Had you the wit to research the topic, and you most certainly don't, then you would have asked yourself if this so called "mathematical proof" had been peer reviewed. If you are unsure of what that expression means then I refer you to Google. Hope that helps.
@@PerdixDesignLtd You appear not to understand how these things work. Allow me. You do your own research across several sources to obtain a concensus as it were. I wouldn't wish to be accused of pointing people to a "fake" site for confirmation bias support.
@@t1n4444 Ah, pointless trolling then. You appear to have no data to back up your opinion. Have you perhaps worked with hydrogen? I have, . Do you understand the materials science challenges to overcome in any form of grid supply? I suspect not. What I believe the OP was referring to was the logistics difficulty in delivering sufficient fuel, were H2 to replace petrol/diesel as a fuel at filling stations. But you can stick with opinion, and I'll stick with experience, data and science. Enjoy your day.
First of all, I love your show. That's why I've been following the show since its early years. I will definitely use today's broadcast about the madness and double-tongued nature of hydrogen. About 45 years ago, sometime around 1968 or 69, as a child I read the science books that my father brought with him. I was about 7 or 8 at the time. Anyway. My mother didn't like it, she wanted me to read children's books. So it happened that she brought along the adventures of Pietje Bell. In between I also just read my father's books. I can still remember 1 well, although I can't remember the title, but it was about hydrogen techniques and how politicians used this. At that time we lived in Rozenburg in the middle of all the oil storage and refineries between Rotterdam and De Punt. A long line of 50 km of poison. Easy to see on google earth. At the same time, a refinery exploded right behind the apartment where we lived at the time. It was the largest explosion since the Second World War, flames hundreds of meters high. Another interest of mine were the butterflies and caterpillars from all over that came off the cargo ships and could be found everywhere in Rozenburg. After the explosion they all disappeared. The water in the harbors and in the Rhine was already poisonous green before the explosion, you saw fish fighting for their lives with growths sometimes larger than the fish itself. I myself got massive nosebleeds that lasted for hours and terrible headaches. After a few weeks, one of my legs stopped working. After a few weeks in the hospital, the feeling slowly returned. I still have the headaches, nowadays I sleep a maximum of 3 hours before the pain wakes me up. Okay enough about me. The way you approach hydrogen is exactly how I see it, to make it you need twice as much energy as it produces when you convert it back to electricity. And most is made from gas or oil as you also confirm, it is still the same oil industry tactics as 50 :) years ago. Now my question: fully charged, what I miss is that the energy question receives all the attention, but this is only half of the problem. For the climate, biodiversity and our survival. It is necessary that we also look at our food. To give an example, the Amazon is on fire for the production of animal feed for the European cattle herd. The Netherlands, which you often think highly of, is the architect and largest importer and consumer of all soy from South America. 92% of this soy is intended as animal feed. The remaining 8 percent are what they call technical oils. In reality biofuel for mandatory blending in Europe. So yes, the EV is extremely important, but stopping animal products is just as important. If we do not do this, all the energy we have put into making our lives more sustainable will ultimately not achieve the goal we have been fighting for all these years. So my question is please study our food, how what you eat is made and what the food imprint is. If we all choose vegan, we can feed the world with 70 percent less agricultural land. I hope you read this, after all, you asked for a response and I have wanted to write this for a long time and have already done so briefly, but I do not see it in the program. We certainly want to be on the same side as the history books are written. Vegans also grow older and in better health. Going vegan is easy, it's just a mind-set. Your food will taste so much better. Okay that's all. I'm looking forward to the next episode.
@@ahaveland I stopped counting a long time ago and don't celebrate my birthday either. Many people often think that my youngest brother who is 14 years younger is years older than me. Another nice side effect of veganism. :) youtube: dockters urge american to go vegan. These 800 doctors have studied it. You can find their publications in the link under the RUclips if you have any questions about whether it is healthy.
Love the numbers game, I see what you did there.😂 You are absolutely right of course but unfortunately there seem to be few if any governments who can see the global picture. Today our Prime Minister has let slip that he wants to reel back on his deadlines for ceasing the selling of new ice cars and changing out gas boilers among many other retractions. If only they could see that investment in sustainable technology which does exist now.... apparently he's still waiting for it to mature(!)....will mean massive savings for all of us in the not too distant future. Of course unless investment means instant profits no matter the future cost he's not interested. So how we expect people like that to see the global picture I don't know. I've been permanently disabled by pollution so my only recourse has been to vote Green in every election no matter that I'm told it's a wasted vote. We now have Greens in more and more local and county council's so the tide is turning, change will come but not before many communities and people across the world suffer catastrophic destruction of themselves and their environment. I'm sorry you suffered too but I like your subtle humour.😅
A big big problem with any future hydrogen economy is it's contribution to the greenhouse gas warming cycle. You say WHAT? That's right hydrogen makes climate warming worse. It's all about the leaking. Hydrogen is a tiny, tiny molecule and is very hard to move around without leaks. Leaks are going to happen at every stage of it's use and production. And if it is in widespread, ubiquitous use as it's proponents predict, the leakage will be a VERY large amount of gas. Okay so what, right? It's just hydrogen. Hold up. Hydrogen reacts with hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere, tying them up. Again you say so what? Hydroxyl radicals (OH) currently react with a slew of greenhouse gases like methane and ozone. OH radicals are sometimes called “the detergent of the troposphere”. So hydrogen ties up these OH molecules preventing them from reacting with the greenhouse gasses. Thus those gasses keep the warming cycle going. Leaking hydrogen interferes with this natural process and makes greenhouse warming worse. So just say no to the very light, explosive gas.
Ah, thank you. Someone else who's noticed that we're proposing just swapping filling the atmosphere with CO2, for filling the atmosphere with H20. But atmospheric water vapour is WORSE than carbon dioxide. WORSE than methane, even. Because it's water - and everyone knows water as "mostly harmless" and pure and life-giving - then folks are not looking closely enough at the fact that it's the worst greenhouse gas of them all. Where fossil fuels are "locked up CO2" under the ground that we're digging up and burning, to release all that CO2 into the atmosphere, then sea water and ice sheets are "locked up H20" - thanks to gravity, water in its liquid and solid states falls and, thus, stays on the ground - that a hydrogen economy would be releasing (at massive scale, if you're intending to power all transport off of it, for example) into the air. Indeed, powering planes with hydrogen might seem the solution but that's releasing H20 into the higher atmosphere. Like, you're directly putting it in the worst place. (For planes, what DARPA's working on might be the actual solution - wireless power transmission. So the electric planes would actually just be drawing power being beamed up at them from the ground. In fact, this is an even cleverer solution to the problem, as you can imagine that a plane could actually stay in the air FOREVER and there'd be no additional weight for fuel or batteries - well, you might actually include a small battery back-up for safety reasons. If the plane does not need to carry its own fuel, that's an even smarter (and safer) solution than hydrogen.)
That really depends where you get the hydrogen from surely. If you get it by splitting water electrolytically then you'll remove as much water as you add in theory. Of course that's not where most of it will come from, as we all know which is where the problem is (and also the only reason anyone is pushing hydrogen in the first place).
Burning jet fuel at altitude already releases a lot of H2O into the atmosphere. That is what the contrails are made of. I don't think beaming energy up to aircraft is going to work. A large aircraft needs something like 30MW. That power has to be concentrated into a pretty small area. It would be a severe hazard. furthermore, the operating range will be small, certainly not over the horizon so you immediately have a problem with oceanic routes.@@klaxoncow
@@rogerphelps9939Up until 1966, most international passenger travel was by sea. It was a great way to travel then, even more so today. Sure it takes a few days, but a bit of downtime does no one any harm and if you must work most modern ships have shared office facilities and very good Internet access. Ships have few weight and volume constraints so can be powered by a range of non polluting fuels including nuclear. Modern ships can easily travel at 25 knots and potentially could do 40kts. This would allow a trans Pacific sailing time of 7 days.
Ha ha ha - oh no, we will run out of atmospheric -OH: - yep that sort of reactionary response - gets the crazies crawling out of the woodwork - like the dipstick moaning about water vapour in the atmosphere - yep the water cycle exists - it has been in rough equilibrium since the daw of time (sort of)... (At least there is a process for capturing the H2 and preventing collapse of the life systems on earth due to industrialised hydrolysis and the eventual loss of earth's water.... (jk) It has been claimed that Off-gassing Coalmines - in my economy, produce more GWP from methane than the entire national production of direct GHG from Transport, Agriculture and non mining industry... A question is; do we "rely" on one technology, or continue exploring all avenues. NB capitalism requires producers and consumers - -when everyone becomes a producer the model collapses.
So do I, and it is really great. I am fully aware, however, that a lot of my electricity comes from burning gas. In the depths of winter my heat pump can use up to 50kwh per day. That's a lot. At the moment, if the wind isn't blowing, that electricity has to come from gas and nuclear. We need urgent research into technology that can store tens of thousands of GWh because batteries will be far too expensive and totally inadequate especially as we should all be using heat pumps in the not too distant future.
@@JohnSmith-sz4gvWe have battery, solar, a Model 3 Tesla, and we export far more power than we use. HOWEVER we don’t live in a very cold climate. That makes a huge difference of course.
OK. Here is the breakdown. This is a 4 bedroom detached house. The heat pump is on for about 17 hours per day and consumes up to 3kw. It has a COP of 3 or better so it is producing 9 or 10 or more kw of heat. It replaced a 60,000 btu oil boiler (the gas grid does not exist out in the sticks). 60,000 btu is about 18kw. Oil and gas boilers tend to cycle on and off at full blast whereas heat pumps using inverter technology can run at a variable speed and match their output to demand. It is most efficient to run a heat pum for long periods and vary the output to match demand. Anyway such a gas or oil boiler will be on for around half of the time. I should add that my house, built in 1979, has foam filled cavity walls, double glazing and around 250mm of fibreglass loft insulation. Its EPC before the heat pump was installed was Band C which is, I believe, above average, from looking at EPC ratings for houses for sale in my local free magazine. There is very little more that could be done to improve insulation. I know that gas consumtion used to be specified in archaic therm units but nowadays it is kwh. If you have gas heating I suggest you look at what your consumption actually is; you might be shocked. Anyway, my point is that heat pumps use a lot of electricity and in the depths of winter they will require a lot more electricity than EV charging and it has to come from somewhere that does not produce CO2 emissions.@@JohnSmith-sz4gv
@@JohnSmith-sz4gv - a 7kW (consumption) central heat pump isn't all that unusual - that on half power will use more than 80kWh per day - - any household on Natural Gas heating - in a truly cold climate most likely uses vastly more energy - unless constructed to functional "passive haus" standards.
