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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 16, 2023 18:22:12 GMT
I know government reports are incredibly tedious to read, so this American chap has condensed the main points in an easy to understand way, plus adding in some relevant points on what other countries are doing. Hydrogen power was looked at by a Cambridge academic who looked at each user application in turn. We also have different types of hydrogen: green, grey and blue. Only hydrogen buses were considered at all feasible, but the problem with them are they are dangerous and can explode. This report comes with numbers as well. The numbers, if true, are pretty conclusive and may surprise some of you. It does not mean zero carbon can not be achieved. It's just telling us to not waste our money on hydrogen when there are better alternatives.
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Post by Pacifico on Nov 16, 2023 22:20:41 GMT
what alternatives? - most of the alternatives come with just as big negatives as Hydrogen. Remember were are not swapping to any of these new technologies because they are better than what we have now.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 17, 2023 1:06:20 GMT
what alternatives? - most of the alternatives come with just as big negatives as Hydrogen. Remember were are not swapping to any of these new technologies because they are better than what we have now. The alternatives are explained in the report. If you follow the logic it makes perfect sense. This engineering lark has many twists and turns to it which the hype mongers usually omit. |
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Post by Pacifico on Nov 17, 2023 7:53:51 GMT
what alternatives? - most of the alternatives come with just as big negatives as Hydrogen. Remember were are not swapping to any of these new technologies because they are better than what we have now. The alternatives are explained in the report. If you follow the logic it makes perfect sense. This engineering lark has many twists and turns to it which the hype mongers usually omit. Yes but it didnt explain how you get over the negatives in the alternatives which are just as big as Hydrogen. For example the negatives of heat pumps are widely known and until you find some way of mitigating those issues it is a technology just as flawed as hydrogen for heating the home. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 17, 2023 14:15:00 GMT
The alternatives are explained in the report. If you follow the logic it makes perfect sense. This engineering lark has many twists and turns to it which the hype mongers usually omit. Yes but it didnt explain how you get over the negatives in the alternatives which are just as big as Hydrogen. For example the negatives of heat pumps are widely known and until you find some way of mitigating those issues it is a technology just as flawed as hydrogen for heating the home. I think it did at least cover the main point between heat pumps and hydrogen. These are:
1) The heat pump's efficiency (COP) is dependent on outside temperature. 2) capital outlay for heat pumps is £12k vs £2k for hydrogen 3) green hydrogen is only 25% efficient, hence you need 4x the electricity to give you the heat, whereas a heatpump can multiply upto 6x. That means you have a factor of 24 so it is crazy to use hydrogen. (In Britain the COP is about 2 and often advertised at 3-4. It's like the range of electric cars, but even if we had a cop of 1 we still have a factor of 4 to deal with.) 4) If we used so much electricity to convert to green hydrogen the price of electricity would rocket up due to supply shortages.
5) You have the hydrogen leak problem. You can't just use normal gas pipe fittings. You need specialist connectors of a much higher spec.
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Post by Pacifico on Nov 17, 2023 17:45:08 GMT
Yes but it didnt explain how you get over the negatives in the alternatives which are just as big as Hydrogen. For example the negatives of heat pumps are widely known and until you find some way of mitigating those issues it is a technology just as flawed as hydrogen for heating the home. I think it did at least cover the main point between heat pumps and hydrogen. These are:
1) The heat pump's efficiency (COP) is dependent on outside temperature. 2) capital outlay for heat pumps is £12k vs £2k for hydrogen 3) green hydrogen is only 25% efficient, hence you need 4x the electricity to give you the heat, whereas a heatpump can multiply upto 6x. That means you have a factor of 24 so it is crazy to use hydrogen. (In Britain the COP is about 2 and often advertised at 3-4. It's like the range of electric cars, but even if we had a cop of 1 we still have a factor of 4 to deal with.) 4) If we used so much electricity to convert to green hydrogen the price of electricity would rocket up due to supply shortages.
5) You have the hydrogen leak problem. You can't just use normal gas pipe fittings. You need specialist connectors of a much higher spec.
