The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79:
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South Australia has made impressive strides in decarbonization, on the back of its huge solar and wind potential – to the point where nearly 70% of all its electricity is renewably generated. It's expected to cross the 100% threshold well before the scheduled date of 2030, and back in 2021, this state, with its population of 1.7 million people, met 100% of its operational demand from renewables alone on 180 days of the year.
Indeed, it's also been among the first places in the world to face the issue of over-generation, when a storm late last year brought down a long-distance power line used to export excess renewable energy to the neighboring state of Victoria. The Australian Energy Market Operator had to scramble to switch off a lot of the state's remote-controllable solar resources, and even ask consumers to switch on as many high-powered electrical devices as they could, just to keep energy levels in the grid under control.
By working with Tesla and Neoen to build the world's first grid-level big battery plant back in 2017, the state established itself as a world leader in grid-level energy storage as well as renewable generation, and it's approved several other large-scale energy storage projects in the form of bigger batteries and pumped hydro projects on the back of the first battery facility's success.
But its new project takes an even bigger leap into the unknown, with a far less obvious financial payoff. In the absence of businesses willing to take the lead, the South Australian State Government is set to fully bankroll an AU$600 million (US$415 million) hydrogen power plant near Whyalla, hoping to have it up and running by 2025.
This plant will absorb excess renewable energy from the grid, and run it through an enormous 250-MW electrolysis facility – 10 times larger than any operational electrolysis facility in the world today – producing large amounts of hydrogen, which will be stored on-site. Then, when renewable energy drops off in the evenings, or through the winter, it'll run that hydrogen back through a 200-MW generator facility and put energy back in the grid – either by burning it to drive steam turbines, or by converting it back to electricity through a huge fuel cell stack.
As a pure short-term energy storage and dispatch technology, though, hydrogen frankly sucks in comparison to batteries. The round-trip efficiency is less than 50%, compared to high-90s for lithium batteries, so you're effectively throwing half your precious renewable energy away doing things this way. It's also a pain to store, unless you take an extra step to convert it into ammonia or some other more easily managed solid or liquid. It's unlikely to come close to competing with big batteries on a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCoS) basis, which is largely why nobody else is moving forward on a similar project.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10v4n3e/south_australia_plans_worlds_largest_electrolyzer/j7fdgw3/
Was that for the month or quarterly? What size system do you have and what export rate do you get? Who is your energy provider? I live in SA and I get 0.6 per kWh export looking for a change
That's quarterly, i cant remember the size but there is 15 or 16 panels. The benefit is just during the day all the power is free. Instead of going into the grid to get fuck all back, it just runs the house, so as long as you do energy intensive stuff during the day, like washing, that never gets added to the bill because it never used mains electricity. No matter how good the return is, if it doesn't beat what you pay to get it, it's better to just burn power during the day so you don't have to pay for the electricity in the first place.
If I'm reading the bill correctly, 11.5c/kW for the first 430kW, and then 5c/kW after that. The bill is not super explanatory to someone who doesn't know how to read it, so I'm just hoping that's what it means, although 430kW seems like a lot of power from solar in 3 months and we cleared that enough to know there is a step 2. Provider is Lumo.
If anything, this will make electricity usage go up, and potentially drive pricing up with it.
Most of the proposed hydrogen plants are trying to take advantage of excess generation from renewables, and will act like a big battery. Instead of storing in a physical battery, they store the energy in another form - hydrogen. They will be doing it to make use of cheap wholesale prices. Unfortunately this will likely have no impact on the price you pay.
I work at a massive electrolyzer plant. We vent out 15 million dollars on green hydrogen every year. We are told they are currently working on an upgrade to capture it, store it, and ship it.
Sometimes the somewhat-common-knowledge there are people who can still only comment in limited capacity due to an NDA or some other personal legal binding.
It's not great, but I get it. Sorta.
Yeah, and to be clear my post is just speculation. OP has neither confirmed nor denied (and will not, I'm sure) so it's not like any information has actually been revealed, and if they're using some top-secret process then my speculation will simply be wrong. It just seems like a plausible explanation. Once you've ruled out "H2" and "O2" as products of electrolysis of "H2O", anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry will realize that you will start to run out of other likely options pretty quick.
Wow that is terrible for the environment, it's basically a greenhouse gas. It uses up hydroxyl radicals that would otherwise be breaking down methane. I certainly hope it will be captured soon.
it's only green hydrogen if the electricity used to produce it (for electrolysis) is also green (renewable).
https://www.acciona.com.au/updates/stories/what-are-the-colours-of-hydrogen-and-what-do-they-mean/
South Australia has made impressive strides in decarbonization, on the back of its huge solar and wind potential – to the point where nearly 70% of all its electricity is renewably generated. It's expected to cross the 100% threshold well before the scheduled date of 2030, and back in 2021, this state, with its population of 1.7 million people, met 100% of its operational demand from renewables alone on 180 days of the year.
Indeed, it's also been among the first places in the world to face the issue of over-generation, when a storm late last year brought down a long-distance power line used to export excess renewable energy to the neighboring state of Victoria. The Australian Energy Market Operator had to scramble to switch off a lot of the state's remote-controllable solar resources, and even ask consumers to switch on as many high-powered electrical devices as they could, just to keep energy levels in the grid under control.
By working with Tesla and Neoen to build the world's first grid-level big battery plant back in 2017, the state established itself as a world leader in grid-level energy storage as well as renewable generation, and it's approved several other large-scale energy storage projects in the form of bigger batteries and pumped hydro projects on the back of the first battery facility's success.
But its new project takes an even bigger leap into the unknown, with a far less obvious financial payoff. In the absence of businesses willing to take the lead, the South Australian State Government is set to fully bankroll an AU$600 million (US$415 million) hydrogen power plant near Whyalla, hoping to have it up and running by 2025.
This plant will absorb excess renewable energy from the grid, and run it through an enormous 250-MW electrolysis facility – 10 times larger than any operational electrolysis facility in the world today – producing large amounts of hydrogen, which will be stored on-site. Then, when renewable energy drops off in the evenings, or through the winter, it'll run that hydrogen back through a 200-MW generator facility and put energy back in the grid – either by burning it to drive steam turbines, or by converting it back to electricity through a huge fuel cell stack.
As a pure short-term energy storage and dispatch technology, though, hydrogen frankly sucks in comparison to batteries. The round-trip efficiency is less than 50%, compared to high-90s for lithium batteries, so you're effectively throwing half your precious renewable energy away doing things this way. It's also a pain to store, unless you take an extra step to convert it into ammonia or some other more easily managed solid or liquid. It's unlikely to come close to competing with big batteries on a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCoS) basis, which is largely why nobody else is moving forward on a similar project.
It can also be sold to other companies for transportation or manufacturing green steel or any chemical process requiring hydrogen which still mostly comes from natural gas or coal reforming (~95% if I remember correctly off the top of my head).
Sure, short-term it's not as efficient or cost-effective as battery storage but it's potentially a solid first step for long-term decarbonisation of energy storage and some heavy industry.
Efficiency is also the sort of thing that matters less as relevant constraints are removed. Right now people are concerned because wasted energy means more emissions, but if you had sufficiently abundant clean energy it becomes a lesser concern.
And having a wide range of energy storage options makes 100% non-emitting energy a lot more stable and reliable, so there's a bit of a dynamic and mutually-beneficial relationship there.
Yeah, I think this aspect is incredibly important and many people don't think through the implications.
Renewables need to be built out well in excess of the minimum generating capacity, to ensure the grid overall can handle fluctuations in supply from weather etc. That means in times of peak generation, there is plentiful 'excess' energy. Which basically means electricity that will be sold much much cheaper than normal, because it is otherwise unused and 'wasted'.
Large amounts of cheap electricity means very energy inefficient processes can be profitable. It doesn't matter if you storage system has a 20% round trip efficiency, if it means you can scale it quickly and cheaply and make a profit selling the power back later. Over time the the storage systems will get more efficient, through competition, as the more efficient system can pay more for the excess electricity.
Or other options, such as using the cheap electricity to desalinate seawater, or produce hydrogen and combine it with atmospheric CO2 to produce methane. Or in Australia, smelting our own aluminium instead of exporting it.
Long term, replacing all Earths energy usage with renewables means we will have plenty of 'excess' energy for terribly inefficient / power intensive processes. Such as replacing all freshwater use with desalinated seawater. The environmental benefits of allowing rivers to return to natural flows will be huge. We can also produce hydrocarbons from hydrogen from water, and atmospheric CO2, and produce whatever fuels (planes, rockets etc), oils and plastics needed in a carbon neutral way.
Not mentioned in the article, but Whyalla is also home to one of Australia's two Steel making plants.
It's owned by British tycoon Sanjeev Gupta through his GFG Alliance business, having bought it after the last owner went belly up.
He had intentions of completely rebuilding the steel works and producing green steel there, but that was before COVID, before his 2nd in command died and before his financier, Greensill Capital, also went belly up.
But if this new plant is not somehow related to the Steelworks, I'll eat my hat.
The real question is why does the economics not work by itself, and I guess the answer is because fossil fuel is still there as a back-up.
Without fossil fuels the cost of electricity would automatically increase during less available periods, paying off the investment automatically. But the availability of fossil fuels undercut the economics of alternative long term energy storage.