Hydrogen for refineries is increasingly provided by industrial suppliers. Refineries use hydrogen to lower the sulfur content of diesel fuel. Refinery demand for hydrogen has increased as demand for diesel fuel has risen both domestically and internationally, and as sulfur-content regulations have become more stringent ...Jan 20, 2016
The demand for hydrogen in these refineries is also directly related to the quality of the feedstock. So as the big wells dry up and we are forced to use petroleum with more impurities to satisfy demand, it requires more and more hydrogen to clean it up.
Hiya Rob, great show as always. I have to say that the subjects you cover and the people you interview are incredibly interesting. Perhaps just as importantly you put a positive perspective on things that really gives people hope in a world that's constantly focused on the negative.
We are a fully electric household with no gas, petrol or diesel being used. My view when needing to replace the boiler as we were on LPG, also meant getting rid of a huge storage tank from our back garden. It worked out that our home insulation was equivalent of none but the ASHP kept our home at 18c with a 2c drop overnight. Had insulation fixed and I am seeing usage down by at least a third comparing similar days to last year. The cost last year was less than cost of buying LPG. I looked at spending money would save us money every month. Solar panels do help and especially as winter is starting or ending the sun can be enough to run the ASHP for free. Emily was a lovely guest and very knowledgeable and seemed to have a great grasp of both sides of the arguments. Thank you for another enjoyable episode.
Hydrogen in refineries is needed to convert heavy petroleum fractions into lighter products and to remove sulfur, nitrogen and metals from many petroleum fractions.
When I was a teenager, I was like hydrogen is better but didn't really understand why Then I grew up, realised that hydrogen is mostly pointless. At least grey hydrogen isn't a scam because we know it's from fossil fuels Blue hydrogen is definitely a scam though especially as they're relying on a technology that doesn't even exist. Green hydrogen is also mostly pointless because what's the point of having renewable energy to then convert it to hydrogen first. Why not just use that "neat"? I say mostly pointless because I'll accept that hydrogen (even if grey hydrogen, assuming that grey isn't coal ) would be needed to replace coking coal in steel production Equally, for the "hard to decarbonise" industries like aviation and HGVs, hydrogen is at least a lot better than the alternative. It still used fossil fuels but gas is better for the environment than oil for instance. The ultimate aim would be zero hydrogen. Even people in terraced houses could be served by community heating via a heat pump under the ground. I do however accept that with people in terraced housing, they will most likely use hydrogen first. I'd hope however that we wouldn't "stick" with it though.
it never was a thing, it was a delaying tactic because tony abbott says its a cult. The libs lost government and its now exposed as crap. As if we didnt know anyway.
Oil refineries use hydrogen to "crack" heavy oil (long chain hydrocarbons like bitumen, C60 H122) down to valuable diesel (medium chain C16 H34) and gasoline (short chain C8 H18). Each diesel or gasoline molecule created from the long chains requires 2 new hydrogen atoms to close off the ends of the shorter molecules.
I think one element in the discussion that is difficult to evaluate is that the realities en each country are extremely different. In many parts of Europe people live in environments such as apartments where they park their car in the street so can't charge at home. They don't have a roof or garden to install solar panels so no FV installation. They don't have central A/C like the US where you have air conditioning and forced air heating using a reverse cycle A/C (heat pump). And the realities of their energy costs are substantially different: in Spain today unless you are building a new house and therefore installing a new heating system, or have a solar installation, you cannot recover the costs of installing a heat pump. Today gas is significantly less expensive than electricity and even though heat pumps are 3-4X more efficient you, at best, equal the cost of an efficient gas furnace. Therefore not recovering the costs tp install the heat pump and maybe even other required changes to make the change possible.
Forced-air heating is less energy efficient than convective heating (radiators), but its main advantage is being compatible with air conditioning. I think the main reason adoption of heat pumps is higher in the USA than the UK is due to the need for air conditioning. An air-to-air heat pump is only slightly more complicated than an air conditioner, so the installation price is very competitive vs air conditioner + gas furnace.
An air conditioner *is* an air-to-air heat pump, unless you have some expensive installation which dumps the heat somewhere else like a ground loop or body of water. An air-to-air heat pump *is* mechanically almost identical to a regular air conditioner. It merely has to support the "reverse cycle".
Yeah, one politician in my lifetime suggested that and they denied him a debate, blamed him for the Democratic loss, and people are still mad that he ran. 🤷
At least in the USA that's not going to happen - not in our lifetimes anyway. The Supreme Court already ruled that money is equivalent to freedom of speech ('Citizens United'). That shows you how our establishment (political entities and the elites that fund them) thinks - they are intent on moving things in the opposite direction. It will have to wait until at least a new generation of elites with an opposing attitude before the tide can turn.
i just switched my hotwater and heating to electric and switched to a renewable-only electricityprovider. boom, zero carbon home. really wasnt that hard. PS: Emily is absolutely charming! :)
Actually you aren't really zero carbon. Over a fixed time period your supplier will be selling surplus renewables to other utilities and receiving fossil fuel generated power when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. If your provider had to ensure minute by minute that it was receiving and providing only renewable power, it would have implement lots of power cuts when there just isn't sufficient renewable electricity available. I am sure you wouldn't like that.
@@rogerphelps9939oh, im under no illusion that i only get green electrons, but my money only goes to green power sources. providers have to specify where they buy their power, mine only funds renewables.
@@rogerphelps9939If we all buy only carbon free electricity, the suppliers and producers are forced to supply us with carbon free electricty. Of course that may take some time.
@@rogerphelps9939But it IS the closest someone can get without building their own generation system and going completely off-grid. But sure, argue just to argue.
Dear Robbert and the FullyCharged team. Can you please, please, please do a podcast about energy storage for homes, neighberhood's, city's and even countries. and how it can help the energy grid. And you can expand this topic as well to water storage and weat and cold.
Random point, but I used to live in Milton Keynes around 1975-1980, and the house there, built in about 1970) had a "furnace" which blew hot air around the house. The main advantage was speed. I never needed a timer as I would just turn a switch, and 5 minutes later the house was warm. Every house I've lived in since had, at some point, water leaking from a radiator.
Please let the guest/expert talk more without fill in, voiced acknowledgement, drifting questions etc. There were several points where Emily was going to say something and stopped because you said something or were about to.
On heat pumps: just read about "novel" heat pumps that use CO2 as the working fluid rather than chloroflourocarbons, which kill ozone. Advantages, somewhat better COP and can provide useful heat down to lower outdoor temperatures, and always provide hot water when heat available. Disadvantage, higher compression pressures required, so higher precision compressors, costs slightly more.
I saw advertisements for a heat pump water heating system, that used a 24,000 BTU compressor for a large water heater, such as used in a commercial building. It used CO2 as a refrigerant, and worked pretty good. Yet the company went out of business after about 2 years. Don't know why. They are actually very energy efficient. And work well - even with 20F outside air temperature. Yes CO2 does require a very high compression to make it work, something like 850 PSI or 950 PSI. In 2023, there are several companies looking at using CO2 as a refrigerant. However they also need to restrict the refrigerant amount to only about 5 or 10 pounds per system, so they do not cause a problem if they start to leak into a small building. Back in the 1910's they used CO2 and other gases for cooling the air, and a leak could cause a problem, even in a large room, such as a theater. That is why most commercial cooling systems, they cool water to about 45F or 50F, then use the chilled water to cool the air that is exposed to people.
Yes, we own a Sanden HWS which is 300lt. It works really well and we only need to run it 2 hours a day. We are totally off grid, so the efficiency of this system was a no brainer. Looking to by a medium sized heat pump air conditioning system for heating.
It is very common to find a furnace in a American home, and much more rare to find a gas or oil fired boiler in a home. I would say less than 10% of homes use a boiler in America. A furnace will use air ducts to blow warm air into each room of the home. A boiler will use hot water and a circulating pump to pump 120 to 180F water into a radiator in each room in a home. Some use steam, but that is very rare! Most are hot water in a home. To imagine how a furnace works, think of your oven burner. There is a steel box, so the gas fumes are kept separate from the fresh air in the home blown across the steel heat exchanger, so the bad air is exhausted outside, and the fresh air is on the other side of the steel heat exchanger, that air is heated to about 100F or 130F, and then that air is blown into the room. For those who have not seen a boiler heating system, they heat the water in the boiler, and that is pumped into radiators in each room of the home. So in a bathroom, there would be a radiator, about 12" tall and 12" wide. In a larger bedroom, the radiator would be larger to heat the larger space, and might be 24" tall and 12" wide. In a larger room, such as the living room or a library, it would be 24" tall and 24" wide or maybe 30" tall. Some very large rooms might use two radiators. Water is circulated at about 120F on a cool day, say 40F outside. On a very cold day, say 5F (-10C) then the water temperature is increased to provide more heat to the rooms. About 140F or 150F on a very cold day to provide more heat per square foot of radiator surface area.
Another Robert monologue! Why bother having guest speakers if you interrupt them with your own experiences very time they pause to draw breath? As much as we love your work Robert, you really need to learn how to conduct interviews :)
Min 19:00 (industrial usage of Hydrogrn): steel! H2 is needed n the reduction of iron! The steel undustry will be one of the major consumers, just like the chemical industry.
Much is said about the poblems of adding new loads to the grid but little is said about the obsolete fossil fuel related loads which would be removed from the grid. It would be good to have more information on this.
There is still this obsession with "national grids" and "the market". Many of us, involved with community based generation projects, realised years ago, that we need to do things differently, to meet our needs in the future.
i never understood the hype about hydrogen, it's not like we have vast reserves of hydrogen in the ground, we have make the stuff, and there is no way to do that that makes green sense
The economics of electrolysis-derived hydrogen is precisely what's deterring it from using electricity from fossil fuels. To get electrolysis hydrogen affordably, you need cheap electricity. No way around that. As things stand, the LCOE of wind and solar electricity is less than electricity from fossil fuels. Even if an electrolyser installation has to run continuously at 100% output, it will simply be more expensive per kWh to purchase electricity from the grid than it is to source it from utility-scale renewable generation behind-the-meter. Of course, a more ideal arrangement would be an electrolyser installation tied to the grid with utility-scale renewable generation behind-the-meter. The electrolysers, in MW, would be less than the behind-the-meter utility-scale renewable generation (to raise capacity factors for the electrolysers) and the electrolysers' power consumption curve can ebb and flow with renewable electricity output.
Has someone forgotten to upload this as a "podcast" not seen it show up on my podcast addict yet 🤷♀️ Look forward to listening to it later, hopefully 🤞👍
@@EverythingElectricShow Much appreciated guys, can't remember the last time that happened 😬 Just finished listening to it on t' poddy app 😁👍 Best way to start the week, that & a bobbylew ABN rant 😜😁
The only reason for using hydrogen is to do a job that can't be done in another way more cheaply or without producing as many harmful byproducts. Otherwise, there is nothing inherently wonderful about it as a power source or manufacturing aid - which goes for anything else, for that matter. It then becomes a question of whether the cost or harm caused is worth the outcome for this unique use. There is plenty in the comments below to give us cause to pause on this line of research.
