If Germany and England are giving hydrogen a test, great.  That means that we’ll eventually have some data to tell us the most cost efficient way to store power.

It might, in fact, be neither hydrogen nor batteries.  Isentopic’s heat in gravel is making progress and promises to be very cheap if it works.

You’ve got to crack water into hydrogen and you’ve got to ‘burn’  hydrogen to create electricity.

2. Tanks have advantages…they are completely passive, they are cheap to make, and most of all, as I said, the costs and weight don’t scale linearly with size — like with batteries!

3. You can “suspect” things, or you can look them up on the web.  Germany and England have already benchmarked and are implementing grid scale hydrolysis systems for hydrogen storage of renewable energy.

EOS Energy Storage 

EOS Energy Storage is manufacturing a zinc-air battery that uses a saline-ion electrolyte.

Safe, won’t burn. Cheap, commonly available materials. The US has lots of zinc.
Designed to last 10,000 cycles

Cost $160/kWh.

At $160/kwh and 10,000  cycles it would cost morning hours, daytime solar -> evening hours) storage.  That battery charging and DC -> AC conversion equipment will be in place in order to deal with daily cycles.

If we increase the amount of storage in each system then we can supply for days at a time rather than hours at a time using equipment already in place.  Those few ‘deep storage’ hours of power would cost us 6 cents for the wind and 2 cents for storage.  

Second, you can’t look at one element in a system in isolation and declare it a winner.  Hydrogen tanks might be cheap to manufacture but the cracking and burning gear is not.  And there are significant operating expenses due to the energy wasted in the overall system.

I suspect there may be a use for hydrogen for deep grid storage – those few strings of days each year when both wind and solar input are low.  

You could store a lot of hydrogen cheaply and you could generate it with a moderate amount of equipment because you could generate gradually over time.  But you’d be looking at installing a large amount of hydrogen->electricity equipment.  

Fuel cells are quite expensive.

Hydrogen keeps its energy 100%.

Batteries especially the lithium-ion type lose charge rapidly.

And batteries are expensive because you need to add them as you need storage.

Whereas hydrogen can be stored very cheaply in a simple tank.

The fuel cell is not a storage device but a converter…it doesn’t have to scale with the storage, only with the peak demand from it.

And also hydrogen is very portable.

Hydrogen is at least 50% lossy.  That’s big time lossy.

We don’t know how the cost things will play out.  Right now batteries are pricey but hydrogen generation and fuel cells are just plain expensive.

Perhaps hydrogen gen and fuel cells will get cheaper than batteries, but they’ll have to get significantly cheaper in order to make up for the overall system inefficiency.  When you  throw away half the incoming energy your operating costs soar.

Better to convert excess solar to hydrogen which can also be used as a fuel for vehicles.

I have also converted the same type of freezer to a fridge by installing a different thermostat and it now consumes only 200 watt hours per day which is about  25% of a normal fridge.

The price has dropped so rapidly that sometimes those FiTs seem to be unreasonably high, and they likely are based on current solar prices.  They are being adjusted downward.

In the US we’ve taken a different approach via a subsidy based on 30% of the installation price.  That means that the subsidy has automatically tracked downward with solar costs.

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I think what we are seeing in Germany is a great decentralization of the grid.  Solar has worked very well for many people. They’ve got their installed price down to roughly half of what we pay in the US.  The next step is to install some storage at the house level so that even less power flows back and forth on the German grid.

Since storage is being installed at the retail, rather than the wholesale, level the numbers work better.  Purchasers of storage are avoiding retail prices and using those savings to pay for storage.  Storage at the utility level means that the storage has to be paid for with the spread between wholesale and retail prices, a smaller number.

DIY is not that complicated. The hardest part is mounting. I’d use my shed. Take the opportunity to buy a nicer shed, and position it for maximum insolation. The next hardest part is connecting to your wiring box. Find a friend with experience in house wiring. The rest is just connecting wires like any other electronics. (Your utility must inspect everything before you go live.)

The meager expense of my fossil electricity, and most of the world’s, keeps us subservient. In my state and country, we are being given a product that doesn’t include externalities in the price. We are in a co-dependent relationship with the fossil fuel sellers that can only be ruinous in the long term.

Back to the content of the article…I am wondering what is different algorithmically than a normal battery storage system. This type of thing is a software problem now, just like the blending of gas and electric power in a plugin hybrid is very much about software.

As a programmer, one who really enjoys the minute details of kernel (OS) *resource* optimization (discussed so especially openly by Linux developers), I relish and look forward to discussion of all the algorithmic resource optimization that is happening within vehicles, household power, micro grids, and the macro grid.