need the diversity of having nuclear in the mix, too.
Not at all. The technology for hydrogen energy storage is (with the possible exception of cheap electrolysers) is off the shelf. It's not widely used not because it's not available, but because natural gas is cheaper to store and burn when there are no CO2 taxes. But the CO2 taxes will be raised enough to push natural gas out, if we're going to control global warming.
When the largest electrolyzer we have in the world is 10MW... and hydrogen storage hasn't been demonstrated at anywhere near the scale you're talking about... it's a tad of a stretch to talk about it being "off the shelf." Particularly when you point to nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeding as nonexistent in the same thread.
We can run electrolysers in parallel to scale to any desired output level. There might be economies of scale to make them even larger, or there could be economies of manufacturing scale of making smaller ones at higher volume. PV and wind are examples of technologies that work well with large numbers of not so large units, replicated as needed. This is a nice place for a technology to be.
Electrolytic hydrogen plants of up to 250 MW were constructed in the 20th century by the use of smaller electrolysis units in parallel. All of them were for producing ammonia from hydrogen. See table 3-2 on page 99 of this NASA report from 1975:
"Survey of Hydrogen Production and Utilization Methods"
I think that you slipped a decimal point. The mass of a cubic foot of hydrogen is about 0.00236 kg, not 0.000236 [1]. That means that the output power is an order of magnitude greater than you calculated -- 173 megawatts.
It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.
LOL. Hydrogen storage is much more invented than seawater uranium extraction. All the components are close to off the shelf; it's just a matter of putting them together (and for the CO2 tax to be high enough to make it worthwhile).
Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level).
This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.
I will repeat the reply I gave elsewhere to this argument:
Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.
This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.
You're falling back to the "if it works on paper it'll be guaranteed to work at scale, and work cheaply" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
It's not just a question of storage, you can just use a salt cavern for that.
It's also a question of electrolyzing water into hydrogen efficiently.
And converting it back into electricity efficently.
And building all of these systems cheaply.
And deploying all of these systems at massive scale.
We're still on the first phase of that. As per your other comment we still don't even have effective elctrolysers to do this cost-effectively [1].
Will hydrogen storage pan out? Maybe. But until then it's not a solution. It's a potential solution, like fusion, or algae in vats, and thermal storage, and all the other potential solutions being proposed. It's not a solution that has actually demonstrated viability.
Why shouldn't it scale? It's not as if it uses any rare materials. The geological formations in which hydrogen can be stored are abundant. The cost estimation should be good, since the technology is just integrating existing components. That's the easiest and surest kind of technology to roll out.
That's a question that can't be answered until people actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale.
Why shouldn't nuclear plants scale? They're mostly just steel and concrete. Uranium is more than 40 times more prevalent than gold, and it's energy density is such that it represents a negligible cost of operations. The technology is just scaling up existing components, we had nuclear powered submarines for a while. This is what people thought about nuclear power in the 1950s and early 60s. As plants actually started being constructed problems such as corrosion, large amounts of earth moving, metal impurities, and more were discovered and made the plants more expensive.
We haven't discovered these issues with hydrogen storage. We won't discover these issues until we actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale. We don't know what challenges will lie in store when building hydrogen storage, because we've never done it before. This is why it's useless to talk about the cost of hydrogen storage until we actually have experience building and operating hydrogen storage plants. Our knowledge of cost of hydrogen storage is in the same situation as nuclear power in the 1950s.
Hydrogen storage remains in the prototyping phase. We have no significant amount of hydrogen grid storage. Like thermal batteries or synthetic methane, hydrogen represents a potential storage solution but not one that we know will scale and be effectively deployed at the scope required.
If we actually deploy 50 GWh of hydrogen storage, and demonstrate that it can cheaply and reliability be built at scale then your point would be valid. But until then, hydrogen represents a theoretical solution not an actual solution.
Hydrogen is stored underground in Texas salt formations at Clemens Dome, Moss Bluff, and Spindletop. The largest of them, Spindletop, was completed in 2017:
All the components of hydrogen, with the possible exception of low cost electrolyzers, don't need to be prototyped. It's existing technology. It's not like (say) molten salt reactors, in which fundamental development remains to be done.
Right, and what company can I call right now to install 50GWh of hydrogen storage?
It's existing technology, but it's a novel application of that technology. We haven't used hydrogen electrolysis as a form of grid storage before. And we certainly haven't used it for grid storage at the Terawatt hour scale. And that the scale we'll need to make wind and solar viable. 1 TWh isn't even 30 minutes of global electricity consumption.