Per heat pumps in the US: yes we have 60% market saturation, but the vast majority of those units are old, inefficient, etc. They are also commonly paired with a gas furnace that takes over when it gets really cold. So in the US they are not an alternative to gas, but used in conjunction with gas to reduce the gas bill. Historically in the US, wealthier people had coal furnaces and poor people had wood stoves. When we transitioned away from those technologies, coal furnaces were replaced at first with gas boilers, and later with gas furnaces and heat pumps. Those are expensive to install and cheap to operate. But poor people largely transitioned from wood stoves to electric baseboard heat which is very cheap to install, but incredibly inefficient and very expensive to operate. In the US we really dont have such a thing as cheap heating. Which is why in the winter months we very often have stories about poor people burning down their homes or accidentally poisoning themselves using portable kerosene heaters. Every winter. According to a pamphlet from Shell, they use Hydrogen in hydrotreating (removing sulfur and other impurities) and hydrocracking (breaking down long chain molecules into more valuable, smaller molecules). And according to that, demand is dependant on the quality of the feedstock... low sulfur petroleum requires less. Another report shows that 55% of hydrogen demand in the US is for the petroleum industry... which highlights a secondary problem with the whole "hydrogen economy" which is that demand will greatly reduce if we begin burning fewer petroleum-based fuels.
Poland could actually really do with a show like yours. All the electric car issues previously seen in the UK, the FUD etc, is there now, like UK had it 5-7 years ago...
MATHEMATICS CORRECTION: At timestamp 5:44 1963 is not 50 years ago, it's 60 years ago. Considering you were a robot covered in rubber traveling the universe, people wouldn't expect you make mistakes like this, unless they had actually seen that show, so it's understandable.
@@nc3826 WRONG: You use the word "old" the phrase being corrected was "50 years ago" DOUBLE WRONG: If something is 50 years ago it's not 60 years ago. ALSO: If someone is 50 years old they are not 60 years old. So you are WRONG WRONG WRONG, with big WRONG on top of that.
Something that happened in 1963 is not necessarily 60 years ago.... It could just be 59 years ago... Without a date It is unknown.... So being pedantic about it is completely pointless...... And guess who is still pedantically WRONG WRONG WRONG, with big WRONG on top of that ???
Robert, your opening comment about the UK's green electricity failed to mention the use of wood chips. "Drax power station near Selby, Yorkshire is the UK’s largest renewable power station and generates 11% of the UK’s renewable power by burning wood pellets." You also mentioned Drax at 25:40...still no mention of the greenwashed electricity that comes from clear cutting absolutely unimaginable enormous tracts of land in the US and Canada and then shipping these chipped trees across the ocean to the UK. You should be doing a show on this to encourage the UK governments to work on stopping it.
Ccs is just an extra cost. No one will do it until they get hit with a cost greater than the cost of not doing it. Even when they do there is every incentive to leak the maximum amount of carbon possible
- the economics and energy balance there does not work. The war in Russia will shortly make the world ask properly existential questions... The rest is largely "deckchairs on the Titanic" - hopes and dreams.. While ever there is no global reduction in sight, despite ridiculous international spending towards "decarbonisation" - COVID-19 did more, as did the GFC, but trajectories resume following these temporary upsets. lol..
Yup. This is perhaps why the greens in the UK would prefer a carbon tax instead That, or a carbon coin as discussed in the (fictional) book called "ministry of the future" That would incentive the US in particular given it's value currently is heavily linked to the flow of crude oil and they're the country that realistically should lead on this because they do emit the most per capita. That's not to suggest we shouldn't do anything here of course. I'm aware of the anti renewable people who say "But what about Murica. What about x" I'm not one of those types. I'm just getting at that the US probably should lead this especially as there's financial incentives to do so, especially when less and less crude oil is pumped.
All that matters is the cost of ‘renewable’ hydrogen at the pump. The issue of where electricity comes from is not the user’s problem. It is someone else’s problem. If I use a battery electric vehicle (BEV) I have done my part. If it is a hydrogen electric vehicle, I have done my part as well. Electricity producers have to do theirs. So as usual we come to the same conclusion: tax on carbon. That way, if the hydrogen is ‘dirty’, it will be too expensive.
The rate of biodiversity loss and deforestation is so much faster than the growth of "clean" energy means humanity is still in so much trouble. Is it solvable?
Lived in a house in Yorkshire with a gas furnace, pushing hot air round the house. But what you got was the smell of wet dog as they loved lying in front of the vents. Radiators are better.
Sorry Bobby; We attended the show and were absolutely underwhelmed. I'm still a fan but we won't be going out of our way or $50 poorer for a Fully Charged show. I'm so glad I didn't go down to San Diego last year as the 100 miles to Vancouver from Seattle was just plain frustrating, expensive and disappointing. I found the talks to be superficial. There were no agricultural or landscape presenters and the bicycle vendors were limited. Too bad I wasn't shopping for a Level 2 charger and we don't live in the BC Hydro service area. Very limited.
"In the UK a heat pump is definitely cheaper to run than a gas boiler" - Scottish Power didn't get that memo. My electricity price is 5x higher than the gas price, so my brand new Mitsubishi heat pump (CoP 4.2) will cost more to run than the gas boiler I just replaced. Planning to switch to a different supplier as soon as I'm allowed...
Robert is great but he's gotta stop jumping in on the guest every few seconds and allow them to finish or continue and he can dominate conversions quite often. He just gets a bit excited I guess. But I love his own opinion pieces and would listen to him often but when he has a guest on, we should hear the guest 80% of the conversion. No offence intended but I want to hear the expert fully please. But well done on giving the expert a platform. I love this channel.
I've been criticizing both hydrogen and carbon due to energy reasons. In the US, most H2 conversation is about making green H2 and using it in fuel cell vehicles (and heaven forbid some H2 ICE engines). As Emily points out, this takes a lot of wind turbines or solar panels to electrolyze the water, it would be much more efficient to put the solar power straight into people's EV batteries. Its the same for efuels. Then there would be no H2 leakage of another powerful greenhouse gas. Hydrogen hubs to make fertilizer and a few other things is fine, but this has no visibility in the US press and I can't even list another big industry that would productively use H2. H2 airliners aren't going to get past the Hindenburg. Carbon capture is also an energy problem. Moving and sequestering a useful amount of CO2 takes more energy than we ever got out of the fossil that produced the CO2 in the first place. Does Emily really think there is a useful amount of sequestration capacity without it just all leaking back out into the atmosphere?
Great show Robert Your guest is lovely and so intelligent and on the money with technology and what's going on in the world with power she is so switched on. As we all know carbon capture is a total joke The only place to lose carbon is to eject it into space which would be very expensive and Hydrogen is a joke for automobiles but not for heavy goods if you have the infrastructure which most countries don't have at the moment as most are hanging onto diesel and some are going electric with the tesla truck and others Busses should all be electric by now but my town has none all are still diesel and I remember when I worked for our bus company as an engineer 30 plus years ago we converted two busses into electric busses but they were run on lead acid battery although a knew acid combination we ran the two for twelve months then put the engines back in them when the trail was finished so they were looking even back then in the late eighties I now run an electric car and like most of the others I would never want to go back to ice cars ever again I just love driving past the petrol stations but I do see now BP is fitting chargers in the stations there are three in our Rugby station on Lawford road high amp ones as well so I hope they do this to all there stations it would make life so easy having to hunt one down you would know ahh BP station I can go and get a charge worry over so I hope all the others follow suit as it makes perfect business sense as every week more evs are pouring onto our roads and why are learner drivers teaching people to drive a manual gearbox most will never have to use it anymore as it will become obsolete very soon one thing i have noticed more and more automatic learner drivers on the road teaching students which is a good thing. as a mechanic i saw the death nail in Ice cars ten plus years ago the innovations all stopped there was just no more new inventions to be had with the fuel powered engines until they came out with the hybrid engine to cheat the emissions that's all they are making them for not for being green because they are not they are more complicated than an ev or a fuel powered car and more things to go wrong which they do there reliability is bad so i wouldn't touch one if you paid me same as a ice vehicle unless its a Ferrari 12 cylinder lol which would never be.
It's better to burn Gas rather than Hydrogen stripped from gas. The heat from solar thermal is required for industry. We then need to have wind, solar and nuclear power to make hydrogen for other industrial purposes. Ammonia is needed for industry. It is not well known how much salt is used in industry.
Today at 6:30pm uk power mix Gas 59.7% Coal 2.7%, (Biomass 4.5%), Wind 11%, Solar 2.8%, Hydro 1.9% Nuclear 16.6%. its around 65% still burning stuff ( Biomass is classed as zero carbon but shipping wood chip from Canada can't be)
Enormous amounts of H2 is used in refining to desulphourize oil. The company i work for makes API 618 compressors. For Kuwait we supplied 13x a 7MW compressor. Yes, 7 MegaWatt
I think the description of our gas heating systems, what in the UK they call boilers n Spain we call calderas, do not "boil" the water in the system. The water being heated to a maximum of 70ºC to circulate around the house heating rooms via radiators. To boil water you must heat first to a minimum of 100ºC and then circulate steam which is absolutely not done. In fact, our water pressure in the system should be at 1-1,2 bar.
27:25 carbon capture while production is not carbon capture, it is reduction of emission, this should be put in law, because this show how they distorting reality.
Yes, but piping the heat to different rooms is only one part of the equation, the other part is transferring the heat into the air in the room. That's why mini-splits have become popular... the benefits of moving heat in a liquid, combined with the benefits of a blown-air heating and cooling system in the room itself.
I understand it is possible to convert waste plastic into hydrogen via high temperature gasification? This would be a neat solution to the hydrogen production issue, as well as the environmental problems caused by waste plastic.
Plastic is made of hydrocarbons...but let's say. Now, how do you heat up the waste plastic to reach those high temperatures? Using electricity? why then not use that electricity to power stuff directly? Regardless how you look at it, hydrogen production is energy intensive and will only serve some niche applications for which we have no choice simply because H2 production and usage make very little sense in terms of energy efficiency.
Fertilizer production and other uses of ammonia take something like 3-5 % of the natural gas production in the world today, making that from hydrogen produced from renewable electricity instead would be a huge market for hydrogen.
Storage is the key to renewables and the transition to an all-electric economy. There are some really clever types of storage becoming available, some based on gravitational potential energy, like pumped hydro and others, using less intrusive technology, even integrated into building design, and chrmical potential energy, e.g. batteries of various types, including (obviously) Li-Ion and Sodium-Ion plus large scale types such as the Ambri Liquid Metal battery, and Vanadium and Zinc-based flow batteries, plus thermal storage-based systems such as 1440 Degrees based on the solid/liquid phase change of elemental Silicon. There is even a new thermal storage system based on graphite and using high temperature thermal photovoltaic cells with 40% efficiency. Hydrogen will be another future energy storage system which couId kick in when other short term storages approach their limits, and the marginal cost of generation goes to zero or below..