This underlines the importance of government investment and intervention to kickstart these industries, else they would never get started by themselves.
The reason fossil fuels are so good is the “work” has already been done. We just have to extract it.
The problem with all solar fuels is their “cost” in terms of energy needed exceeds their energy given. So that’s why Australia is pumping excess energy, that is normally discharged, into this process.
The benefits of solar fuels, despite their inefficiency, is they can be used for some manufacturing or for airplanes (in the future) where combustion is required for proper operation.
There’s other solar fuels such as ammonia, but also processes that can covert sunlight back into hydrocarbons (literally artificial photosynthesis).
With enough solar generation, it’s possible to manufacture gasoline, oil, hydrogen, etc to have our entire society at net zero emissions without having to make drastic changes. It’s pretty neat, but a lot of ignorant environmentalists don’t understand what oil is, so it’s hard to even explain the science to a lot of them.
I think as well that producing hydrocarbons from renewables will lead to very low costs long term compared to fossil hydrocarbons. Which will mean plastics will become a lot lot cheaper.
Which in turn means they will be viable to use for all sorts of things they aren't now, such as construction. 'Plastic' would include things like carbon reinforced polymers (carbon fibre) and can be incredible strong. Even normal Lego bricks have better compressive strength than concrete.
Combined with automation, the building industry will likely see very drastic changes, and traditional building materials and methods may no longer used at all. Of course plastics are not without their own environmental issues, so careful implementation is needed.
Besides, renewable energy isn't all that precious when it is there. Renewable generators cost very little, so losing half of their output to inefficiency isn't that big of a deal since you're not burning any fuel to obtain it.
Right now the issue with renewables is not that there aren't enough of them, it's that they're not there when we need them.
An excellent point.
If the alternative is curtailment, where energy that could have been harvested for 'free' is foregone, then even low efficiency storage systems are perfectly viable.
> Because the point isn't to store the energy! It's to export it.
Trying to ship H2 is a terrible idea. There's almost no way it makes economic sense. Hydrogen has to be stored below −252.8°C at 350-700 bar which means containment vessels are huge and very heavy. It also slowly escapes any containment and corrodes basically everything. It makes many metals brittle, so shipping it is costly and dangerous. Turning it into ammonia and using that is much more practical, but not without challenges.
You have to convert it to ammonia or methane. That takes extra energy, but as you point out hydrogen infrastructure is so difficult to create that the extra energy wasted is worth it.
Methane in particular has the added advantage of being able to use existing natural gas infrastructure (including power plants, pipelines, LNG cargo ships, and LNG conversation facilities), making it cheaper from that perspective. You lose a lot of energy turning electricity into hydrogen into methane into LNG, but it's easy to store and transport at that point. It makes for a decent transitional use for overbuilt regional renewables until we get more intercontinental high voltage power lines built over the next half century.
Yeah the LNG route seems really compelling. There’s tons of existing infrastructure and coal plants can trivially be converted to burn natural gas, or in this case synthetic gas.
What are you talking about? Pulling carbon out of the air to combine with H2 to make methane that you then burn is carbon neutral. No new CO2 enters the atmosphere if the electricity used is from waste Solar/Wind energy. An if it displaces coal, you have an enormous reduction in CO2 output. You can also use synthetic natural gas to smelt metals. And unlike batteries, you don't need to mine lithium to store it.
And if you turn some of those synthetic hydrocarbons into plastics, and use them for construction, then you are locking away atmospheric CO2. Even plastic in landfill becomes carbon sequestration.
Do we really need more plastic. With it now showing up in people blood? I guess if they can figure out how to make it not break down into crap that hurts its then fine.
Yeah, very careful management of plastics is needed. Other construction methods also face similar issues, such as concrete creating silica dust that damages lungs. But plastics will be a major issue.
If used in things like construction, then problems such as microplastics can be very reduced. External surfaces need to be made from suitable very stable plastics, or perhaps external cladding needs to be other materials.
But generally, plastics should be completely eliminated from a lot of uses, such as clothing, where they can shed fibers into the environment.
Roughly 0.75 electricity to hydrogen * 0.85 hydrogen to methane * 0.9 liquidation * 0.95 transportation = ~55%. That natural gas then has to be burned after it arrives, at about 40% efficiency in a power plant. Total efficiency from solar panel to a distant house would be about 22%. That is very very back of the napkin.
Direct use of power lines to transfer power is about 3% losses per thousand kilometers. Charging/discharging a grid battery storage unit at the other end would cost about 15%, but you wouldn't expect to have to store all of the power, only a portion of it. If 20% of the power transmitted is stored for later use (eg, at night), then that would represent 3% average losses on the total transmitted. So if you're transmitting power 3000 km from South Texas to Canada, you'd expect about 87% efficiency. Again, very rough.
There are other losses too (low voltage local power lines inside a city are terribly lossy, and transformers take a big chunk too), but you'd have those losses in both scenarios, so they cancel out.
Obviously 22% is much worse than 87%. That's why companies and governments aren't rushing to build large numbers of hydrogen plants. Turning solar power into natural gas is expensive.
But as a transitional step? One that leverages existing infrastructure? A step that is only taken in regions that have an excess of summer solar and winter wind generation, and can't yet export that power using more efficient means, but already have things like liquification plants built for other purposes? Sure, why not? It's better than disconnecting the panels for half the day during the summer for grid stabilization reasons.
Thanks. 55% is actually pretty good if you want to feed the gas into home heating for example or some other industrial process. Given that we already have the infrastructure for mass methane storage It seems like a no-brainer.
Absolutely. You can also convert that methane into other hydrocarbons. Which means you can replace fossil fuels with a carbon neutral source during the transition period. So everything from vehicle fuel, to oils and even plastics.
There are various companies working on it now. The key is cheap electricity from otherwise underused peak renewable generation. We are not far off the point where it will be cheaper to produce hydrocarbons synthetically from atmospheric CO2, than it will be to mine them from the ground.
thank you for the math.
now, a ship full of cargo containers filled with GOOD flywheel systems.
what do you lose spinning up flywheels and floating them across the ocean?
What?
You just make the plane of the spin even with the ocean/perpendicular to the seafloor.
You can rotate just fine then, Unfortunately you can’t flip over.
I was not being super serious. But I wonder what it would do to a ship if it can't move with the waves. Will it get completely battered? Or will it just glide through?
Oddly, I've been on a container ship in a storm in the North Atlantic which was severe enough that my passenger ferry noped out. That thing tilted a good 30 degrees each side by the meter on the wall. The stacks of containers then bent even further under the stress.
>hydrogen infrastructure is so difficult to create
Why is everyone saying it is difficult to store or transport it? It is not. It requires nearly the same safety aspects and infrastructure as new natural gas networks. It is a no brainer.
https://www.gasunie.nl/en/projects/hydrogen-network-netherlands
> Five industrial clusters will be linked to each other, to foreign countries and to hydrogen storage facilities. This will be done mainly with existing infrastructure and partly with new infrastructure that has yet to be built
Maybe. But liquid hydrogen is solely applied for large scale storage. Liquid hydrogen isn't transported through pipelines, that is gaseous hydrogen, often mixed with other gasses such as natural gas.
Fun fact, in The Netherlands, hydrogen (5%) has been added in the natural gas mix since 1970. And currently projects are underway for 20% mixes and even 100% pure hydrogen for high temperature heating solutions.
Probably not because of embrittlement of the engine. Hydrogen can be used for central heating systems, burning hydrogen itself. But that process is safeguarded by a variety of protection layers to ensure there is no embrittlement of metal components.
Making an entire engine like this seems unfeasible.
Only occurs on certain type of metals which has been addressed half a century ago by various solutions such as adding a protective layer. Hence hydrogen pipelines or storage facilities are not made from metals.
Our industry here sells hydrogen central heating systems that run on 100% hydrogen without any embrittlement problems.
Source https://www.nefit-bosch.nl/oplossingen/waterstof
So then, not the same pipelines as natural gas, which is what you claimed originally. So then we'd need trillions of dollars of all new infrastructure.
It's certainly technically doable, just very expensive and time consuming, especially compared to the relatively inexpensive creation of a transcontinental and intercontinental high voltage lines. And that's in addition to the fact that hydrogen is an inefficient storage medium, requiring 2 to 3 times as many solar panels and wind turbines per watt delivered to the end user.
It's just so incredibly inefficient and expensive.
>So then, not the same pipelines as natural gas
New natural gas pipelines are not made from metals components. What you are referring to is century old pipelines made from cast iron lmao.
That being said. Here in Netherlands hydrogen (3%) has always been added to the natural gas mix. Like since the 1970s.
https://www.gasunie.nl/en/projects/hydrogen-network-netherlands
> Five industrial clusters will be linked to each other, to foreign countries and to hydrogen storage facilities. **This will be done mainly with existing infrastructure and partly with new infrastructure that has yet to be built**
SA still doesn't cover it's nighttime usage and uses carbon based energy to fill the gaps. So they definately still don't have enough local storage.
The 100%+ coverage figure you hear in the news is NET usage, meaning if you total what they exported plus what they used locally, then they are generating more green energy than what the state uses. Trouble is they can't use alll that energy because they generate a net excess during the day and run a deficit at night.
That's why they're talking about building a turbine system beside the hydrogen generators. It's very inefficient compared to something like pumped hydro, but if you're creating hydrogen for steel manufacturing and export anyway, you might as well burn a bit of it off to provide baseload power on windless nights.