50 GWh of hydrogen would fit in one salt cavern of the kind already made for natural gas. Any numbers of companies can solution mine those caverns for you; that technology is many decades old. I'd need more information about the rest of what you want, as that scales by power not by energy capacity.
And are we currently using any of these caverns for electrolysis and grid storage? All you said is that we have a big cavern that we could fill with hydrogen. I'm asking if anybody is actually building hydrogen grid storage at any significant scale. Are there any facilities that take in excess energy from renewables, turn it into hydrogen, and then turn that hydrogen back into electricity?
We both know the answer: there aren't any.
Back in the 1950s people thought nuclear power would be cheaper than fossil fuels. They thought it'd be effectively free. The energy density of uranium is so much better, so clearly generating electricity with it would be much cheaper. But actually deploying a technology at scale reveals more and more challenges.
Your proposal for hydrogen storage is in the same phase that nuclear power was in during the 1950s. A solution that exists on paper, but one that hasn't actually encountered and overcome the challenges of implementing it at scale. Same with thermal batteries, synthetic methane, and so on. These are proposals that haven't passed the test of actual implementation at scale.
Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.
This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.
Storing hydrogen is only one piece of the puzzle. Yes, if you happen to live near an abandoned salt mine that's a convenient place to put a large quantity of hydrogen. That doesn't solve the problem of massive electrolysis facilities, and turbines that can burn hydrogen.
And it certainly doesn't answer the question of whether or not this represents a viable grid-storage solution, since we haven't built it at remotely close to the scale required.
It's not "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done"
It's "if it isn't already being done, it is extremely reckless to assume that it can be done cheaply at a massive scale".
Screw it, let's just use fusion. Nobody has actually built a fusion plant? Well, who cares if it hasn't already been done, that's a "foolish argument" in your own words. /s
These are not abandoned salt mines, they are deliberately created caverns in salt domes. The cost of creating them is included in the capital cost ($1/kWh capacity).
Hydrogen could also be stored in depleted gas fields and in deep saline aquifers. The storage capacity available is more than adequate.
For the third time, storage is only one part of the puzzle. We also need a way to cheaply electrolyze water into hydrogen, compress it into the storage facility, and then use it to generate electricity. Nobody doubts that you can pump hydrogen into a big cave. What's dubious is transforming this into a usable energy-storage facility.
We haven't done this to provide 100 MWh of storage. How on earth can we be confident it'll be easy to provide 1 TWh of storage, or 10 TWh?
People mostly talk about lithium ion storage because that's what's actually available, besides geographically limited options like hydroelectricity. Until there's a company that's building dozens of gigawatt hours of hydrogen storage it's a moot point. It's a technology that exists the laboratory, not one that's commercially available.
No, you have salt caverns with a volume sufficient to accommodate a lot of hydrogen. Actually implementing such a solution involves massive scale electrolysis, and either massive scales of oxidation cells or gas turbines designed to burn hydrogen. Neither of these things have been done at anything remotely close to the scale required to make renewables feasible.
Back in the 1950s people thought that nuclear power would be effectively free. But actually building it at scale exposed challenges of implementation that weren't foreseen. The cost of a system on paper and the cost after overcoming the challenges of actually building it are two very different things. For hydrogen storage, you only have the former.
Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines. The only limiting factor would be electrolysis, but that is already something people are planning to build a lot of.
Nuclear's problem are fundamentally political in nature. If we really cared about green energy, nuclear power could easily be built out at scale.
> No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with.
The industries that manipulate tens of millions of tons of hydrogen each year would be astounded to hear this statement of yours. What are those facilities made of, unobtainium?
A claim which simply isn't true. Only certain alloys have a problem with hydrogen. We've been using hydrogen in industry for decades and most of this problem has been solved.
We've been using hydrogen in the chemical industry. We haven't been using hydrogen to drive combustion turbines very much, and even then it's in a mixture of natural gas.
> I think this comment is dangerous as it legitimises the (clearly documented) widespread arrests of openly marked journalists behaving entirely non aggressively, almost surely because they were pointing cameras at police officers behaving violently.
I have yet to see an instance of journalists being arrested for filming.
What I have seen are crowds of people refusing to abide by curfews or dispersal orders and getting arrested - journalists are sometimes among them. Each time I see a video of a journalist supposedly being arrested for filming, I also see a bunch of people in the background who aren't filming also being arrested.