I'm disappointed that Your guest did not Say more about the other Negatives Of hydrogen and transportation uses. particularly storage and hydrogen leakage.
Regenerative agriculture, and grassland restoration, and reforestation - are all "carbon capture and sequestration". And these are *far* less expensive, and *far* larger scale, than any puny high tech thing we can come up with.
Actually they arnt at all. Grasslands are mostly carbon neutral. Most of the CO2 they absorb escapes back into the atmosphere in the fall and winter as they rot. Or they are injested by animals and the carbon is released as methane. The reason trees are carbon sinks is because of the wood, but the leaves release much of the carbon as they fall and rot. And when the tree itself falls and rots, or the wood is burned, then it is no longer a sink. Living trees and quality wood furniture (not the disposable chipboard stuff) and timber framed homes are carbon sinks. There are also some edge cases like peat bogs and permafrost were forest carbon is stored by geological processes.
@@patreekotime4578 Grasslands have more carbon per acre than forests - grass is 80% roots and when they are grazed and/or trampled, they abandon a *proportional amount of the roots. Since grass roots go down 30-50 feet, this is well below the oxygen line - and ALL that carbon is perfectly sequestered. It then regrows - grass is among the fastest growing plants - and they push a LOT of carbon into the ground. Rinse and repeat the grazing/trampling on restored grasslands - which cover much more of the earth than forests - and we could be back below 350ppm in less than a decade. This is *how* we got to having 40-50 feet of topsoil. Plants do the hardest part - they split the oxygen away from carbon dioxide, and turn the carbon into a solid form.
I think the best use case for hydrogen is to use it for storage make it from excess renewables that would otherwise go to "waste" as its otherwise not a viable thing in the cleaner future imo.
Hydrogen is used in refining industry to remove sulphur from fuels. And that usage is is 65-70% of the Hydrogen used today. Difficult to see a future market for the product, let alone build an industry around it.
yup, and that just shows you why governments world-wide seem to promote way too willingly hydrogen everywhere and every time they open their mouth on climate change solutions... because they are being told by the fossil fuel industry lobbyists that it's the best stuff while actually it's just a way for the fossil fuel industry to get hold of more hydrogen they need for their fossil fuel business...
There is an easy way to know that the electricity used to make hydrogen is renewable and that’s to build generation solely to power the plant that does the hydrogen production. Same as how in New Zealand we built a hydroelectric power station solely to power an aluminium smelter. All the electricity used for smelting is renewable and excess is fed into the grid. So build a solar or wind farm or whatever and use that solely to produce hydrogen and you then Know you have green hydrogen made with only renewable electricity. Feed excess into the grid but don’t allow a reverse feed in From the grid. Solved.
The impression that you have is the same as mine but I think there is a computer board problem with a supplier that is causing these issues. Hopefullly it will be corrected.
Open Democracy has just made a report on British Gas trying tie in customers by misinforming their customers about hydrogen ready boilers, and telling them they are wasting their time with heat pumps.
When people mention hydrogen they start debate about cars with EV's verses hydrogen cars, this car debate is crazy, electric car are far superior to hydrogen cars. When you think of hydrogen think of airplanes and other uses. Airbus have their hydrogen research progressing and just think in a couple of decades time Airbus will have to replace the A320 family and they won't be replaced with battery electric aircraft. I know that currently there are 2 seater electric aircraft that are being manufactured and are perfect for a 45 minute flying lesson. But you won't have a 300 seater aircraft with 3000 mile range running on batteries. Hydrogen is perfect for the aviation sector and not Smart car.
08:40 What a surprise! Electrolysis of water is energy intensive! Who knew?! Seriously, though, this is how engineers & business moguls think from the get-go, namely what does a process cost & will it make a profit? Today in 2023 electrolysis is far too expensive to be a commercial success unless, perhaps, one is living in Iceland or Norway with giant hydro-electric generation capacities. Even worse, the fuel cells themselves are expensive. Maybe some future breakthrough will solve these problems, but in the meantime BEVs are becoming the tech of choice.
How can you know that the electricity for your electrolyser is green because? (Emily @8:57) "it's just really complicated because can't, you know, trace the path of an electron from a solar farm to a hydrogen plant" A bit of layman's science: It's not just complicated, it's a bit mind bending, especially if physics isn't your strong subject. Even if you could trace the path of an electron it wouldn't help because, in most cases, the electrons at the solar farm will never actually reach the electrolyser. The only exception would be is if you had a direct DC powerlink from the solar farm to the electrolyser, and even then the electrons would only travel about 1Km every 4 months. The reason why most people think they would is due to some misconceptions, firstly that electricity is a flow of electrons, and secondly that the electrons flow almost instantaneously at close to the speed of light. If any part of the transmission is by AC, then the electrons will never arrive at the electrolyser. For AC, the electrons only travel about 4 microns (about 1 tenth of a thou) along the wire, (at a frequency of 50Hz) before the voltage reverses and they come back out again. Think of it a bit like your water supply, the the pipe is the wire, and the water is the electrons. When you fill your kettle in the kitchen the litre of water that you fill it with is not the same litre as the reservoir puts into the pipe at the other end, and because water doesn't squash very well that happens almost instantaneously. Eventually the litre of water that went into the pipe will arrive at your tap, or somebody else's. Because the water always flows from the reservoir to your house this is like DC current. The AC analogy would be a bit like the pump at the reservoir pushing a litre of water into the pipe and then sucking it back out again, this wouldn't give you a water supply but you could use the varying water pressure in your house to drive some sort of hydraulic motor to power something. For electricity in wires it's a bit like having absolutely huge diameter water pipes, so even in the DC situation it takes a very long time for the litre put in at the reservoir to eventually arrive at your kitchen tap.
It would be great if customers could choose to be more exposed to the wholesale price of electricity - it would really encourage installation of energy storage (whether that be charging your EV or house batteries) - something the grid desperately needs in renewable-dominated areas like California. This strategy would have no need for tax payers' money - you choose whether to be part of the future. Would probably have to cap the extremes though, to avoid random ludicrously high bills in extreme weather events, like what happened in Texas a few years ago.
first love your show BUT is one was very disappointing i do not believe hydrogen will not or cannot play any part in motor cars so was hoping for some inside but the show had very little content about hydrogen uk tesla owner
We need energy abundance. We need to build nuclear energy as quickly as possible. With steam-electrolysis you can produce at high and efficient volumes. We won't have enough clean energy if we don't push everything.
One of the reasons we had to switch away from freon is because refridgeration systems are notorious for developing leaks. There are probably also not enough refridgeration units on the planet to make up for very much of our global output. In 2022 we produced something like 100 million metric tons of CO2 a day. Refridgerants are usually measured in tens of ounces per unit.
In the Netherlands we are seeing more and more propane based air-to-water heatpumps. Mostly because they can generate higher water temperature, which older houses need. Like CO2 it needs very high pressure, so it can only be applied on monoblock heatpumps. For air-to-air heatpumps I don't know the higher cost of CO2 or propane based heatpumps are worth it.
@@patreekotime4578 High pressures are a problem with co2 and also water in the system is also not good. In the UK, co2 is our supermarkets preferred option.
Rather like saying the cars are breaking down and he wouldn't recommend them. Have you seen the number of car repair places? They are everywhere. Talk about unreliability!
The service guy next door is misinformed. Also suffering from confirmation bias if he works servicing them. I'm sure mechanics feel like cars constantly need servicing since they are often doing it. Heat pumps are not maintenance free, but the maintenance is like maintaining a dehumidifier. Take out the filters and clean them periodically. Spray and rinse the coils every year or two. Everyone I know with heat pumps has had no issues. Total FUD.
I still think the best one you did was with that professor in the UK who basically said the maths for hydrogen transportation don't work.
Had you the wit to research the topic, and you most certainly don't, then you would have asked yourself if this so called "mathematical proof" had been peer reviewed.
If you are unsure of what that expression means then I refer you to Google.
Hope that helps.
@@t1n4444 if you don't cite your sources, then your rebuttal can carry no more weight than the OP comment you are irked by.
@@PerdixDesignLtd
You appear not to understand how these things work.
Allow me. You do your own research across several sources to obtain a concensus as it were.
I wouldn't wish to be accused of pointing people to a "fake" site for confirmation bias support.
@@t1n4444 Ah, pointless trolling then. You appear to have no data to back up your opinion. Have you perhaps worked with hydrogen? I have, . Do you understand the materials science challenges to overcome in any form of grid supply? I suspect not. What I believe the OP was referring to was the logistics difficulty in delivering sufficient fuel, were H2 to replace petrol/diesel as a fuel at filling stations. But you can stick with opinion, and I'll stick with experience, data and science. Enjoy your day.
The fully charged podcast referred to was with Professor David Cebon. Published on 3 October 2022
First of all, I love your show. That's why I've been following the show since its early years. I will definitely use today's broadcast about the madness and double-tongued nature of hydrogen. About 45 years ago, sometime around 1968 or 69, as a child I read the science books that my father brought with him. I was about 7 or 8 at the time. Anyway. My mother didn't like it, she wanted me to read children's books. So it happened that she brought along the adventures of Pietje Bell. In between I also just read my father's books. I can still remember 1 well, although I can't remember the title, but it was about hydrogen techniques and how politicians used this. At that time we lived in Rozenburg in the middle of all the oil storage and refineries between Rotterdam and De Punt. A long line of 50 km of poison. Easy to see on google earth. At the same time, a refinery exploded right behind the apartment where we lived at the time. It was the largest explosion since the Second World War, flames hundreds of meters high. Another interest of mine were the butterflies and caterpillars from all over that came off the cargo ships and could be found everywhere in Rozenburg. After the explosion they all disappeared. The water in the harbors and in the Rhine was already poisonous green before the explosion, you saw fish fighting for their lives with growths sometimes larger than the fish itself. I myself got massive nosebleeds that lasted for hours and terrible headaches. After a few weeks, one of my legs stopped working. After a few weeks in the hospital, the feeling slowly returned. I still have the headaches, nowadays I sleep a maximum of 3 hours before the pain wakes me up. Okay enough about me. The way you approach hydrogen is exactly how I see it, to make it you need twice as much energy as it produces when you convert it back to electricity. And most is made from gas or oil as you also confirm, it is still the same oil industry tactics as 50 :) years ago. Now my question: fully charged, what I miss is that the energy question receives all the attention, but this is only half of the problem. For the climate, biodiversity and our survival. It is necessary that we also look at our food. To give an example, the Amazon is on fire for the production of animal feed for the European cattle herd. The Netherlands, which you often think highly of, is the architect and largest importer and consumer of all soy from South America. 92% of this soy is intended as animal feed. The remaining 8 percent are what they call technical oils. In reality biofuel for mandatory blending in Europe. So yes, the EV is extremely important, but stopping animal products is just as important. If we do not do this, all the energy we have put into making our lives more sustainable will ultimately not achieve the goal we have been fighting for all these years. So my question is please study our food, how what you eat is made and what the food imprint is. If we all choose vegan, we can feed the world with 70 percent less agricultural land. I hope you read this, after all, you asked for a response and I have wanted to write this for a long time and have already done so briefly, but I do not see it in the program. We certainly want to be on the same side as the history books are written. Vegans also grow older and in better health. Going vegan is easy, it's just a mind-set. Your food will taste so much better. Okay that's all. I'm looking forward to the next episode.