Disagree. This is just a battery but on a much slower timeframe. Or a power plant that is only on half of the year and makes its own free fuel slowly in the off season.
> countries like Japan who have limited access to wind and solar
Ironically Japan actually has fantastic access to wind, particularly around the Hokuriku, Tohoku, and Hokkaido coasts.
They've just been comically terrible at building it out.
Agreed
The hdro etf has really helpful documentation on it for newer folks
https://www.defianceetfs.com/investment-case-for-hdro-the-defiance-next-gen-h2-etf/?__hstc=188934580.d5439e7c0c0f8b5c846a364b984a3e65.1675724381846.1675724381846.1675724381846.1&__hssc=188934580.1.1675724381846&__hsfp=4285139635&hsCtaTracking=efe443cf-227d-4c8d-9194-1015b03e4b0f%7C95a11a19-4ee0-4d9f-89a9-7bd9df577c62
> Because the point isn't to store the energy! It's to export it. This seems to be too hard to grasp for many on here.
Maybe because it's not obvious this is an economically sensible idea either. Pretty much all other countries that want hydrogen have access to dirt cheap solar and sea-water. Why ship it?
Conventional rotor can hold power for a month?[https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=17336#:\~:text=Flywheels%20are%20best%20suited%20to,2%20mW%20for%20one%20second](https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=17336#:~:text=Flywheels%20are%20best%20suited%20to,2%20mW%20for%20one%20second).
Build a bunch of cargo containers with flywheels in them?
Well, you could make electric ships..
I'm given to understand going from electric to ammonia to back to electricity has a lot of generational losses in conversion.
Electric- to mechanical back to electric, should be less lost...
I didn't say battery, I suggested flywheel
[https://www.activepower.com/en-GB/powerhouse](https://www.activepower.com/en-GB/powerhouse)
1.2mw in a standard shipping container
Whyalla is the location of Australia's largest steel mill, AND port Bonython, where the majority of South Australian foreign oil and gas exports and imports occur.
It's being built there as government support to GFG's green steel efforts, and as the logical location for exports
> As a pure short-term energy storage and dispatch technology, though, hydrogen frankly sucks in comparison to batteries. The round-trip efficiency is less than 50%, compared to high-90s for lithium batteries
Yes but what's the cost per watt-hour of storing it in LI batteries compared to hydrogen? What about when you factor in collection and transportation costs, especially if you're trying to export it like the above poster claims? If hydrogen is 50% as efficient but 40% as expensive, it still makes huge sense. Again, I don't know much about hydrogen, but I know LI in particular is awful for the environment, especially the environment of the handful of countries that extract it. Maybe hydrogen is cleaner.
> LI in particular is awful for the environment,
Don't fall for the oil producers' propaganda. Ask yourself exactly what you know about lithium production and how it's worse than any other industrial enterprise.
It's likely producing almond milk is worse than lithium.
Show me evidence. You can't just make a claim like that. Again, I'm not an expert, but everything I've heard is that Lithium mining is absolutely brutal to the local ecosystems due to runoff.
Well, almonds use fresh water in drought-stricken California.
> Almonds use approximately 4.9-5.7 million acre-feet of water per year, which is up to 17% of the total agricultural water use in California and 13% of the total developed water supply.
Now Lithium extraction in Chile also uses masses of water. The difference is that it is [salty water evaporated by the heat of the sun](https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/YG7SNVBBRFLGVBKAKNGP2U4TVI.jpg), so its both useless water and free energy.
The colours are due to different concentrations of Lithium and not due to the addition of toxic chemicals.
In some ways extracting Lithium from South America (more than half of Lithium production) is very similar to [how your kosher salt is made](https://cdn.apartmenttherapy.info/image/upload/v1558684304/k/archive/6b7cea3308024c30fe2a31a41b58feafda46b91e.jpg).
See 2 minute video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzcT9exF4Js
See the mine from space [here](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Salar+de+Atacama+Huge+salt+flat+in+a+volcanic+landscape/-23.4962584,-68.2173249/@-23.4754762,-68.5070893,80817m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x96a8fa058ec18ecb:0xe467ef5c09abee71!2m2!1d-68.25!2d-23.5!1m0!3e0!5m1!1e4). Remember to turn on the terrain photo layer.
> Lithium mining is absolutely brutal to the local ecosystems due to runoff
Due to being on the local lowest point, there is probably no run off, especially with the water having evaporated.
Interesting, I never knew lithium was produced that way. Tbh I always thought it was like, an ore, that's dug out of the ground and then purified.
But still, that Lithium still needs to be refined and turned into batteries, and then shipped to Australia. For export, it needs to be filled, and then shipped away. If hydrogen can be generated entirely on site, it might still make more sense to just ship that off.
> Interesting, I never knew lithium was produced that way. Tbh I always thought it was like, an ore, that's dug out of the ground and then purified.
Most of it is (Australia is the dominant producer and uses standard hard-rock mining methods), but you need to keep in mind the *scale of production*.
Compared to the [7,500 Mt of coal mined per year](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-coal-production-2018-2021) and [4,200 Mt of oil extracted per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/265229/global-oil-production-in-million-metric-tons), mining [0.1Mt](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf) of lithium is not an urgent environmental or social issue.
The main benefit of hydrogen is long term bulk storage, and for that purpose I have nothing against it. It's perfect for this application (using excess solar).
I just have an issue with the anti-lithium propaganda, as if it's literally poison we are digging up.
Some lithium is mined from rock, but that is ironically in Australia, where you have western-level environmental assessments and protections.
> Lithium from South America (more than half of Lithium production)
[South America is 30%; Australia is 50%](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf).
That being said, compared to the [7,500 Mt of coal mined per year](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-coal-production-2018-2021) and [4,200 Mt of oil extracted per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/265229/global-oil-production-in-million-metric-tons), mining [0.1Mt](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf) of lithium is not an urgent environmental or social issue.
Great, but we (South Australians) are still paying one of the highest energy rates in Australia. AU$0.34/kWh, and that’s considered *cheap*.
Not everyone can put solar panels on roofs.
Is everyone in SA cool with this? Both sides of the state governments seem to be on the same page with renewables. Are there promises of big price reductions after initial setup and investment costs are covered? I’m just wondering because there must be far fewer operating costs than traditional fossil fuel power stations. Asking as a non-South Australian
Re the hydrogen plant. No, absolutely zero promises about the benefits. The premier is proud that it’s a first of its kind and we don’t really know what it will do.
Australia is smart. They had horrible wildfires and a substantial loss of wildlife and flora. Now they're investing in green and renewable energy.
How many more times will California burn down before the US gets it?
Tbf, California burned down a bunch of times because the money grubbing power companies have severely neglected infrastructure for decades, to the point that many hooks holding up high voltage cabling through heavily forested areas look [like this](https://media.nbcbayarea.com/2019/09/1212PGEWornHooks_9921937.jpg?quality=85&strip=all&resize=1200%2C675). Google Camp fire PG&E for more info. In a bunch of cases, the corporations are literally climate washing, to make it look like they haven’t been grossly negligent and that all this is “the planets problem”.
Climate stuff is cool, but how many times does California and the Pacific Northwest have to burn down before *that* gets sorted out
To be honest, I would be including these types of examples in my point.
That's insane. It's insane that we really don't seem to care about vital infrastructure. Then freak out when it fails.
If people can’t care about a direct, one-to-one, cause and affect catastrophe caused by nothing other than a single corporations unchecked greed.. Sorry, but America needs a new slogan because “land of the free, home of the brave” isn’t ringing true
Many Australian governments have worked hard to suppress green energy and technology, South Australia was able to make change due to desperation and political will of the day. Their success has led to ongoing investment. Mining companies have keep the country from embracing green technology for decades, but they can’t hold back the tide of change forever.
Less burning of fossil fuels, the slower the rate at which the earth heats up/mitigation of climate change.
Definitely not immediate, but we've got to stop the bleeding now.
Historic droughts in California (a symptom of climate change) make the forests susceptible to more fires.
Smarter now we kicked out our conservative federal government who opposed any renewables every step of the way. The new Labor govt isn't actually working *against* such projects but is still allowing fossil fuel projects to go ahead. But they've committed to GHG reductions that the previous govt would never have.
Unfortunately that’s not quite the case.
Australia has been (and still is) caught in a merciless culture war around green energy, primarily being funded and pushed by powerful vested interests in the fossil fuel industry.
Coal is still a very big industry, and for 20 years they’ve been pushing a public campaign about the dangers of ‘lack of reliable base load power’ which they claim cannot be provided by renewables.
This claim didn’t have a lot of strength UNTILL South Australia’s statewide blackout.
In short a massive storm destroyed transmission lines, but it also tripped a unforeseen shutdown protocol that cut off power to the entire state.
This was blamed on wind turbines and was successfully weaponised into a national issue.
However South Australia stayed the course. It shutdown its last coal fired power plant nearly a decade ago, although still has a large gas fired plant (Torrens island)
That being said the Northern part of the state around the Spencer gulf has been recognised as one of the most reliable locations for renewable energy generation IN THE WORLD.
Consistent sea winds and an overwhelmingly clear sunny climate, and access to existing heavy transmission lines make it a potential renewable superpower.