Anyone can don a jersey that says "press, or a lanyard claiming to be a journalist. The more widespread the notion that these things somehow exempt people from curfews and orders to disperse, the less surprised I am that so many journalists (most of them independent) are getting arrested.
> I'll just come out and say it: You are not arguing in good faith. You have 0 interest in considering the merits of the police accountability movement. You trying to discredit the movement by pointing to the minority of opportunists who have sprung up.
No, the people who protest in a productive and lawful manner I genuinely support. They are the victims of opportunists who riot, and make it so that the former cannot peacefully assemble. When a protest turns into a riot, and a curfew or dispersal order is issued it is the opportunists and rioters who deprived the legitimate protestors of their opportunity to speak. That is part of why it's so important to detain and charge rioters: it's not just the direct harm of violence, it's also the indirect harm of inhibiting peaceful demonstration.
But back to the original point, referencing a sharp increase in arrests while ignoring a sharp increase in riots is just willful ignorance. That's really what it is. What were the biggest riots we had in 2019? In 2018? Were they even remotely as big as the summer 2020 riots?
I'm sure plenty of people protested peacefully. But how is that relevant? Regardless of the extent of the overlap between people protesting and people rioting, an increase of the latter is bound to lead to more arrests even if the police's thresholds for making an arrest remain exactly the same.
The fact that there were more looters and rioters in the Pacific Northwest because of "general anarchy" is supportive of my claim, if anything: There were more arrests in Portland not because police became more oppressive, it was because there were more looters and rioters.
What "hard evidence" contradicts it? Can you provide evidence that no such dispersal order was given? Or that they were arrested prior to such order, or curfew?
In fact the source you posted doesn't even claim that they were arrested for filming. This idea that the reporter was arrested for filming seems to be entirely your own.
Your question isn't, "Why am I ready to take police's words at face value?" The question you're really asking is "why aren't I ready to take an anonymous internet commenter's claims at face value?"
The video is the evidence. If you don't accept it as evidence, perhaps the fact that the governor of Minnesota apologized for it should hint that the arrest was not justified. If you don't consider any evidence, except police's words, to be evidence, I have nothing to add.
Nowhere in the interview you linked to did the Minnesota governor say that the journalist was arrested for filming, either.
The CNN journalist was far from the only person arrested. If the cops were arresting people for filming, not for violating dispersal orders, why were so many other people in the area who weren't filming being arrested? Why do you insist on claiming that they were arrested for filming, when CNN's own article doesn't make this claim?
There was no causal link between filming and this man's arrest. The police ordered a crowd to disperse, and the crowd didn't. Members of the crowd did not disperse, and were arrested. A journalist was among said members that did not disperse and were arrested. He would have been arrested whether or not he was filming.
The debate is whether the arrest was lawful or unlawful. What unlawful purpose did the police had in mind when they arrested the journalists is of very little effect and does not warrant a discussion. If you want to prove the arrest was lawful, bring on evidence. For example, that the journalist was charged and convicted of a crime in relation to the arrest made here later. If there are no charges and convictions, and I cannot emphasize it enough because you seem to ignore it no matter how many times I say it, the video strongly suggests and I daresay even proves the arrest was made for not legitimate reason, and the governor apologized for it, I cannot see how you can argue in good faith that the arrest was lawful.
> My understanding of the situation is that they were arrested because the police wanted them arrested, plain and simple. Not because they ignored any order, but because the police had the power and the will, though not the legal right, to punish them.
At least we're progressing from "he was arrested for filming" to "police wanted to arrest him" and speculating why.
But we don't need to rely on speculation: The reporter asked why they were being arrested. The police responded that they were arrested because they didn't disperse from an area when they were told to do so. And plenty of people who weren't filming were also arrested. And the nowhere in the CNN article you originally linked to did it claim that their journalist was arrested for filming.
I'm not just taking the police at their word, I'm comparing the police's words to what happened. And it's entirely consistent with what happened. If the police arrested the reporter, and only the reporter then a causal link between filming and the arrest would be more plausible. But the police were arresting other people who were refusing to disperse, too, so their reason is more consistent with the events that occurred as compared to your claim that the police were arresting people for filming.
At this point I, too, have concluded I'm not talking to someone arguing in good faith. You're making an assertion based on preconceived notion about how the police behave and operate, ignoring the fact that this isn't at all consistent with the events that transpired, and accusing people who point this out of arguing in good faith. There isn't anything more to discuss here.