1968-69 closer to 60 years ago, not 45!
@@ahaveland The 45 was an answer to the 50 that Robert mentioned, but which should have been 60. Didn't you see the smiley where I mention the 50?🌍
@@ronaldblom686 yes, 1963 was 60 years ago, which is when I was born so it's a sensitive number!
Would be nice to be 50 again!
@@ahaveland I stopped counting a long time ago and don't celebrate my birthday either. Many people often think that my youngest brother who is 14 years younger is years older than me. Another nice side effect of veganism. :) youtube: dockters urge american to go vegan. These 800 doctors have studied it. You can find their publications in the link under the RUclips if you have any questions about whether it is healthy.
Love the numbers game, I see what you did there.😂
You are absolutely right of course but unfortunately there seem to be few if any governments who can see the global picture. Today our Prime Minister has let slip that he wants to reel back on his deadlines for ceasing the selling of new ice cars and changing out gas boilers among many other retractions. If only they could see that investment in sustainable technology which does exist now.... apparently he's still waiting for it to mature(!)....will mean massive savings for all of us in the not too distant future. Of course unless investment means instant profits no matter the future cost he's not interested. So how we expect people like that to see the global picture I don't know.
I've been permanently disabled by pollution so my only recourse has been to vote Green in every election no matter that I'm told it's a wasted vote. We now have Greens in more and more local and county council's so the tide is turning, change will come but not before many communities and people across the world suffer catastrophic destruction of themselves and their environment. I'm sorry you suffered too but I like your subtle humour.😅
A big big problem with any future hydrogen economy is it's contribution to the greenhouse gas warming cycle. You say WHAT? That's right hydrogen makes climate warming worse. It's all about the leaking. Hydrogen is a tiny, tiny molecule and is very hard to move around without leaks. Leaks are going to happen at every stage of it's use and production. And if it is in widespread, ubiquitous use as it's proponents predict, the leakage will be a VERY large amount of gas. Okay so what, right? It's just hydrogen. Hold up. Hydrogen reacts with hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere, tying them up. Again you say so what? Hydroxyl radicals (OH) currently react with a slew of greenhouse gases like methane and ozone. OH radicals are sometimes called “the detergent of the troposphere”. So hydrogen ties up these OH molecules preventing them from reacting with the greenhouse gasses. Thus those gasses keep the warming cycle going. Leaking hydrogen interferes with this natural process and makes greenhouse warming worse. So just say no to the very light, explosive gas.
Ah, thank you. Someone else who's noticed that we're proposing just swapping filling the atmosphere with CO2, for filling the atmosphere with H20.
But atmospheric water vapour is WORSE than carbon dioxide. WORSE than methane, even.
Because it's water - and everyone knows water as "mostly harmless" and pure and life-giving - then folks are not looking closely enough at the fact that it's the worst greenhouse gas of them all.
Where fossil fuels are "locked up CO2" under the ground that we're digging up and burning, to release all that CO2 into the atmosphere, then sea water and ice sheets are "locked up H20" - thanks to gravity, water in its liquid and solid states falls and, thus, stays on the ground - that a hydrogen economy would be releasing (at massive scale, if you're intending to power all transport off of it, for example) into the air.
Indeed, powering planes with hydrogen might seem the solution but that's releasing H20 into the higher atmosphere. Like, you're directly putting it in the worst place.
(For planes, what DARPA's working on might be the actual solution - wireless power transmission. So the electric planes would actually just be drawing power being beamed up at them from the ground. In fact, this is an even cleverer solution to the problem, as you can imagine that a plane could actually stay in the air FOREVER and there'd be no additional weight for fuel or batteries - well, you might actually include a small battery back-up for safety reasons. If the plane does not need to carry its own fuel, that's an even smarter (and safer) solution than hydrogen.)
That really depends where you get the hydrogen from surely. If you get it by splitting water electrolytically then you'll remove as much water as you add in theory. Of course that's not where most of it will come from, as we all know which is where the problem is (and also the only reason anyone is pushing hydrogen in the first place).
Burning jet fuel at altitude already releases a lot of H2O into the atmosphere. That is what the contrails are made of. I don't think beaming energy up to aircraft is going to work. A large aircraft needs something like 30MW. That power has to be concentrated into a pretty small area. It would be a severe hazard. furthermore, the operating range will be small, certainly not over the horizon so you immediately have a problem with oceanic routes.@@klaxoncow
@@rogerphelps9939Up until 1966, most international passenger travel was by sea. It was a great way to travel then, even more so today.
Sure it takes a few days, but a bit of downtime does no one any harm and if you must work most modern ships have shared office facilities and very good Internet access.
Ships have few weight and volume constraints so can be powered by a range of non polluting fuels including nuclear.
Modern ships can easily travel at 25 knots and potentially could do 40kts. This would allow a trans Pacific sailing time of 7 days.
Ha ha ha - oh no, we will run out of atmospheric -OH: - yep that sort of reactionary response - gets the crazies crawling out of the woodwork - like the dipstick moaning about water vapour in the atmosphere - yep the water cycle exists - it has been in rough equilibrium since the daw of time (sort of)...
(At least there is a process for capturing the H2 and preventing collapse of the life systems on earth due to industrialised hydrolysis and the eventual loss of earth's water.... (jk)
It has been claimed that Off-gassing Coalmines - in my economy, produce more GWP from methane than the entire national production of direct GHG from Transport, Agriculture and non mining industry...
A question is; do we "rely" on one technology, or continue exploring all avenues. NB capitalism requires producers and consumers - -when everyone becomes a producer the model collapses.
That Emily is such a gracious guest, I'm thinking 1963 is 60 years ago not 50... but she's kind to bobbyllew and lets it slide
Have a fossil free house, solar panels, heat pump hot water, home battery and EV vehicles. Our Electric future.
So do I, and it is really great. I am fully aware, however, that a lot of my electricity comes from burning gas. In the depths of winter my heat pump can use up to 50kwh per day. That's a lot. At the moment, if the wind isn't blowing, that electricity has to come from gas and nuclear. We need urgent research into technology that can store tens of thousands of GWh because batteries will be far too expensive and totally inadequate especially as we should all be using heat pumps in the not too distant future.
@@rogerphelps9939 50kwh per day !!! Maybe that mansion needs down sizing or more insulation .
@@JohnSmith-sz4gvWe have battery, solar, a Model 3 Tesla, and we export far more power than we use.
HOWEVER we don’t live in a very cold climate. That makes a huge difference of course.
OK. Here is the breakdown. This is a 4 bedroom detached house. The heat pump is on for about 17 hours per day and consumes up to 3kw. It has a COP of 3 or better so it is producing 9 or 10 or more kw of heat. It replaced a 60,000 btu oil boiler (the gas grid does not exist out in the sticks). 60,000 btu is about 18kw. Oil and gas boilers tend to cycle on and off at full blast whereas heat pumps using inverter technology can run at a variable speed and match their output to demand. It is most efficient to run a heat pum for long periods and vary the output to match demand. Anyway such a gas or oil boiler will be on for around half of the time. I should add that my house, built in 1979, has foam filled cavity walls, double glazing and around 250mm of fibreglass loft insulation. Its EPC before the heat pump was installed was Band C which is, I believe, above average, from looking at EPC ratings for houses for sale in my local free magazine. There is very little more that could be done to improve insulation. I know that gas consumtion used to be specified in archaic therm units but nowadays it is kwh. If you have gas heating I suggest you look at what your consumption actually is; you might be shocked. Anyway, my point is that heat pumps use a lot of electricity and in the depths of winter they will require a lot more electricity than EV charging and it has to come from somewhere that does not produce CO2 emissions.@@JohnSmith-sz4gv
@@JohnSmith-sz4gv - a 7kW (consumption) central heat pump isn't all that unusual - that on half power will use more than 80kWh per day - - any household on Natural Gas heating - in a truly cold climate most likely uses vastly more energy - unless constructed to functional "passive haus" standards.
Hydrogen for refineries is increasingly provided by industrial suppliers. Refineries use hydrogen to lower the sulfur content of diesel fuel. Refinery demand for hydrogen has increased as demand for diesel fuel has risen both domestically and internationally, and as sulfur-content regulations have become more stringent ...Jan 20, 2016
Yes, and all of this hydrogen comes from cracking natural gas and emitting multi megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Thanks
The demand for hydrogen in these refineries is also directly related to the quality of the feedstock. So as the big wells dry up and we are forced to use petroleum with more impurities to satisfy demand, it requires more and more hydrogen to clean it up.
I misread the title as "The Hydrogen Enema". Conjured up an interesting image.
😂
Who goes there, friend or enema?
Where do I sign up?
Some like a good blowout every once in a while .
😂
Hiya Rob, great show as always. I have to say that the subjects you cover and the people you interview are incredibly interesting. Perhaps just as importantly you put a positive perspective on things that really gives people hope in a world that's constantly focused on the negative.
We are a fully electric household with no gas, petrol or diesel being used. My view when needing to replace the boiler as we were on LPG, also meant getting rid of a huge storage tank from our back garden. It worked out that our home insulation was equivalent of none but the ASHP kept our home at 18c with a 2c drop overnight. Had insulation fixed and I am seeing usage down by at least a third comparing similar days to last year. The cost last year was less than cost of buying LPG. I looked at spending money would save us money every month.
Solar panels do help and especially as winter is starting or ending the sun can be enough to run the ASHP for free.
Emily was a lovely guest and very knowledgeable and seemed to have a great grasp of both sides of the arguments. Thank you for another enjoyable episode.
Hydrogen in refineries is needed to convert heavy petroleum fractions into lighter products and to remove sulfur, nitrogen and metals from many petroleum fractions.
Thanks for cracking that case
Cobalt is also used to remove sulphur from petroleum products. I didn't know hydrogen was also used to remove sulphur.
@@SlayerEddyTV Cobalt (and also Nickel) are used as a catalyst. The reaction happens between the Hydrogen and Sulfur.