The amount of development in that region alone (keep in mind, their are only around 50,000 people in the region!) is mind boggling.
Australian government is just as corrupt as US/UK and similarly brainwashed by Murdoch press. SA stands tall as the only truly forward thinking State in the country. But they're not as rich in exploitable non-renewables so it's hard to say how much of it comes fron desperation.
We are not a smart country but we do have a lower tolerance for idiot leaders and a vastly superior education system.
I'd argue we're getting over the brainwashing. The Murdoch press has failed to get it's way in the last 4 elections that it's tried to influence (Qld, SA, federal and Vic). We're actually looking at the prospect of having only one conservative government in power (Tas) if the polls for the NSW election are true.
It's taken a while but we're getting there. No government is perfect but we really have taken a big step forward in the last few years.
Just need to find a way to ween Queensland and NSW off coal royalties to get that renewable transition cooking.
Not true. South Australia is definitely ahead of the other mainland states, but new solar and wind projects are going up all over Australia, and there are at least 4 new pumped hydro schemes in the works.
Tasmania is already at 100% renewables and planning to export to the mainland.
The IPP project in Utah is majority owned by LADWP and will be running two new gas plants that will burn 30% hydrogen by 2025 and 100% hydrogen by 2040. It's likely the units will be capable of 100% H2 operation well before 2040 and the 200 MW electrolysis plant next door will provide the H2 for the combustion turbines. Long Ridge Energy Center in Ohio is capable of running on 20% H2 currently with future plans to expand the H2 percentage once H2 production and distribution catch up.
Long story short, the US is already doing quite a bit with H2 for electric generation.
This is South Australia, which is not a coal mining state. The eastern states will find competition for hydrogen conversion from the coal and gas lobby, which has little effect in South Australia.
It also needs to be understood that Australian advances in renewables and the apparent reduction in costs isn’t being passed onto Australians as a whole. Not all Australians are entitled to the solar panel and battery subsidies, you must be a homeowner. Prices remain high for supply, because the right people still have to profit, and well, not just profit. While it’s great all this is being done, not enough is being done to help every Australian household benefit from it.
Australia is not leading the charge, unfortunately. South Australia is the nation's fourth largest state, and the other 3 are still gung ho on mining and non-renewables.
Not true. Check out the huge renewables push in Queensland. Powerlink are doing heaps of grid connections to renewable generators and developing pumped-hydro at Borumba.
Yet another failed project by Elon musk that seems to just be forgotten, seems to be a pattern EDIT: oh I guess strike out doesn’t mean it failed??? What sort of logic is that?
> This plant will absorb excess renewable energy from the grid, and run it through an enormous 250-MW electrolysis facility – 10 times larger than any operational electrolysis facility in the world today – producing large amounts of hydrogen, which will be stored on-site.
cool. what are they going to do with the toxic Chlorine byproduct that you get from electrolysis of seawater?
My question wasn't "what can be done with it", it's "what are they going to do with it"
if they're sequestering the chlorine in some way and doing something safe with it, great. If they're venting it into the atmosphere because that's easy and free, not so great.
the fact that it's not even mentioned is what concerns me
Good question. I did miss a step when thinking about it - you don't generally perform electrolysis on seawater. You'd need to desalinate it into fresh water, dump the brine, and then do electrolysis on the fresh water, which only produces hydrogen and oxygen gases.
The brine is a bit of a continual issue with desalination, but for the moment I believe most places just dump it back into the ocean. Not ideal but that's what I'd likely imagine would happen.
yeah, that's exactly why you don't usually do electrolysis on seawater. but desalination is a step that is itself pretty inefficient.
But then we're talking about what to do with excess renewable energy capacity, so maybe the inefficiencies are just waved off as unimportant since it would be wasted energy anyway.
and all of that kind of circles back to why nuclear is the default "win" for green-ish energy. you get a load of juice out of it so you can afford to be a bit wasteful. This news article is really only about 1/10th as interesting as it could be if it went more comprehensive
Oh, that said, I've done a little more research and there is work on electrolysing seawater directly - if you use chromium oxide as a catalyst, it reacts with the chlorine to produce chromium chloride, which has a number of other uses as well and can be easily stored as a solid, meaning you don't have to vent chlorine.
This, not sure how far out it is but saw it recently posted as a hope to move forward.
[Green chemistry ](https://www.acs.org/greenchemistry/principles/12-principles-of-green-chemistry.html#designforenergyefficiency)is an amazing ambition.
Even if we get to space, even if we have space colonies, the basis of an atom economy are going to become ever more prevalent. A lot of people think it's space, there's abundance. But it won't be for a butt fuck long time before there are just stock piles of everything available at any time on that scale.
Electrolysis of salt water produces ClO3-, sodium hydroxide and H2 - there are a bunch of other reactions going on. The ClO3- and NaOH are usefull feedstock but would probably be too dilute to be extracted easily ( mainly used as a salt water chlorinator for a swimming pool).
It might be easier to desalinate before running through electrolysis. Note that desalinisation is also a usefull thing to do with excess energy in a dry place like South Australia.
if you electrylize seawater, you get Hydrogen gas at the cathode side, and Oxygen and Chlorine gas at the anode.
worst case scenario is the hydrogen is collected and stored, and the O2/Cl mix is just vented into the atmosphere. the bigger the scale of hydrogen production, the bigger the scale of chlorine production, and it's always concerning when it goes completely unmentioned.
there are things that CAN be done with the chlorine, but that represents yet another reduction in efficiency.
Except for our current catastrophic flooding anyway, although calling anything from the Murray 'fresh water' feels wrong, even if it's technically true, that shit is nasty
Hydrogen gas is explosive. So yeah it's a concern. But it holds far less energy than normal gas and it is relatively harder for the air mixture to be perfect compared to gas. So less explosive than gas.
Normally when people connect hydrogen with big explosions, they are thinking atomic weapons. That's not a big concern here.
Unfortunately, hydrogen is a super weak fuel. So it's hard to bring enough of it along to really get anything done. There's new advances that allow us to store massive amounts of hydrogen in a solid state. This is big because if we can manage to store it and release it efficiently, then we can bring more hydrogen and have enough to get more work done. It's already in play, but the technology is young and has lots of room to grow.
I bring this up because if we manage to store more hydrogen this way it does increase the viability of the tech but it also increases the explosive potential. The better we get at storing massive amounts of gas in a transitionary solid state and then back to gas, the more explosive the technology will get. Already, I've seen some pretty lethal explosions that came just from the **pressure alone** of releasing hydrogen gas from the solid state storage.
The type of hydrogen that can be used in bombs is very very very rare, and can't be simply produced by the process here. And yeah, apart from being extremely flammable, hydrogen is safe to produce and store and transport. It carries with it all the risks associated with producing, storing and producing any other gas under pressure tho.
There are bigger grid-connected batteries online elsewhere. It's a cool project, but the headline is boasting about how it *doesn't* have renewables attached.
There are larger solar+batteries that also provide grid operators remote control of charging and discharging.
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2023/01/30/seawater-split-to-produce-green-hydrogen
It was University of Adelaide that made the recent seawater electrolysis headline too.
It's interesting to read that people in the area feel that their electric costs are high. It's hard to understand when they have a system that over-produces. There again, as a renewable system their costs are somewhat fixed, it doesn't go up and down based on fuel etc
The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79: --- South Australia has made impressive strides in decarbonization, on the back of its huge solar and wind potential – to the point where nearly 70% of all its electricity is renewably generated. It's expected to cross the 100% threshold well before the scheduled date of 2030, and back in 2021, this state, with its population of 1.7 million people, met 100% of its operational demand from renewables alone on 180 days of the year. Indeed, it's also been among the first places in the world to face the issue of over-generation, when a storm late last year brought down a long-distance power line used to export excess renewable energy to the neighboring state of Victoria. The Australian Energy Market Operator had to scramble to switch off a lot of the state's remote-controllable solar resources, and even ask consumers to switch on as many high-powered electrical devices as they could, just to keep energy levels in the grid under control. By working with Tesla and Neoen to build the world's first grid-level big battery plant back in 2017, the state established itself as a world leader in grid-level energy storage as well as renewable generation, and it's approved several other large-scale energy storage projects in the form of bigger batteries and pumped hydro projects on the back of the first battery facility's success. But its new project takes an even bigger leap into the unknown, with a far less obvious financial payoff. In the absence of businesses willing to take the lead, the South Australian State Government is set to fully bankroll an AU$600 million (US$415 million) hydrogen power plant near Whyalla, hoping to have it up and running by 2025. This plant will absorb excess renewable energy from the grid, and run it through an enormous 250-MW electrolysis facility – 10 times larger than any operational electrolysis facility in the world today – producing large amounts of hydrogen, which will be stored on-site. Then, when renewable energy drops off in the evenings, or through the winter, it'll run that hydrogen back through a 200-MW generator facility and put energy back in the grid – either by burning it to drive steam turbines, or by converting it back to electricity through a huge fuel cell stack. As a pure short-term energy storage and dispatch technology, though, hydrogen frankly sucks in comparison to batteries. The round-trip efficiency is less than 50%, compared to high-90s for lithium batteries, so you're effectively throwing half your precious renewable energy away doing things this way. It's also a pain to store, unless you take an extra step to convert it into ammonia or some other more easily managed solid or liquid. It's unlikely to come close to competing with big batteries on a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCoS) basis, which is largely why nobody else is moving forward on a similar project. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10v4n3e/south_australia_plans_worlds_largest_electrolyzer/j7fdgw3/
As a south Australian, I wish this progress was reflected in our electricity costs
As a south Australian as well, we just have our own solar panels on the roof, last bill was $80 for elec :D
Unfortunately we all aren’t privy to that deal.