I'm not saying that Hydrogen is better than what we have now, but it is at least a workable alternative for homes that are either unable or unsuitable for heat pumps. There is no technology that is universally applicable, you need a range of options that can meet all the different scenarios - sometimes that will be a heat pump, sometimes something else possibly hydrogen. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 17, 2023 18:05:05 GMT
I think it did at least cover the main point between heat pumps and hydrogen. These are:
1) The heat pump's efficiency (COP) is dependent on outside temperature. 2) capital outlay for heat pumps is £12k vs £2k for hydrogen 3) green hydrogen is only 25% efficient, hence you need 4x the electricity to give you the heat, whereas a heatpump can multiply upto 6x. That means you have a factor of 24 so it is crazy to use hydrogen. (In Britain the COP is about 2 and often advertised at 3-4. It's like the range of electric cars, but even if we had a cop of 1 we still have a factor of 4 to deal with.) 4) If we used so much electricity to convert to green hydrogen the price of electricity would rocket up due to supply shortages.
5) You have the hydrogen leak problem. You can't just use normal gas pipe fittings. You need specialist connectors of a much higher spec.
I'm not saying that Hydrogen is better than what we have now, but it is at least a workable alternative for homes that are either unable or unsuitable for heat pumps. There is no technology that is universally applicable, you need a range of options that can meet all the different scenarios - sometimes that will be a heat pump, sometimes something else possibly hydrogen. What we are doing here is looking at the mass case. Yes there are cases where heat pumps are not the solution, like the Apollo mission used a hydrogen fuel cell. This is irrelevant. Nearly every house in the UK has an electricity supply. Electricity is much safer than any combustible gas or liquid. We can use physical laws to determine what is possible and what is not, like we can calculate the theoretical maximum efficiency a heat pump could ever achieve. There are some experimental houses that use passive heating, but you will still need a heat pump, albeit a smaller one.
The other thing is how we generate electricity. New solar cells have efficiency rating of up to approximately 40%, up from the standard 25% and new technology here also deals with the decay problem enabling them to last hundreds of years.I think we aught to direct research money into ultra high voltage transmission lines. The higher the voltage the smaller the loss, so eventually we could have a grid being fed with solar power 100% of the time.
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Post by Pacifico on Nov 17, 2023 22:25:21 GMT
So if not Hydrogen what technology do you see as an alternative for all the properties where Heat Pumps are totally unsuitable?
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 17, 2023 23:29:13 GMT
So if not Hydrogen what technology do you see as an alternative for all the properties where Heat Pumps are totally unsuitable? Well you would simply have to use a normal electric fire and pay more for your heating or use oil perhaps. It depends of the fuel available. We would be talking about the populations close to the poles, but few people live up that way. There is also the idea you can use an SMR and then through a heat exchanger pipe warm water for heating. Nuclear generators generate far more heat energy than they do electricity, say 500MW of leccy and 1200MW of heat is about the figure. |
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Post by Pacifico on Nov 18, 2023 7:44:26 GMT
So if not Hydrogen what technology do you see as an alternative for all the properties where Heat Pumps are totally unsuitable? Well you would simply have to use a normal electric fire and pay more for your heating or use oil perhaps. It depends of the fuel available. We would be talking about the populations close to the poles, but few people live up that way. There is also the idea you can use an SMR and then through a heat exchanger pipe warm water for heating. Nuclear generators generate far more heat energy than they do electricity, say 500MW of leccy and 1200MW of heat is about the figure. No - we are talking about people living in the UK where even the Heat Pump manufacturers have admitted that their technology is not suitable for a lot of the UK housing stock. I want to know what those people in the UK are going use. |
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Post by steppenwolf on Nov 18, 2023 9:55:00 GMT
That's a good video - I wasn't aware that the Apollo missions used HFC.
I'd make threeo comments. First they didn't mention that if you use hydrogen instead of natural gas in a boiler you generate a lot of NOx - which is seriously toxic. That's because hydrogen burns at a very high temperature and oxidises nitrogen in the air. I know that some firms claim to have overcome this problem (presumably by controlling the temperature ate which it's burned) but I'm not aware that anyone has actually done it commercially yet.