It’s amazing how CCS stopped being a thing after Australia changed government almost like it was never about the technology
When I was a teenager, I was like hydrogen is better but didn't really understand why
Then I grew up, realised that hydrogen is mostly pointless. At least grey hydrogen isn't a scam because we know it's from fossil fuels
Blue hydrogen is definitely a scam though especially as they're relying on a technology that doesn't even exist.
Green hydrogen is also mostly pointless because what's the point of having renewable energy to then convert it to hydrogen first. Why not just use that "neat"?
I say mostly pointless because I'll accept that hydrogen (even if grey hydrogen, assuming that grey isn't coal ) would be needed to replace coking coal in steel production
Equally, for the "hard to decarbonise" industries like aviation and HGVs, hydrogen is at least a lot better than the alternative. It still used fossil fuels but gas is better for the environment than oil for instance.
The ultimate aim would be zero hydrogen. Even people in terraced houses could be served by community heating via a heat pump under the ground.
I do however accept that with people in terraced housing, they will most likely use hydrogen first. I'd hope however that we wouldn't "stick" with it though.
?
@@rivergladesgardenrailroad8834 it’s doesn’t work and is not really in any policy discussions now.
@@rickybryan1759 OK, climate Change and Storage.
it never was a thing, it was a delaying tactic because tony abbott says its a cult. The libs lost government and its now exposed as crap. As if we didnt know anyway.
Oil refineries use hydrogen to "crack" heavy oil (long chain hydrocarbons like bitumen, C60 H122) down to valuable diesel (medium chain C16 H34) and gasoline (short chain C8 H18). Each diesel or gasoline molecule created from the long chains requires 2 new hydrogen atoms to close off the ends of the shorter molecules.
I think one element in the discussion that is difficult to evaluate is that the realities en each country are extremely different. In many parts of Europe people live in environments such as apartments where they park their car in the street so can't charge at home. They don't have a roof or garden to install solar panels so no FV installation. They don't have central A/C like the US where you have air conditioning and forced air heating using a reverse cycle A/C (heat pump). And the realities of their energy costs are substantially different: in Spain today unless you are building a new house and therefore installing a new heating system, or have a solar installation, you cannot recover the costs of installing a heat pump. Today gas is significantly less expensive than electricity and even though heat pumps are 3-4X more efficient you, at best, equal the cost of an efficient gas furnace. Therefore not recovering the costs tp install the heat pump and maybe even other required changes to make the change possible.
Forced-air heating is less energy efficient than convective heating (radiators), but its main advantage is being compatible with air conditioning. I think the main reason adoption of heat pumps is higher in the USA than the UK is due to the need for air conditioning. An air-to-air heat pump is only slightly more complicated than an air conditioner, so the installation price is very competitive vs air conditioner + gas furnace.
An air conditioner *is* an air-to-air heat pump, unless you have some expensive installation which dumps the heat somewhere else like a ground loop or body of water.
An air-to-air heat pump *is* mechanically almost identical to a regular air conditioner. It merely has to support the "reverse cycle".
How about taking steps to outlaw spending money to influence political decisions?
Yeah but how will the super rich politicians be able to stay corrupt then? /s
Yeah, one politician in my lifetime suggested that and they denied him a debate, blamed him for the Democratic loss, and people are still mad that he ran. 🤷
At least in the USA that's not going to happen - not in our lifetimes anyway. The Supreme Court already ruled that money is equivalent to freedom of speech ('Citizens United'). That shows you how our establishment (political entities and the elites that fund them) thinks - they are intent on moving things in the opposite direction. It will have to wait until at least a new generation of elites with an opposing attitude before the tide can turn.
don't hold your breath.
i just switched my hotwater and heating to electric and switched to a renewable-only electricityprovider.
boom, zero carbon home. really wasnt that hard.
PS: Emily is absolutely charming! :)
Actually you aren't really zero carbon. Over a fixed time period your supplier will be selling surplus renewables to other utilities and receiving fossil fuel generated power when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. If your provider had to ensure minute by minute that it was receiving and providing only renewable power, it would have implement lots of power cuts when there just isn't sufficient renewable electricity available. I am sure you wouldn't like that.
@@rogerphelps9939oh, im under no illusion that i only get green electrons, but my money only goes to green power sources. providers have to specify where they buy their power, mine only funds renewables.
@@rogerphelps9939If we all buy only carbon free electricity, the suppliers and producers are forced to supply us with carbon free electricty. Of course that may take some time.
@@rogerphelps9939But it IS the closest someone can get without building their own generation system and going completely off-grid. But sure, argue just to argue.
I agree. I just wish to emphasise that we have a long way till our electricity is 100% greenhouse emissions free all of the time.@@patreekotime4578
"there's hot air coming out the side of the wall"
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Hi Robert and Team, as always great show, thanks for all the good work.
Dear Robbert and the FullyCharged team. Can you please, please, please do a podcast about energy storage for homes, neighberhood's, city's and even countries. and how it can help the energy grid. And you can expand this topic as well to water storage and weat and cold.
Random point, but I used to live in Milton Keynes around 1975-1980, and the house there, built in about 1970) had a "furnace" which blew hot air around the house. The main advantage was speed. I never needed a timer as I would just turn a switch, and 5 minutes later the house was warm. Every house I've lived in since had, at some point, water leaking from a radiator.
Please let the guest/expert talk more without fill in, voiced acknowledgement, drifting questions etc. There were several points where Emily was going to say something and stopped because you said something or were about to.
Yep
This Podcast stream is on my "must listen to ASAP" list.
I moved to an all-electric flat 3 years ago, and despite Ukraine War and the Gas Price hike, I am happy with that decision.
Does Kriton have the new NAS charge socket installed yet. :)
It's great that it's thin enough, to fit where the sun never shines for fanboys ;)
On heat pumps: just read about "novel" heat pumps that use CO2 as the working fluid rather than chloroflourocarbons, which kill ozone. Advantages, somewhat better COP and can provide useful heat down to lower outdoor temperatures, and always provide hot water when heat available. Disadvantage, higher compression pressures required, so higher precision compressors, costs slightly more.
I saw advertisements for a heat pump water heating system, that used a 24,000 BTU compressor for a large water heater, such as used in a commercial building. It used CO2 as a refrigerant, and worked pretty good. Yet the company went out of business after about 2 years. Don't know why. They are actually very energy efficient. And work well - even with 20F outside air temperature. Yes CO2 does require a very high compression to make it work, something like 850 PSI or 950 PSI.
In 2023, there are several companies looking at using CO2 as a refrigerant. However they also need to restrict the refrigerant amount to only about 5 or 10 pounds per system, so they do not cause a problem if they start to leak into a small building. Back in the 1910's they used CO2 and other gases for cooling the air, and a leak could cause a problem, even in a large room, such as a theater. That is why most commercial cooling systems, they cool water to about 45F or 50F, then use the chilled water to cool the air that is exposed to people.
Yes, we own a Sanden HWS which is 300lt. It works really well and we only need to run it 2 hours a day. We are totally off grid, so the efficiency of this system was a no brainer. Looking to by a medium sized heat pump air conditioning system for heating.
It is very common to find a furnace in a American home, and much more rare to find a gas or oil fired boiler in a home. I would say less than 10% of homes use a boiler in America. A furnace will use air ducts to blow warm air into each room of the home. A boiler will use hot water and a circulating pump to pump 120 to 180F water into a radiator in each room in a home. Some use steam, but that is very rare! Most are hot water in a home.
To imagine how a furnace works, think of your oven burner. There is a steel box, so the gas fumes are kept separate from the fresh air in the home blown across the steel heat exchanger, so the bad air is exhausted outside, and the fresh air is on the other side of the steel heat exchanger, that air is heated to about 100F or 130F, and then that air is blown into the room.
For those who have not seen a boiler heating system, they heat the water in the boiler, and that is pumped into radiators in each room of the home. So in a bathroom, there would be a radiator, about 12" tall and 12" wide. In a larger bedroom, the radiator would be larger to heat the larger space, and might be 24" tall and 12" wide. In a larger room, such as the living room or a library, it would be 24" tall and 24" wide or maybe 30" tall. Some very large rooms might use two radiators. Water is circulated at about 120F on a cool day, say 40F outside. On a very cold day, say 5F (-10C) then the water temperature is increased to provide more heat to the rooms. About 140F or 150F on a very cold day to provide more heat per square foot of radiator surface area.
Another Robert monologue! Why bother having guest speakers if you interrupt them with your own experiences very time they pause to draw breath?
As much as we love your work Robert, you really need to learn how to conduct interviews :)
He's been doing it this way for YEARS, dude ...... Ain't gonna change now .......!!
agreed.
Min 19:00 (industrial usage of Hydrogrn): steel! H2 is needed n the reduction of iron! The steel undustry will be one of the major consumers, just like the chemical industry.
Yeah unless we start building everything with aluminum.
There are 2 buses running here in Adelaide, and one EV. Hydrogen is made locally and stored at the Bus Depot.
Much is said about the poblems of adding new loads to the grid but little is said about the obsolete fossil fuel related loads which would be removed from the grid. It would be good to have more information on this.
There is still this obsession with "national grids" and "the market". Many of us, involved with community based generation projects, realised years ago, that we need to do things differently, to meet our needs in the future.
i never understood the hype about hydrogen, it's not like we have vast reserves of hydrogen in the ground, we have make the stuff, and there is no way to do that that makes green sense
Love all your shows Robert. 🇨🇦
The economics of electrolysis-derived hydrogen is precisely what's deterring it from using electricity from fossil fuels. To get electrolysis hydrogen affordably, you need cheap electricity. No way around that. As things stand, the LCOE of wind and solar electricity is less than electricity from fossil fuels. Even if an electrolyser installation has to run continuously at 100% output, it will simply be more expensive per kWh to purchase electricity from the grid than it is to source it from utility-scale renewable generation behind-the-meter.
Of course, a more ideal arrangement would be an electrolyser installation tied to the grid with utility-scale renewable generation behind-the-meter. The electrolysers, in MW, would be less than the behind-the-meter utility-scale renewable generation (to raise capacity factors for the electrolysers) and the electrolysers' power consumption curve can ebb and flow with renewable electricity output.
Thanks Robert- another great interview 👍
Always interesting and entertaining and informative
Good discussions on a similarities and differences in our nations. Best way to learn from each other
Has someone forgotten to upload this as a "podcast" not seen it show up on my podcast addict yet 🤷♀️
Look forward to listening to it later, hopefully 🤞👍
Hi John, apologies, this has now gone live. It'll be there for you when you tune in.
@@EverythingElectricShow Much appreciated guys, can't remember the last time that happened 😬
Just finished listening to it on t' poddy app 😁👍
Best way to start the week, that & a bobbylew ABN rant 😜😁
The only reason for using hydrogen is to do a job that can't be done in another way more cheaply or without producing as many harmful byproducts. Otherwise, there is nothing inherently wonderful about it as a power source or manufacturing aid - which goes for anything else, for that matter. It then becomes a question of whether the cost or harm caused is worth the outcome for this unique use. There is plenty in the comments below to give us cause to pause on this line of research.