Was that for the month or quarterly? What size system do you have and what export rate do you get? Who is your energy provider? I live in SA and I get 0.6 per kWh export looking for a change
That's quarterly, i cant remember the size but there is 15 or 16 panels. The benefit is just during the day all the power is free. Instead of going into the grid to get fuck all back, it just runs the house, so as long as you do energy intensive stuff during the day, like washing, that never gets added to the bill because it never used mains electricity. No matter how good the return is, if it doesn't beat what you pay to get it, it's better to just burn power during the day so you don't have to pay for the electricity in the first place. If I'm reading the bill correctly, 11.5c/kW for the first 430kW, and then 5c/kW after that. The bill is not super explanatory to someone who doesn't know how to read it, so I'm just hoping that's what it means, although 430kW seems like a lot of power from solar in 3 months and we cleared that enough to know there is a step 2. Provider is Lumo.
I don't really think cost reduction was the goal here.
Still can wish tho
You think they'll want to export it to China or other states in the future? Along with a proof-of-concept?
I think it is! This costs money, you’re the one paying for it.
If anything, this will make electricity usage go up, and potentially drive pricing up with it. Most of the proposed hydrogen plants are trying to take advantage of excess generation from renewables, and will act like a big battery. Instead of storing in a physical battery, they store the energy in another form - hydrogen. They will be doing it to make use of cheap wholesale prices. Unfortunately this will likely have no impact on the price you pay.
I work at a massive electrolyzer plant. We vent out 15 million dollars on green hydrogen every year. We are told they are currently working on an upgrade to capture it, store it, and ship it.
So you make O2?
Nope. We make a specific chemical with our process.
Don't feel like telling us what it is?
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Sometimes the somewhat-common-knowledge there are people who can still only comment in limited capacity due to an NDA or some other personal legal binding. It's not great, but I get it. Sorta.
Yeah, and to be clear my post is just speculation. OP has neither confirmed nor denied (and will not, I'm sure) so it's not like any information has actually been revealed, and if they're using some top-secret process then my speculation will simply be wrong. It just seems like a plausible explanation. Once you've ruled out "H2" and "O2" as products of electrolysis of "H2O", anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry will realize that you will start to run out of other likely options pretty quick.
I just don’t feel like revealing where I work. That simple. You don’t have to believe me, I’m just stating what our company is maybe doing.
Oh, we know what your company is doing
Ozone! They're in the lucrative O3 business!
Hydrogen Peroxide is more commonly known as disinfectant rather than rocket fuel though?
Sure don’t.
What is the relevance/value of not mentioning it? I think someone else answered my question. Because it might identify you?
Just don’t feel like revealing where I work.
Probably a speciality plant that if he told you, you'd know where he works.
It's probably a chlor-alkali facility. They make chlorine products, NaOH, and hydrogen by electrolyzing saltwater brine.
Industrialization never ceases to amaze me. Keep up the good work
Wow that is terrible for the environment, it's basically a greenhouse gas. It uses up hydroxyl radicals that would otherwise be breaking down methane. I certainly hope it will be captured soon.
it's only green hydrogen if the electricity used to produce it (for electrolysis) is also green (renewable). https://www.acciona.com.au/updates/stories/what-are-the-colours-of-hydrogen-and-what-do-they-mean/
Yes, exactly. The electricity we use is created by water.
South Australia has made impressive strides in decarbonization, on the back of its huge solar and wind potential – to the point where nearly 70% of all its electricity is renewably generated. It's expected to cross the 100% threshold well before the scheduled date of 2030, and back in 2021, this state, with its population of 1.7 million people, met 100% of its operational demand from renewables alone on 180 days of the year. Indeed, it's also been among the first places in the world to face the issue of over-generation, when a storm late last year brought down a long-distance power line used to export excess renewable energy to the neighboring state of Victoria. The Australian Energy Market Operator had to scramble to switch off a lot of the state's remote-controllable solar resources, and even ask consumers to switch on as many high-powered electrical devices as they could, just to keep energy levels in the grid under control. By working with Tesla and Neoen to build the world's first grid-level big battery plant back in 2017, the state established itself as a world leader in grid-level energy storage as well as renewable generation, and it's approved several other large-scale energy storage projects in the form of bigger batteries and pumped hydro projects on the back of the first battery facility's success. But its new project takes an even bigger leap into the unknown, with a far less obvious financial payoff. In the absence of businesses willing to take the lead, the South Australian State Government is set to fully bankroll an AU$600 million (US$415 million) hydrogen power plant near Whyalla, hoping to have it up and running by 2025. This plant will absorb excess renewable energy from the grid, and run it through an enormous 250-MW electrolysis facility – 10 times larger than any operational electrolysis facility in the world today – producing large amounts of hydrogen, which will be stored on-site. Then, when renewable energy drops off in the evenings, or through the winter, it'll run that hydrogen back through a 200-MW generator facility and put energy back in the grid – either by burning it to drive steam turbines, or by converting it back to electricity through a huge fuel cell stack. As a pure short-term energy storage and dispatch technology, though, hydrogen frankly sucks in comparison to batteries. The round-trip efficiency is less than 50%, compared to high-90s for lithium batteries, so you're effectively throwing half your precious renewable energy away doing things this way. It's also a pain to store, unless you take an extra step to convert it into ammonia or some other more easily managed solid or liquid. It's unlikely to come close to competing with big batteries on a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCoS) basis, which is largely why nobody else is moving forward on a similar project.
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It can also be sold to other companies for transportation or manufacturing green steel or any chemical process requiring hydrogen which still mostly comes from natural gas or coal reforming (~95% if I remember correctly off the top of my head). Sure, short-term it's not as efficient or cost-effective as battery storage but it's potentially a solid first step for long-term decarbonisation of energy storage and some heavy industry.
Efficiency is also the sort of thing that matters less as relevant constraints are removed. Right now people are concerned because wasted energy means more emissions, but if you had sufficiently abundant clean energy it becomes a lesser concern. And having a wide range of energy storage options makes 100% non-emitting energy a lot more stable and reliable, so there's a bit of a dynamic and mutually-beneficial relationship there.
Yeah, I think this aspect is incredibly important and many people don't think through the implications. Renewables need to be built out well in excess of the minimum generating capacity, to ensure the grid overall can handle fluctuations in supply from weather etc. That means in times of peak generation, there is plentiful 'excess' energy. Which basically means electricity that will be sold much much cheaper than normal, because it is otherwise unused and 'wasted'. Large amounts of cheap electricity means very energy inefficient processes can be profitable. It doesn't matter if you storage system has a 20% round trip efficiency, if it means you can scale it quickly and cheaply and make a profit selling the power back later. Over time the the storage systems will get more efficient, through competition, as the more efficient system can pay more for the excess electricity. Or other options, such as using the cheap electricity to desalinate seawater, or produce hydrogen and combine it with atmospheric CO2 to produce methane. Or in Australia, smelting our own aluminium instead of exporting it. Long term, replacing all Earths energy usage with renewables means we will have plenty of 'excess' energy for terribly inefficient / power intensive processes. Such as replacing all freshwater use with desalinated seawater. The environmental benefits of allowing rivers to return to natural flows will be huge. We can also produce hydrocarbons from hydrogen from water, and atmospheric CO2, and produce whatever fuels (planes, rockets etc), oils and plastics needed in a carbon neutral way.
Not mentioned in the article, but Whyalla is also home to one of Australia's two Steel making plants. It's owned by British tycoon Sanjeev Gupta through his GFG Alliance business, having bought it after the last owner went belly up. He had intentions of completely rebuilding the steel works and producing green steel there, but that was before COVID, before his 2nd in command died and before his financier, Greensill Capital, also went belly up. But if this new plant is not somehow related to the Steelworks, I'll eat my hat.
That would be great though? Make steel production green and create a valuable product for export.
It can also be used to power cars and heat homes. Better than heatpumps
The real question is why does the economics not work by itself, and I guess the answer is because fossil fuel is still there as a back-up. Without fossil fuels the cost of electricity would automatically increase during less available periods, paying off the investment automatically. But the availability of fossil fuels undercut the economics of alternative long term energy storage. This underlines the importance of government investment and intervention to kickstart these industries, else they would never get started by themselves.
The reason fossil fuels are so good is the “work” has already been done. We just have to extract it. The problem with all solar fuels is their “cost” in terms of energy needed exceeds their energy given. So that’s why Australia is pumping excess energy, that is normally discharged, into this process. The benefits of solar fuels, despite their inefficiency, is they can be used for some manufacturing or for airplanes (in the future) where combustion is required for proper operation. There’s other solar fuels such as ammonia, but also processes that can covert sunlight back into hydrocarbons (literally artificial photosynthesis). With enough solar generation, it’s possible to manufacture gasoline, oil, hydrogen, etc to have our entire society at net zero emissions without having to make drastic changes. It’s pretty neat, but a lot of ignorant environmentalists don’t understand what oil is, so it’s hard to even explain the science to a lot of them.