Secondly I think they're a bit hasty in dismissing green hydrogen as a storage medium. It's true that it is highly inefficient (25% as against 75% efficiency of a battery), but the fact remains that we DO need to store electricity from renewable sources and it will NEVER be viable to store it in batteries - too expensive and not environmentally friendly. So what alternative do we have other than green hydrogen. At the moment lots of renewable energy is just being discarded because it's generated at times when no one needs it and we can't store it. So even if green hydrogen is inefficient it's vastly better than just discarding it.
It could be viable, but obviously it would need a lot of govt involvement to set up the infrastructure (and modify the grid to accept returned energy) but all of this is do-able. At the moment the govt seems to think that they can force people to buy BEVs and private industry will provide the charging points - but the latest figures for pure electric car sales indicate that sales are falling (especially to private buyers) and private industry is not installing chargers because they're very unprofitable.
Thirdly heat pumps are not viable for most of the property in the UK - and they're too noisy and expensive even for those where they could be used. Non starter.
I said many years ago that the govt should be devoting more thought to the transition from fossil fuels, but so far they seem to have done basically nothing except make a few daft laws and hope people will comply. It's NOT going to work.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 18, 2023 10:00:32 GMT
Well you would simply have to use a normal electric fire and pay more for your heating or use oil perhaps. It depends of the fuel available. We would be talking about the populations close to the poles, but few people live up that way. There is also the idea you can use an SMR and then through a heat exchanger pipe warm water for heating. Nuclear generators generate far more heat energy than they do electricity, say 500MW of leccy and 1200MW of heat is about the figure. No - we are talking about people living in the UK where even the Heat Pump manufacturers have admitted that their technology is not suitable for a lot of the UK housing stock. I want to know what those people in the UK are going use. Can you give me their reason for their heat pumps being unsuitable? Perhaps their workmanship is not up to standard.
I have a report of their workmanship here
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 18, 2023 10:36:14 GMT
Nov 18, 2023 9:55:00 GMT steppenwolf said: That's a good video - I wasn't aware that the Apollo missions used HFC.
I'd make threeo comments. First they didn't mention that if you use hydrogen instead of natural gas in a boiler you generate a lot of NOx - which is seriously toxic. That's because hydrogen burns at a very high temperature and oxidises nitrogen in the air. I know that some firms claim to have overcome this problem (presumably by controlling the temperature ate which it's burned) but I'm not aware that anyone has actually done it commercially yet.
There is a neat trick you can do with ammonia. A firm has produced ammonia in tablet form, so it is as dense as highly compressed ammonia gas but trapped in a solid. Ammonia gas is what you need to react with the NOx and turn it to water. This is actually being trialled in buses currently, so it is already quite well developed if required.
Secondly I think they're a bit hasty in dismissing green hydrogen as a storage medium. It's true that it is highly inefficient (25% as against 75% efficiency of a battery), but the fact remains that we DO need to store electricity from renewable sources and it will NEVER be viable to store it in batteries - too expensive and not environmentally friendly. So what alternative do we have other than green hydrogen. At the moment lots of renewable energy is just being discarded because it's generated at times when no one needs it and we can't store it. So even if green hydrogen is inefficient it's vastly better than just discarding it. Storage is a mutli-level problem. There is storage for a few seconds to deal with any power surges. The things that can deliver the highest power in the shortest time are super capacitors. Next up we have storage on a daily cycle. I think the best contender is the flow battery, but you can reduce the overall amount of storage by time-shifting uses of large amounts of energy. You can charge your cars in the middle of the night when usage is low. You can go and smelt some aluminium when there is cheap electricity. To do this we need an intelligent grid which prices electricity in real time and uses edge computing devices running AI algorithms. Your water heater can go looking on the internet to see the weather for that day and the cost of electricity and decide on how it is going to make best use of cheap electricity to keep your water warm. You can use storage heaters as well. Your heat pump can pump heat into a thermal storage medium in the night to give you the base supply of heat, then you use more expensive electricity to fine tune it to cope with temperature variations. For longer term and short term you use the grid to average out the power production, especially with wind that is very erratic. However for the longest storage of all at the cheapest price I don't think you can beat thermal storage if done on a giant industrial scale. You could store energy from summer to be used in winter if the facility were large enough. These is far cheaper than using batteries, but you are probably looking at only 75% recovery rate.