Per heat pumps in the US: yes we have 60% market saturation, but the vast majority of those units are old, inefficient, etc. They are also commonly paired with a gas furnace that takes over when it gets really cold. So in the US they are not an alternative to gas, but used in conjunction with gas to reduce the gas bill. Historically in the US, wealthier people had coal furnaces and poor people had wood stoves. When we transitioned away from those technologies, coal furnaces were replaced at first with gas boilers, and later with gas furnaces and heat pumps. Those are expensive to install and cheap to operate. But poor people largely transitioned from wood stoves to electric baseboard heat which is very cheap to install, but incredibly inefficient and very expensive to operate. In the US we really dont have such a thing as cheap heating. Which is why in the winter months we very often have stories about poor people burning down their homes or accidentally poisoning themselves using portable kerosene heaters. Every winter.
According to a pamphlet from Shell, they use Hydrogen in hydrotreating (removing sulfur and other impurities) and hydrocracking (breaking down long chain molecules into more valuable, smaller molecules). And according to that, demand is dependant on the quality of the feedstock... low sulfur petroleum requires less. Another report shows that 55% of hydrogen demand in the US is for the petroleum industry... which highlights a secondary problem with the whole "hydrogen economy" which is that demand will greatly reduce if we begin burning fewer petroleum-based fuels.
Poland could actually really do with a show like yours. All the electric car issues previously seen in the UK, the FUD etc, is there now, like UK had it 5-7 years ago...
Toledo, ohio USA here, luv your show. Ps. Kindness is still free.
you have to be cruel to be truly kind
MATHEMATICS CORRECTION: At timestamp 5:44 1963 is not 50 years ago, it's 60 years ago.
Considering you were a robot covered in rubber traveling the universe, people wouldn't expect you make mistakes like this, unless they had actually seen that show, so it's understandable.
Must we go to Red alert, Sir? It means we have to change the light bulb.
@@nc3826 WRONG: You use the word "old" the phrase being corrected was "50 years ago"
DOUBLE WRONG: If something is 50 years ago it's not 60 years ago. ALSO: If someone is 50 years old they are not 60 years old.
So you are WRONG WRONG WRONG, with big WRONG on top of that.
Something that happened in 1963 is not necessarily 60 years ago.... It could just be 59 years ago... Without a date It is unknown....
So being pedantic about it is completely pointless......
And guess who is still pedantically WRONG WRONG WRONG, with big WRONG on top of that ???
Robert, your opening comment about the UK's green electricity failed to mention the use of wood chips. "Drax power station near Selby, Yorkshire is the UK’s largest renewable power station and generates 11% of the UK’s renewable power by burning wood pellets." You also mentioned Drax at 25:40...still no mention of the greenwashed electricity that comes from clear cutting absolutely unimaginable enormous tracts of land in the US and Canada and then shipping these chipped trees across the ocean to the UK. You should be doing a show on this to encourage the UK governments to work on stopping it.
Ccs is just an extra cost. No one will do it until they get hit with a cost greater than the cost of not doing it. Even when they do there is every incentive to leak the maximum amount of carbon possible
- the economics and energy balance there does not work.
The war in Russia will shortly make the world ask properly existential questions... The rest is largely "deckchairs on the Titanic" - hopes and dreams..
While ever there is no global reduction in sight, despite ridiculous international spending towards "decarbonisation" - COVID-19 did more, as did the GFC, but trajectories resume following these temporary upsets.
lol..
Yup. This is perhaps why the greens in the UK would prefer a carbon tax instead
That, or a carbon coin as discussed in the (fictional) book called "ministry of the future"
That would incentive the US in particular given it's value currently is heavily linked to the flow of crude oil and they're the country that realistically should lead on this because they do emit the most per capita.
That's not to suggest we shouldn't do anything here of course. I'm aware of the anti renewable people who say "But what about Murica. What about x"
I'm not one of those types. I'm just getting at that the US probably should lead this especially as there's financial incentives to do so, especially when less and less crude oil is pumped.
Pollution is just a displaced resource.... That's why CCU will replace CCS....
Great chat Robert and Emily
The show is always, always great, fun, I like that.
All that matters is the cost of ‘renewable’ hydrogen at the pump.
The issue of where electricity comes from is not the user’s problem. It is someone else’s problem.
If I use a battery electric vehicle (BEV) I have done my part.
If it is a hydrogen electric vehicle, I have done my part as well.
Electricity producers have to do theirs.
So as usual we come to the same conclusion: tax on carbon. That way, if the hydrogen is ‘dirty’, it will be too expensive.
The rate of biodiversity loss and deforestation is so much faster than the growth of "clean" energy means humanity is still in so much trouble. Is it solvable?
Lived in a house in Yorkshire with a gas furnace, pushing hot air round the house. But what you got was the smell of wet dog as they loved lying in front of the vents. Radiators are better.
Vancouver is a beautiful city, when there I love walking in Stanley Park.
Sorry Bobby; We attended the show and were absolutely underwhelmed. I'm still a fan but we won't be going out of our way or $50 poorer for a Fully Charged show. I'm so glad I didn't go down to San Diego last year as the 100 miles to Vancouver from Seattle was just plain frustrating, expensive and disappointing.
I found the talks to be superficial. There were no agricultural or landscape presenters and the bicycle vendors were limited. Too bad I wasn't shopping for a Level 2 charger and we don't live in the BC Hydro service area. Very limited.
"In the UK a heat pump is definitely cheaper to run than a gas boiler" - Scottish Power didn't get that memo. My electricity price is 5x higher than the gas price, so my brand new Mitsubishi heat pump (CoP 4.2) will cost more to run than the gas boiler I just replaced. Planning to switch to a different supplier as soon as I'm allowed...
I have been enjoyed, so thank you for delivering.
Robert is great but he's gotta stop jumping in on the guest every few seconds and allow them to finish or continue and he can dominate conversions quite often. He just gets a bit excited I guess. But I love his own opinion pieces and would listen to him often but when he has a guest on, we should hear the guest 80% of the conversion. No offence intended but I want to hear the expert fully please. But well done on giving the expert a platform. I love this channel.
I've been criticizing both hydrogen and carbon due to energy reasons. In the US, most H2 conversation is about making green H2 and using it in fuel cell vehicles (and heaven forbid some H2 ICE engines). As Emily points out, this takes a lot of wind turbines or solar panels to electrolyze the water, it would be much more efficient to put the solar power straight into people's EV batteries. Its the same for efuels. Then there would be no H2 leakage of another powerful greenhouse gas. Hydrogen hubs to make fertilizer and a few other things is fine, but this has no visibility in the US press and I can't even list another big industry that would productively use H2. H2 airliners aren't going to get past the Hindenburg.
Carbon capture is also an energy problem. Moving and sequestering a useful amount of CO2 takes more energy than we ever got out of the fossil that produced the CO2 in the first place. Does Emily really think there is a useful amount of sequestration capacity without it just all leaking back out into the atmosphere?
Ah, what a shame that I'm too late to fly out from the UK. Last day of FC LIVE was yesterday. 😊
Great show Robert Your guest is lovely and so intelligent and on the money with technology and what's going on in the world with power she is so switched on. As we all know carbon capture is a total joke The only place to lose carbon is to eject it into space which would be very expensive and Hydrogen is a joke for automobiles but not for heavy goods if you have the infrastructure which most countries don't have at the moment as most are hanging onto diesel and some are going electric with the tesla truck and others
Busses should all be electric by now but my town has none all are still diesel and I remember when I worked for our bus company as an engineer 30 plus years ago we converted two busses into electric busses but they were run on lead acid battery although a knew acid combination we ran the two for twelve months then put the engines back in them when the trail was finished so they were looking even back then in the late eighties I now run an electric car and like most of the others I would never want to go back to ice cars ever again I just love driving past the petrol stations but I do see now BP is fitting chargers in the stations there are three in our Rugby station on Lawford road high amp ones as well so I hope they do this to all there stations it would make life so easy having to hunt one down you would know ahh BP station I can go and get a charge worry over so I hope all the others follow suit as it makes perfect business sense as every week more evs are pouring onto our roads and why are learner drivers teaching people to drive a manual gearbox most will never have to use it anymore as it will become obsolete very soon one thing i have noticed more and more automatic learner drivers on the road teaching students which is a good thing. as a mechanic i saw the death nail in Ice cars ten plus years ago the innovations all stopped there was just no more new inventions to be had with the fuel powered engines until they came out with the hybrid engine to cheat the emissions that's all they are making them for not for being green because they are not they are more complicated than an ev or a fuel powered car and more things to go wrong which they do there reliability is bad so i wouldn't touch one if you paid me same as a ice vehicle unless its a Ferrari 12 cylinder lol which would never be.
It's better to burn Gas rather than Hydrogen stripped from gas.
The heat from solar thermal is required for industry.
We then need to have wind, solar and nuclear power to make hydrogen for other industrial purposes.
Ammonia is needed for industry. It is not well known how much salt is used in industry.
Thank you
Continuity Allert
Rob, if you saw an advert for a hydrogen car in 1963 that was 60 years ago and you were 7 ??
Great pod
Today at 6:30pm uk power mix Gas 59.7% Coal 2.7%, (Biomass 4.5%), Wind 11%, Solar 2.8%, Hydro 1.9% Nuclear 16.6%. its around 65% still burning stuff ( Biomass is classed as zero carbon but shipping wood chip from Canada can't be)
Enormous amounts of H2 is used in refining to desulphourize oil. The company i work for makes API 618 compressors. For Kuwait we supplied 13x a 7MW compressor. Yes, 7 MegaWatt
I think the description of our gas heating systems, what in the UK they call boilers n Spain we call calderas, do not "boil" the water in the system. The water being heated to a maximum of 70ºC to circulate around the house heating rooms via radiators. To boil water you must heat first to a minimum of 100ºC and then circulate steam which is absolutely not done. In fact, our water pressure in the system should be at 1-1,2 bar.
Interesting fact, fertiliser can be made from other things than refined hydrogen
Exactly. This planets plant life has the best recycling system ever invented. Nothing goes to waste. We just need to exploit it more.
Sure, and when folks figure out how to feed 8 billion people with it, while also transitioning to more vegan diet, it will change the world.
27:25 carbon capture while production is not carbon capture, it is reduction of emission, this should be put in law, because this show how they distorting reality.
SHC of Water vs Air means moving heat in water is better than moving heat in air. Boiler vs Furnace.
Yes, but piping the heat to different rooms is only one part of the equation, the other part is transferring the heat into the air in the room. That's why mini-splits have become popular... the benefits of moving heat in a liquid, combined with the benefits of a blown-air heating and cooling system in the room itself.