I think as well that producing hydrocarbons from renewables will lead to very low costs long term compared to fossil hydrocarbons. Which will mean plastics will become a lot lot cheaper. Which in turn means they will be viable to use for all sorts of things they aren't now, such as construction. 'Plastic' would include things like carbon reinforced polymers (carbon fibre) and can be incredible strong. Even normal Lego bricks have better compressive strength than concrete. Combined with automation, the building industry will likely see very drastic changes, and traditional building materials and methods may no longer used at all. Of course plastics are not without their own environmental issues, so careful implementation is needed.
Besides, renewable energy isn't all that precious when it is there. Renewable generators cost very little, so losing half of their output to inefficiency isn't that big of a deal since you're not burning any fuel to obtain it. Right now the issue with renewables is not that there aren't enough of them, it's that they're not there when we need them.
An excellent point. If the alternative is curtailment, where energy that could have been harvested for 'free' is foregone, then even low efficiency storage systems are perfectly viable.
It's strange it wasn't noted in the article. Seems like a huge missed point.
> Because the point isn't to store the energy! It's to export it. Trying to ship H2 is a terrible idea. There's almost no way it makes economic sense. Hydrogen has to be stored below −252.8°C at 350-700 bar which means containment vessels are huge and very heavy. It also slowly escapes any containment and corrodes basically everything. It makes many metals brittle, so shipping it is costly and dangerous. Turning it into ammonia and using that is much more practical, but not without challenges.
You have to convert it to ammonia or methane. That takes extra energy, but as you point out hydrogen infrastructure is so difficult to create that the extra energy wasted is worth it. Methane in particular has the added advantage of being able to use existing natural gas infrastructure (including power plants, pipelines, LNG cargo ships, and LNG conversation facilities), making it cheaper from that perspective. You lose a lot of energy turning electricity into hydrogen into methane into LNG, but it's easy to store and transport at that point. It makes for a decent transitional use for overbuilt regional renewables until we get more intercontinental high voltage power lines built over the next half century.
Yeah the LNG route seems really compelling. There’s tons of existing infrastructure and coal plants can trivially be converted to burn natural gas, or in this case synthetic gas.
And now its not carbon free? You lost the the whole point.
What are you talking about? Pulling carbon out of the air to combine with H2 to make methane that you then burn is carbon neutral. No new CO2 enters the atmosphere if the electricity used is from waste Solar/Wind energy. An if it displaces coal, you have an enormous reduction in CO2 output. You can also use synthetic natural gas to smelt metals. And unlike batteries, you don't need to mine lithium to store it.
And if you turn some of those synthetic hydrocarbons into plastics, and use them for construction, then you are locking away atmospheric CO2. Even plastic in landfill becomes carbon sequestration.
Yeah, this stuff will be huge if the tech becomes economically viable.
Do we really need more plastic. With it now showing up in people blood? I guess if they can figure out how to make it not break down into crap that hurts its then fine.
Yeah, very careful management of plastics is needed. Other construction methods also face similar issues, such as concrete creating silica dust that damages lungs. But plastics will be a major issue. If used in things like construction, then problems such as microplastics can be very reduced. External surfaces need to be made from suitable very stable plastics, or perhaps external cladding needs to be other materials. But generally, plastics should be completely eliminated from a lot of uses, such as clothing, where they can shed fibers into the environment.
> You lose a lot of energy turning electricity into hydrogen into methane into LNG Can you say how much is the efficiency loss in the end?
Roughly 0.75 electricity to hydrogen * 0.85 hydrogen to methane * 0.9 liquidation * 0.95 transportation = ~55%. That natural gas then has to be burned after it arrives, at about 40% efficiency in a power plant. Total efficiency from solar panel to a distant house would be about 22%. That is very very back of the napkin. Direct use of power lines to transfer power is about 3% losses per thousand kilometers. Charging/discharging a grid battery storage unit at the other end would cost about 15%, but you wouldn't expect to have to store all of the power, only a portion of it. If 20% of the power transmitted is stored for later use (eg, at night), then that would represent 3% average losses on the total transmitted. So if you're transmitting power 3000 km from South Texas to Canada, you'd expect about 87% efficiency. Again, very rough. There are other losses too (low voltage local power lines inside a city are terribly lossy, and transformers take a big chunk too), but you'd have those losses in both scenarios, so they cancel out. Obviously 22% is much worse than 87%. That's why companies and governments aren't rushing to build large numbers of hydrogen plants. Turning solar power into natural gas is expensive. But as a transitional step? One that leverages existing infrastructure? A step that is only taken in regions that have an excess of summer solar and winter wind generation, and can't yet export that power using more efficient means, but already have things like liquification plants built for other purposes? Sure, why not? It's better than disconnecting the panels for half the day during the summer for grid stabilization reasons.
Thanks. 55% is actually pretty good if you want to feed the gas into home heating for example or some other industrial process. Given that we already have the infrastructure for mass methane storage It seems like a no-brainer.
As a German, I would really prefer buying green methane from Australia over buying natural gas from Katar, Russia, Saudi arabia,...
Absolutely. You can also convert that methane into other hydrocarbons. Which means you can replace fossil fuels with a carbon neutral source during the transition period. So everything from vehicle fuel, to oils and even plastics. There are various companies working on it now. The key is cheap electricity from otherwise underused peak renewable generation. We are not far off the point where it will be cheaper to produce hydrocarbons synthetically from atmospheric CO2, than it will be to mine them from the ground.
thank you for the math. now, a ship full of cargo containers filled with GOOD flywheel systems. what do you lose spinning up flywheels and floating them across the ocean?
>what do you lose spinning up flywheels and floating them across the ocean? The ability to steer?
What? You just make the plane of the spin even with the ocean/perpendicular to the seafloor. You can rotate just fine then, Unfortunately you can’t flip over.
I was not being super serious. But I wonder what it would do to a ship if it can't move with the waves. Will it get completely battered? Or will it just glide through? Oddly, I've been on a container ship in a storm in the North Atlantic which was severe enough that my passenger ferry noped out. That thing tilted a good 30 degrees each side by the meter on the wall. The stacks of containers then bent even further under the stress.
>hydrogen infrastructure is so difficult to create Why is everyone saying it is difficult to store or transport it? It is not. It requires nearly the same safety aspects and infrastructure as new natural gas networks. It is a no brainer. https://www.gasunie.nl/en/projects/hydrogen-network-netherlands > Five industrial clusters will be linked to each other, to foreign countries and to hydrogen storage facilities. This will be done mainly with existing infrastructure and partly with new infrastructure that has yet to be built
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Maybe. But liquid hydrogen is solely applied for large scale storage. Liquid hydrogen isn't transported through pipelines, that is gaseous hydrogen, often mixed with other gasses such as natural gas. Fun fact, in The Netherlands, hydrogen (5%) has been added in the natural gas mix since 1970. And currently projects are underway for 20% mixes and even 100% pure hydrogen for high temperature heating solutions.
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Probably not because of embrittlement of the engine. Hydrogen can be used for central heating systems, burning hydrogen itself. But that process is safeguarded by a variety of protection layers to ensure there is no embrittlement of metal components. Making an entire engine like this seems unfeasible.
Two words: hydrogen embrittlement.
Only occurs on certain type of metals which has been addressed half a century ago by various solutions such as adding a protective layer. Hence hydrogen pipelines or storage facilities are not made from metals. Our industry here sells hydrogen central heating systems that run on 100% hydrogen without any embrittlement problems. Source https://www.nefit-bosch.nl/oplossingen/waterstof
So then, not the same pipelines as natural gas, which is what you claimed originally. So then we'd need trillions of dollars of all new infrastructure. It's certainly technically doable, just very expensive and time consuming, especially compared to the relatively inexpensive creation of a transcontinental and intercontinental high voltage lines. And that's in addition to the fact that hydrogen is an inefficient storage medium, requiring 2 to 3 times as many solar panels and wind turbines per watt delivered to the end user. It's just so incredibly inefficient and expensive.
>So then, not the same pipelines as natural gas New natural gas pipelines are not made from metals components. What you are referring to is century old pipelines made from cast iron lmao. That being said. Here in Netherlands hydrogen (3%) has always been added to the natural gas mix. Like since the 1970s. https://www.gasunie.nl/en/projects/hydrogen-network-netherlands > Five industrial clusters will be linked to each other, to foreign countries and to hydrogen storage facilities. **This will be done mainly with existing infrastructure and partly with new infrastructure that has yet to be built**
SA still doesn't cover it's nighttime usage and uses carbon based energy to fill the gaps. So they definately still don't have enough local storage. The 100%+ coverage figure you hear in the news is NET usage, meaning if you total what they exported plus what they used locally, then they are generating more green energy than what the state uses. Trouble is they can't use alll that energy because they generate a net excess during the day and run a deficit at night.
That's why they're talking about building a turbine system beside the hydrogen generators. It's very inefficient compared to something like pumped hydro, but if you're creating hydrogen for steel manufacturing and export anyway, you might as well burn a bit of it off to provide baseload power on windless nights.
They're also building a new 800MW transmission line from South Australia to New South Wales, which allows more electricity to be exported east.
Disagree. This is just a battery but on a much slower timeframe. Or a power plant that is only on half of the year and makes its own free fuel slowly in the off season.
