At 13:00 Dave talked about how problematic green hydrogen is, and at 13:30 he said why not just use the electricity directly for the home.
Herein is the whole problem: the solar and wind electricity is generated at times when it is not needed and not generated when it is needed. So we still have to deal with the issue of delaying the electricity by storing it somehow. This could be batteries, or any of the other methods discussed here previously.
In order to provide enough electricity during windless and cloudy days, there has to be enough storage for 3 to 4 times the peak load. Batteries would be too expensive and there aren’t enough. Pumped hydro would be good if enough reservoirs could be built. But those are expensive and have environmental issues. Whatever method is used, it must be very large scale and capable of storing for days or months in the case of use in winter. And there will be so much excess electricity that the round trip efficiency is not important (as so many ‘experts’ have been critical about).
Green hydrogen is proposed by many researchers. Lately I have heard a lot of whining from ‘experts’ about problems that hydrogen has, such as it leaks out of containers and causes steel pipes to become brittle. I counter with the fact that these have already been taken care of by the producers of gray hydrogen. And as Dave has already explained, hydrogen can be changed to ammonia and stored. And Lavo, Homepower Picea, Gencell, Plug Power, Bloom Energy and Ballard have already developed systems that do this using hydrogen.
Dave has brought up some of RethinkX aka Tony Seba’s research, and they get into this same subject in detail. The hydrogen fuel cell plays a major part in systems that store electric power for use at peak times. Toyota, Hyundai, Honda and others already have HFCEVs on the roads. The world must change and abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible, and green hydrogen is a good solution. As Dave said, blue hydrogen is not what it’s made out to be by the hyperbole from the fossil fuels industries.