To reduce reliance on national generation, it makes sense to encourage solar PV with battery storage on an individual basis?
I understand it is possible to convert waste plastic into hydrogen via high temperature gasification? This would be a neat solution to the hydrogen production issue, as well as the environmental problems caused by waste plastic.
Plastic is made of hydrocarbons...but let's say. Now, how do you heat up the waste plastic to reach those high temperatures? Using electricity? why then not use that electricity to power stuff directly? Regardless how you look at it, hydrogen production is energy intensive and will only serve some niche applications for which we have no choice simply because H2 production and usage make very little sense in terms of energy efficiency.
Fertilizer production and other uses of ammonia take something like 3-5 % of the natural gas production in the world today, making that from hydrogen produced from renewable electricity instead would be a huge market for hydrogen.
Storage is the key to renewables and the transition to an all-electric economy.
There are some really clever types of storage becoming available, some based on gravitational potential energy, like pumped hydro and others, using less intrusive technology, even integrated into building design, and chrmical potential energy, e.g. batteries of various types, including (obviously) Li-Ion and Sodium-Ion plus large scale types such as the Ambri Liquid Metal battery, and Vanadium and Zinc-based flow batteries, plus thermal storage-based systems such as 1440 Degrees based on the solid/liquid phase change of elemental Silicon.
There is even a new thermal storage system based on graphite and using high temperature thermal photovoltaic cells with 40% efficiency.
Hydrogen will be another future energy storage system which couId kick in when other short term storages approach their limits, and the marginal cost of generation goes to zero or below..
I'm disappointed that Your guest did not Say more about the other Negatives Of hydrogen and transportation uses. particularly storage and hydrogen leakage.
I can't help thinking hydrogen is the Betamax of sustainable energy.
By using Hydrolysis is there a use for the Oxygen? for instance for Hospital Patients and The Elderly, but is there an industrial use?
Regenerative agriculture, and grassland restoration, and reforestation - are all "carbon capture and sequestration". And these are *far* less expensive, and *far* larger scale, than any puny high tech thing we can come up with.
Actually they arnt at all. Grasslands are mostly carbon neutral. Most of the CO2 they absorb escapes back into the atmosphere in the fall and winter as they rot. Or they are injested by animals and the carbon is released as methane. The reason trees are carbon sinks is because of the wood, but the leaves release much of the carbon as they fall and rot. And when the tree itself falls and rots, or the wood is burned, then it is no longer a sink. Living trees and quality wood furniture (not the disposable chipboard stuff) and timber framed homes are carbon sinks.
There are also some edge cases like peat bogs and permafrost were forest carbon is stored by geological processes.
@@patreekotime4578 Grasslands have more carbon per acre than forests - grass is 80% roots and when they are grazed and/or trampled, they abandon a *proportional amount of the roots. Since grass roots go down 30-50 feet, this is well below the oxygen line - and ALL that carbon is perfectly sequestered. It then regrows - grass is among the fastest growing plants - and they push a LOT of carbon into the ground.
Rinse and repeat the grazing/trampling on restored grasslands - which cover much more of the earth than forests - and we could be back below 350ppm in less than a decade.
This is *how* we got to having 40-50 feet of topsoil. Plants do the hardest part - they split the oxygen away from carbon dioxide, and turn the carbon into a solid form.
Won't feed the world reliably these decades.
I think the best use case for hydrogen is to use it for storage make it from excess renewables that would otherwise go to "waste" as its otherwise not a viable thing in the cleaner future imo.
Heat pumps are ok, but they only last 10-15 years and no one will warranty a repair job on the valving control.
Ha ha ha I'm the case the disproves the rule, TAF !!!!, however a lot more informed than a lot pout there thanks to you guys !
Hydrogen is used in refining industry to remove sulphur from fuels. And that usage is is 65-70% of the Hydrogen used today. Difficult to see a future market for the product, let alone build an industry around it.
yup, and that just shows you why governments world-wide seem to promote way too willingly hydrogen everywhere and every time they open their mouth on climate change solutions... because they are being told by the fossil fuel industry lobbyists that it's the best stuff while actually it's just a way for the fossil fuel industry to get hold of more hydrogen they need for their fossil fuel business...
There is an easy way to know that the electricity used to make hydrogen is renewable and that’s to build generation solely to power the plant that does the hydrogen production.
Same as how in New Zealand we built a hydroelectric power station solely to power an aluminium smelter. All the electricity used for smelting is renewable and excess is fed into the grid.
So build a solar or wind farm or whatever and use that solely to produce hydrogen and you then Know you have green hydrogen made with only renewable electricity. Feed excess into the grid but don’t allow a reverse feed in From the grid. Solved.
The impression that you have is the same as mine but I think there is a computer board problem with a supplier that is causing these issues. Hopefullly it will be corrected.
Cut to the real start @04:04 or @06:10 for her first reply
Open Democracy has just made a report on British Gas trying tie in customers by misinforming their customers about hydrogen ready boilers, and telling them they are wasting their time with heat pumps.
Great stuff
Burning hydrogen still generates nox emissions and so has no future for heating homes etc.
When people mention hydrogen they start debate about cars with EV's verses hydrogen cars, this car debate is crazy, electric car are far superior to hydrogen cars.
When you think of hydrogen think of airplanes and other uses.
Airbus have their hydrogen research progressing and just think in a couple of decades time Airbus will have to replace the A320 family and they won't be replaced with battery electric aircraft.
I know that currently there are 2 seater electric aircraft that are being manufactured and are perfect for a 45 minute flying lesson. But you won't have a 300 seater aircraft with 3000 mile range running on batteries.
Hydrogen is perfect for the aviation sector and not Smart car.
08:40 What a surprise! Electrolysis of water is energy intensive! Who knew?! Seriously, though, this is how engineers & business moguls think from the get-go, namely what does a process cost & will it make a profit? Today in 2023 electrolysis is far too expensive to be a commercial success unless, perhaps, one is living in Iceland or Norway with giant hydro-electric generation capacities. Even worse, the fuel cells themselves are expensive. Maybe some future breakthrough will solve these problems, but in the meantime BEVs are becoming the tech of choice.
How can you know that the electricity for your electrolyser is green because? (Emily @8:57) "it's just really complicated because can't, you know, trace the path of an electron from a solar farm to a hydrogen plant"
A bit of layman's science:
It's not just complicated, it's a bit mind bending, especially if physics isn't your strong subject.
Even if you could trace the path of an electron it wouldn't help because, in most cases, the electrons at the solar farm will never actually reach the electrolyser.
The only exception would be is if you had a direct DC powerlink from the solar farm to the electrolyser, and even then the electrons would only travel about 1Km every 4 months. The reason why most people think they would is due to some misconceptions, firstly that electricity is a flow of electrons, and secondly that the electrons flow almost instantaneously at close to the speed of light. If any part of the transmission is by AC, then the electrons will never arrive at the electrolyser. For AC, the electrons only travel about 4 microns (about 1 tenth of a thou) along the wire, (at a frequency of 50Hz) before the voltage reverses and they come back out again.
Think of it a bit like your water supply, the the pipe is the wire, and the water is the electrons. When you fill your kettle in the kitchen the litre of water that you fill it with is not the same litre as the reservoir puts into the pipe at the other end, and because water doesn't squash very well that happens almost instantaneously. Eventually the litre of water that went into the pipe will arrive at your tap, or somebody else's. Because the water always flows from the reservoir to your house this is like DC current. The AC analogy would be a bit like the pump at the reservoir pushing a litre of water into the pipe and then sucking it back out again, this wouldn't give you a water supply but you could use the varying water pressure in your house to drive some sort of hydraulic motor to power something.
For electricity in wires it's a bit like having absolutely huge diameter water pipes, so even in the DC situation it takes a very long time for the litre put in at the reservoir to eventually arrive at your kitchen tap.
It would be great if customers could choose to be more exposed to the wholesale price of electricity - it would really encourage installation of energy storage (whether that be charging your EV or house batteries) - something the grid desperately needs in renewable-dominated areas like California. This strategy would have no need for tax payers' money - you choose whether to be part of the future. Would probably have to cap the extremes though, to avoid random ludicrously high bills in extreme weather events, like what happened in Texas a few years ago.
Don't forget that gas stoves (ranges) are unvented and unhealthy and the performance of a gas range can be duplicated by an electric induction burner
first love your show BUT is one was very disappointing i do not believe hydrogen will not or cannot play any part in motor cars so was hoping for some inside but the show had very little content about hydrogen uk tesla owner
You don't seem to have published on audio, Android, Pocket Casts BTW
We need energy abundance.
We need to build nuclear energy as quickly as possible.
With steam-electrolysis you can produce at high and efficient volumes.
We won't have enough clean energy if we don't push everything.
Carbon capture or plants as the technology is sometimes referred to.
Or trees, peatlands, corrals😁
On the subject of carbon capture, some years ago a heat pump manafacturer used co2 as the refrigerant; maybe that could become part of the equation?
Based on that logic we need to sequester seltzer emissions too? SMH
One of the reasons we had to switch away from freon is because refridgeration systems are notorious for developing leaks. There are probably also not enough refridgeration units on the planet to make up for very much of our global output. In 2022 we produced something like 100 million metric tons of CO2 a day. Refridgerants are usually measured in tens of ounces per unit.
If it performs 1% worse as a refrigerant it’s not going to be worth it
In the Netherlands we are seeing more and more propane based air-to-water heatpumps. Mostly because they can generate higher water temperature, which older houses need. Like CO2 it needs very high pressure, so it can only be applied on monoblock heatpumps. For air-to-air heatpumps I don't know the higher cost of CO2 or propane based heatpumps are worth it.
@@patreekotime4578 High pressures are a problem with co2 and also water in the system is also not good.
In the UK, co2 is our supermarkets preferred option.
Robert sometimes I wish you would let your guests talk more. You cut them off too often to make your knowledge known too much.
1963 was 60 years ago, not 50.
This is my first comment here. I am not proud of it.
Especially as every man and his pedantic dog......will make the same unnecessary comment about a simple 'misspeak'........!!!
Unfortunately the service guy next door says the the heat pumps are breaking down and he wouldn't recommend them. (Canada)
Rather like saying the cars are breaking down and he wouldn't recommend them. Have you seen the number of car repair places? They are everywhere. Talk about unreliability!
The service guy next door is misinformed. Also suffering from confirmation bias if he works servicing them. I'm sure mechanics feel like cars constantly need servicing since they are often doing it. Heat pumps are not maintenance free, but the maintenance is like maintaining a dehumidifier. Take out the filters and clean them periodically. Spray and rinse the coils every year or two. Everyone I know with heat pumps has had no issues. Total FUD.
Brilliant, sensible analysis of the climate change problem