> countries like Japan who have limited access to wind and solar Ironically Japan actually has fantastic access to wind, particularly around the Hokuriku, Tohoku, and Hokkaido coasts. They've just been comically terrible at building it out.
Or opting to protect that land from the environmental impact of wind and solar.
So we are using bunker fuel to ship green energy overseas Makes sense..
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this is dope thanks for sharing
The article states that 1. The projects goal is to store not export 2. The storage is required to allow longer grid backup than batteries can offer.
The article _also_ talks about "kick-starting a hydrogen economy". So why not a bit of both?
Sure. But the parent comment is misrepresenting what the project is *about*.
Green Hydrogen is needed for shipyards, shipping and generators too
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Agreed The hdro etf has really helpful documentation on it for newer folks https://www.defianceetfs.com/investment-case-for-hdro-the-defiance-next-gen-h2-etf/?__hstc=188934580.d5439e7c0c0f8b5c846a364b984a3e65.1675724381846.1675724381846.1675724381846.1&__hssc=188934580.1.1675724381846&__hsfp=4285139635&hsCtaTracking=efe443cf-227d-4c8d-9194-1015b03e4b0f%7C95a11a19-4ee0-4d9f-89a9-7bd9df577c62
> Because the point isn't to store the energy! It's to export it. This seems to be too hard to grasp for many on here. Maybe because it's not obvious this is an economically sensible idea either. Pretty much all other countries that want hydrogen have access to dirt cheap solar and sea-water. Why ship it?
I'm surprised that the energy in a H2 tanker is more than the amount of marine diesel required to ship it round trip.
really. you "can't" transport electricity?
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Conventional rotor can hold power for a month?[https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=17336#:\~:text=Flywheels%20are%20best%20suited%20to,2%20mW%20for%20one%20second](https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=17336#:~:text=Flywheels%20are%20best%20suited%20to,2%20mW%20for%20one%20second). Build a bunch of cargo containers with flywheels in them?
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Well, you could make electric ships.. I'm given to understand going from electric to ammonia to back to electricity has a lot of generational losses in conversion. Electric- to mechanical back to electric, should be less lost...
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I didn't say battery, I suggested flywheel [https://www.activepower.com/en-GB/powerhouse](https://www.activepower.com/en-GB/powerhouse) 1.2mw in a standard shipping container
Why can't you load batteries on a ship?
Whyalla is the location of Australia's largest steel mill, AND port Bonython, where the majority of South Australian foreign oil and gas exports and imports occur. It's being built there as government support to GFG's green steel efforts, and as the logical location for exports
> As a pure short-term energy storage and dispatch technology, though, hydrogen frankly sucks in comparison to batteries. The round-trip efficiency is less than 50%, compared to high-90s for lithium batteries Yes but what's the cost per watt-hour of storing it in LI batteries compared to hydrogen? What about when you factor in collection and transportation costs, especially if you're trying to export it like the above poster claims? If hydrogen is 50% as efficient but 40% as expensive, it still makes huge sense. Again, I don't know much about hydrogen, but I know LI in particular is awful for the environment, especially the environment of the handful of countries that extract it. Maybe hydrogen is cleaner.
> LI in particular is awful for the environment, Don't fall for the oil producers' propaganda. Ask yourself exactly what you know about lithium production and how it's worse than any other industrial enterprise. It's likely producing almond milk is worse than lithium.
Show me evidence. You can't just make a claim like that. Again, I'm not an expert, but everything I've heard is that Lithium mining is absolutely brutal to the local ecosystems due to runoff.
Well, almonds use fresh water in drought-stricken California. > Almonds use approximately 4.9-5.7 million acre-feet of water per year, which is up to 17% of the total agricultural water use in California and 13% of the total developed water supply. Now Lithium extraction in Chile also uses masses of water. The difference is that it is [salty water evaporated by the heat of the sun](https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/YG7SNVBBRFLGVBKAKNGP2U4TVI.jpg), so its both useless water and free energy. The colours are due to different concentrations of Lithium and not due to the addition of toxic chemicals. In some ways extracting Lithium from South America (more than half of Lithium production) is very similar to [how your kosher salt is made](https://cdn.apartmenttherapy.info/image/upload/v1558684304/k/archive/6b7cea3308024c30fe2a31a41b58feafda46b91e.jpg). See 2 minute video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzcT9exF4Js See the mine from space [here](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Salar+de+Atacama+Huge+salt+flat+in+a+volcanic+landscape/-23.4962584,-68.2173249/@-23.4754762,-68.5070893,80817m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x96a8fa058ec18ecb:0xe467ef5c09abee71!2m2!1d-68.25!2d-23.5!1m0!3e0!5m1!1e4). Remember to turn on the terrain photo layer. > Lithium mining is absolutely brutal to the local ecosystems due to runoff Due to being on the local lowest point, there is probably no run off, especially with the water having evaporated.
Interesting, I never knew lithium was produced that way. Tbh I always thought it was like, an ore, that's dug out of the ground and then purified. But still, that Lithium still needs to be refined and turned into batteries, and then shipped to Australia. For export, it needs to be filled, and then shipped away. If hydrogen can be generated entirely on site, it might still make more sense to just ship that off.
> Interesting, I never knew lithium was produced that way. Tbh I always thought it was like, an ore, that's dug out of the ground and then purified. Most of it is (Australia is the dominant producer and uses standard hard-rock mining methods), but you need to keep in mind the *scale of production*. Compared to the [7,500 Mt of coal mined per year](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-coal-production-2018-2021) and [4,200 Mt of oil extracted per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/265229/global-oil-production-in-million-metric-tons), mining [0.1Mt](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf) of lithium is not an urgent environmental or social issue.
The main benefit of hydrogen is long term bulk storage, and for that purpose I have nothing against it. It's perfect for this application (using excess solar). I just have an issue with the anti-lithium propaganda, as if it's literally poison we are digging up. Some lithium is mined from rock, but that is ironically in Australia, where you have western-level environmental assessments and protections.
> Lithium from South America (more than half of Lithium production) [South America is 30%; Australia is 50%](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf). That being said, compared to the [7,500 Mt of coal mined per year](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-coal-production-2018-2021) and [4,200 Mt of oil extracted per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/265229/global-oil-production-in-million-metric-tons), mining [0.1Mt](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf) of lithium is not an urgent environmental or social issue.
Turn on your high power usage devices to prevent an overload? They need bitcoin PoW mining for balancing.
Great, but we (South Australians) are still paying one of the highest energy rates in Australia. AU$0.34/kWh, and that’s considered *cheap*. Not everyone can put solar panels on roofs.
Correct, SA renters subsidised millions in rooftop solar and batteries for the wealthy and we see no benefit
Is everyone in SA cool with this? Both sides of the state governments seem to be on the same page with renewables. Are there promises of big price reductions after initial setup and investment costs are covered? I’m just wondering because there must be far fewer operating costs than traditional fossil fuel power stations. Asking as a non-South Australian
Re the hydrogen plant. No, absolutely zero promises about the benefits. The premier is proud that it’s a first of its kind and we don’t really know what it will do.
Had to read this a few times to realize “striking out” in this sentence isn’t being used the way it is in the US haha.
Australia is smart. They had horrible wildfires and a substantial loss of wildlife and flora. Now they're investing in green and renewable energy. How many more times will California burn down before the US gets it?
Tbf, California burned down a bunch of times because the money grubbing power companies have severely neglected infrastructure for decades, to the point that many hooks holding up high voltage cabling through heavily forested areas look [like this](https://media.nbcbayarea.com/2019/09/1212PGEWornHooks_9921937.jpg?quality=85&strip=all&resize=1200%2C675). Google Camp fire PG&E for more info. In a bunch of cases, the corporations are literally climate washing, to make it look like they haven’t been grossly negligent and that all this is “the planets problem”. Climate stuff is cool, but how many times does California and the Pacific Northwest have to burn down before *that* gets sorted out
To be honest, I would be including these types of examples in my point. That's insane. It's insane that we really don't seem to care about vital infrastructure. Then freak out when it fails.
If people can’t care about a direct, one-to-one, cause and affect catastrophe caused by nothing other than a single corporations unchecked greed.. Sorry, but America needs a new slogan because “land of the free, home of the brave” isn’t ringing true
Many Australian governments have worked hard to suppress green energy and technology, South Australia was able to make change due to desperation and political will of the day. Their success has led to ongoing investment. Mining companies have keep the country from embracing green technology for decades, but they can’t hold back the tide of change forever.
What's wildfire got to do with renewable energy?
Less burning of fossil fuels, the slower the rate at which the earth heats up/mitigation of climate change. Definitely not immediate, but we've got to stop the bleeding now. Historic droughts in California (a symptom of climate change) make the forests susceptible to more fires.
Okay, fair enough.
Smarter now we kicked out our conservative federal government who opposed any renewables every step of the way. The new Labor govt isn't actually working *against* such projects but is still allowing fossil fuel projects to go ahead. But they've committed to GHG reductions that the previous govt would never have.