It could be viable, but obviously it would need a lot of govt involvement to set up the infrastructure (and modify the grid to accept returned energy) but all of this is do-able. At the moment the govt seems to think that they can force people to buy BEVs and private industry will provide the charging points - but the latest figures for pure electric car sales indicate that sales are falling (especially to private buyers) and private industry is not installing chargers because they're very unprofitable.
Thirdly heat pumps are not viable for most of the property in the UK - and they're too noisy and expensive even for those where they could be used. Non starter. Have you come across hydrodynamic bearings and vortex fans? I use them myself and the small ones can be so quiet you would not know they are on, even if at arm's length. They make a big difference over standard ball bearings or sleeve bearings.
I said many years ago that the govt should be devoting more thought to the transition from fossil fuels, but so far they seem to have done basically nothing except make a few daft laws and hope people will comply. It's NOT going to work.
The standard of engineering and technical know-how in the UK is appalling. Two things we can do are either reform our education system or import it all from China. The video I enclose above will give you some idea of how professional our professionals actually are.
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Post by steppenwolf on Nov 19, 2023 13:15:45 GMT
You always do the same thing BvL. You quote future technologies that have never been put into production - and may never be. Obviously you can get rid of NOx by using ammonia - this is what Adblue does. it's called a reduction catalyser. It's used in lorries and it is/was offered on some cars, but it was not enough to save the diesel engine. It;s not a solution for hydrogen boilers.
And battery technology will never work for storing renewable energy. The requirements are huge. And heat pumps will never work for the UK for so many reasons. You can quote all the future technology you like but we need ACTUAL WORKING technology NOW. In the long run we'll have fission technology (maybe) which will solve ALL our problems. But right now we don't have it - and it's been "just round the corner" for decades.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 19, 2023 13:53:13 GMT
You always do the same thing BvL. You quote future technologies that have never been put into production - and may never be. Obviously you can get rid of NOx by using ammonia - this is what Adblue does. it's called a reduction catalyser. It's used in lorries and it is/was offered on some cars, but it was not enough to save the diesel engine. It;s not a solution for hydrogen boilers. I don't think you have seen the tablet form of ammonia. It is a new invention and it is injected in to the catalytic converter. Not good enough you say. Is 99% reduction not good enough? Not in production you say. It's actually on British buses right now.
Also hydrodynamic fans exist in production and have done for several years, but no one has thought to put them on heat pumps. The technology was first invented for the hard disk drive and is brilliant. There is nothing to wear out. No surface touches, it is the circular shear in the liquid.
There is a commercial company which markets flow batteries as well. They are being trialled in electricity systems and work well. The main advantage is cost and that comes about via long service life. The reason is the only thing that degrades is the electrolyte, but that can be reprocessed to be used as electrolyte again. Furthermore, for large capacity the only thing you need to scale storage capacity are the tanks holding the electrolyte. Think hard about that and you will realise the recycling and cost problems vanish.
If that is not enough for you, another invention is a new type of compressor. I think it is about 10% of the world's electricity is used to drive compressors. We have been using a design hundreds of years old. There is a far better and more efficient way. It's just been invented by a Brit and is being used in industry, much like the flow battery is. It's not large scale adoption, but the results say it should be.
Finally, edge AI computing is now available. I've seen the development boards on sale in China. They use special chips for it, like CPUs but have AI accelerators and they work with TensorFlow and all that. I just think you are not up-to-date.
Can you list the problems with heat pumps in the UK and then I will know what you think is wrong with them. I do understand there are issues, but some of those issues will reduce with the passage of time, but anyway, do fire away an let me know what makes them infeasible.
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