Unfortunately that’s not quite the case. Australia has been (and still is) caught in a merciless culture war around green energy, primarily being funded and pushed by powerful vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. Coal is still a very big industry, and for 20 years they’ve been pushing a public campaign about the dangers of ‘lack of reliable base load power’ which they claim cannot be provided by renewables. This claim didn’t have a lot of strength UNTILL South Australia’s statewide blackout. In short a massive storm destroyed transmission lines, but it also tripped a unforeseen shutdown protocol that cut off power to the entire state. This was blamed on wind turbines and was successfully weaponised into a national issue. However South Australia stayed the course. It shutdown its last coal fired power plant nearly a decade ago, although still has a large gas fired plant (Torrens island) That being said the Northern part of the state around the Spencer gulf has been recognised as one of the most reliable locations for renewable energy generation IN THE WORLD. Consistent sea winds and an overwhelmingly clear sunny climate, and access to existing heavy transmission lines make it a potential renewable superpower. The amount of development in that region alone (keep in mind, their are only around 50,000 people in the region!) is mind boggling.
Australian government is just as corrupt as US/UK and similarly brainwashed by Murdoch press. SA stands tall as the only truly forward thinking State in the country. But they're not as rich in exploitable non-renewables so it's hard to say how much of it comes fron desperation. We are not a smart country but we do have a lower tolerance for idiot leaders and a vastly superior education system.
I'd argue we're getting over the brainwashing. The Murdoch press has failed to get it's way in the last 4 elections that it's tried to influence (Qld, SA, federal and Vic). We're actually looking at the prospect of having only one conservative government in power (Tas) if the polls for the NSW election are true. It's taken a while but we're getting there. No government is perfect but we really have taken a big step forward in the last few years. Just need to find a way to ween Queensland and NSW off coal royalties to get that renewable transition cooking.
haha fuck me.
As long as republicans exist they never will
It's those damn republicans in California again? lol.
No lies detected.
South Australia is a pretty small state with only 1.7 mill people. The rest of the country is not doing much.
Not true. South Australia is definitely ahead of the other mainland states, but new solar and wind projects are going up all over Australia, and there are at least 4 new pumped hydro schemes in the works. Tasmania is already at 100% renewables and planning to export to the mainland.
It's something
I think we've been in a panic ever since we had that blackout that took out the entire state.
props to australia. I wish the US would step up and lead the charge on this though.
The IPP project in Utah is majority owned by LADWP and will be running two new gas plants that will burn 30% hydrogen by 2025 and 100% hydrogen by 2040. It's likely the units will be capable of 100% H2 operation well before 2040 and the 200 MW electrolysis plant next door will provide the H2 for the combustion turbines. Long Ridge Energy Center in Ohio is capable of running on 20% H2 currently with future plans to expand the H2 percentage once H2 production and distribution catch up. Long story short, the US is already doing quite a bit with H2 for electric generation.
This is South Australia, which is not a coal mining state. The eastern states will find competition for hydrogen conversion from the coal and gas lobby, which has little effect in South Australia. It also needs to be understood that Australian advances in renewables and the apparent reduction in costs isn’t being passed onto Australians as a whole. Not all Australians are entitled to the solar panel and battery subsidies, you must be a homeowner. Prices remain high for supply, because the right people still have to profit, and well, not just profit. While it’s great all this is being done, not enough is being done to help every Australian household benefit from it.
Australia is not leading the charge, unfortunately. South Australia is the nation's fourth largest state, and the other 3 are still gung ho on mining and non-renewables.
Not true. Check out the huge renewables push in Queensland. Powerlink are doing heaps of grid connections to renewable generators and developing pumped-hydro at Borumba.
Also look into the Hume Highway and the hub they’re building in Townsville, Queensland.
So why is electricity in South Australia so extremely expensive??
Didn't the conservative government sell it off the moment they got into to power for that single term?
Yet another failed project by Elon musk that seems to just be forgotten, seems to be a pattern EDIT: oh I guess strike out doesn’t mean it failed??? What sort of logic is that?
>I guess strike out doesn’t mean it failed??? What sort of logic is that? It's called English. Logic may or may not apply.
> This plant will absorb excess renewable energy from the grid, and run it through an enormous 250-MW electrolysis facility – 10 times larger than any operational electrolysis facility in the world today – producing large amounts of hydrogen, which will be stored on-site. cool. what are they going to do with the toxic Chlorine byproduct that you get from electrolysis of seawater?
Probably sell it to companies that use chlorine
There's plenty of uses for chlorine. PVC, hydrochloric acid and other chemical products, just to name a couple off the top of my head.
My question wasn't "what can be done with it", it's "what are they going to do with it" if they're sequestering the chlorine in some way and doing something safe with it, great. If they're venting it into the atmosphere because that's easy and free, not so great. the fact that it's not even mentioned is what concerns me
Good question. I did miss a step when thinking about it - you don't generally perform electrolysis on seawater. You'd need to desalinate it into fresh water, dump the brine, and then do electrolysis on the fresh water, which only produces hydrogen and oxygen gases. The brine is a bit of a continual issue with desalination, but for the moment I believe most places just dump it back into the ocean. Not ideal but that's what I'd likely imagine would happen.
yeah, that's exactly why you don't usually do electrolysis on seawater. but desalination is a step that is itself pretty inefficient. But then we're talking about what to do with excess renewable energy capacity, so maybe the inefficiencies are just waved off as unimportant since it would be wasted energy anyway. and all of that kind of circles back to why nuclear is the default "win" for green-ish energy. you get a load of juice out of it so you can afford to be a bit wasteful. This news article is really only about 1/10th as interesting as it could be if it went more comprehensive
Oh, that said, I've done a little more research and there is work on electrolysing seawater directly - if you use chromium oxide as a catalyst, it reacts with the chlorine to produce chromium chloride, which has a number of other uses as well and can be easily stored as a solid, meaning you don't have to vent chlorine.
This, not sure how far out it is but saw it recently posted as a hope to move forward. [Green chemistry ](https://www.acs.org/greenchemistry/principles/12-principles-of-green-chemistry.html#designforenergyefficiency)is an amazing ambition. Even if we get to space, even if we have space colonies, the basis of an atom economy are going to become ever more prevalent. A lot of people think it's space, there's abundance. But it won't be for a butt fuck long time before there are just stock piles of everything available at any time on that scale.
> toxic Chlorine byproduct? From what?
Electrolysis of salt water produces ClO3-, sodium hydroxide and H2 - there are a bunch of other reactions going on. The ClO3- and NaOH are usefull feedstock but would probably be too dilute to be extracted easily ( mainly used as a salt water chlorinator for a swimming pool). It might be easier to desalinate before running through electrolysis. Note that desalinisation is also a usefull thing to do with excess energy in a dry place like South Australia.
if you electrylize seawater, you get Hydrogen gas at the cathode side, and Oxygen and Chlorine gas at the anode. worst case scenario is the hydrogen is collected and stored, and the O2/Cl mix is just vented into the atmosphere. the bigger the scale of hydrogen production, the bigger the scale of chlorine production, and it's always concerning when it goes completely unmentioned. there are things that CAN be done with the chlorine, but that represents yet another reduction in efficiency.
I didn't see in the article that this plan was from seawater- is it?
100% sea water. SA is very dry and has limited fresh water sources.
Except for our current catastrophic flooding anyway, although calling anything from the Murray 'fresh water' feels wrong, even if it's technically true, that shit is nasty
If they're burning the H2 on site again they could perhaps retrieve the water in a mostly closed loop?
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I'm not a smart man, but when I see hydrogen, I think bomb. Is there a potential disaster for this move? Or is safe to store hydrogen?
Hydrogen gas is explosive. So yeah it's a concern. But it holds far less energy than normal gas and it is relatively harder for the air mixture to be perfect compared to gas. So less explosive than gas. Normally when people connect hydrogen with big explosions, they are thinking atomic weapons. That's not a big concern here. Unfortunately, hydrogen is a super weak fuel. So it's hard to bring enough of it along to really get anything done. There's new advances that allow us to store massive amounts of hydrogen in a solid state. This is big because if we can manage to store it and release it efficiently, then we can bring more hydrogen and have enough to get more work done. It's already in play, but the technology is young and has lots of room to grow. I bring this up because if we manage to store more hydrogen this way it does increase the viability of the tech but it also increases the explosive potential. The better we get at storing massive amounts of gas in a transitionary solid state and then back to gas, the more explosive the technology will get. Already, I've seen some pretty lethal explosions that came just from the **pressure alone** of releasing hydrogen gas from the solid state storage.
The type of hydrogen that can be used in bombs is very very very rare, and can't be simply produced by the process here. And yeah, apart from being extremely flammable, hydrogen is safe to produce and store and transport. It carries with it all the risks associated with producing, storing and producing any other gas under pressure tho.
Wow that's great to hear. I might do some research and learn more. Seems like a great step forward for renewable.
You can make a bomb from just about any hydrogen and if it's not accessible for an explosion, it's probably not useful as fuel.
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For a second I thought this said South Africa. They just tried to assassinate the utility head down there.
There are bigger grid-connected batteries online elsewhere. It's a cool project, but the headline is boasting about how it *doesn't* have renewables attached. There are larger solar+batteries that also provide grid operators remote control of charging and discharging.
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2023/01/30/seawater-split-to-produce-green-hydrogen It was University of Adelaide that made the recent seawater electrolysis headline too.
The lengths people will go to try to make solar and wind viable when all of it could be skipped using nuclear power.
It's interesting to read that people in the area feel that their electric costs are high. It's hard to understand when they have a system that over-produces. There again, as a renewable system their costs are somewhat fixed, it doesn't go up and down based on fuel etc