How many solar panels does it take to fill up a hydrogen car?

[NeoGreen]

https://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/how-many-solar-panels-does-it-take-fill-hydrogen-car.html

How many solar panels does it take to fill up a hydrogen car?
Lloyd Alter, March 19, 2019

Stanford scientists figure out a way to get hydrogen out of seawater. Does this matter?

Every time the words "hydrogen fuel" come up, I want to yell in bold uppercase that if it is made through electrolysis, "HYDROGEN ISN'T A FUEL, IT'S A BATTERY!" And come up it has, in Fast Company, where Adele Peters writes Scientists just found a new way to make fuel from seawater.

She describes a new improvement where hydrogen can now be electrolysed from seawater without the anodes dissolving because of the salt. Stanford researchers figured out how to coat the anode to keep it from corroding, according to the press release:

The researchers discovered that if they coated the anode with layers that were rich in negative charges, the layers repelled chloride and slowed down the decay of the underlying metal....Without the negatively charged coating, the anode only works for around 12 hours in seawater, according to Michael Kenney, a graduate student in the Dai lab and co-lead author on the paper. “The whole electrode falls apart into a crumble,” Kenney said. “But with this layer, it is able to go more than a thousand hours.”

Peters at Fast Company writes:

The fuel could theoretically be widely used in transportation, from cars to planes... Hydrogen fuel cells could also store electricity from power plants or store energy in houses.

This is what makes me crazy. Ok, it is true that we have a lot of saltwater around. But it doesn't change the physics or chemistry of how much energy it takes to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. It's a lot of energy; let's pick an example and look at the thermodynamics of running a Toyota Mirai on saltwater hydrogen (and I welcome criticism of my math here).



To electrolyze one kilogram of water into hydrogen and oxygen, it takes 4.41 kWh of power and delivers 110 grams of hydrogen. That will push a Toyota Mirai about 110 meters.



To fill its tank, one would have to electrolyze 45kg of water and it would take close to 200kWh of power, to drive the Mirai 500 km, which is, by the way, twice as much electricity as would be needed to drive a Tesla the same distance.



To generate the electricity needed to fill one Mirai every day would take 2,858 square feet of solar panels – in sunny Phoenix. In other parts of the country it could take twice as much.

And that is all running at 100 percent efficiency with no losses of hydrogen, even though the tiny molecule leaks through almost everything and reacts with almost everything else.

Over 95 percent of hydrogen is now made from natural gas, so it is basically a fossil fuel. To make it from electricity takes a huge amount of energy, and in the end it is half as efficient as a conventional battery. To power electric cars with renewable energy would take acres, hectares, square miles of solar panels – or a pile of nuclear reactors, which is why the nuclear industry were always such fans of the hydrogen economy.

But without those nukes or some magical catalyst that changes the numbers, the idea that we could run planes, trains and automobiles on hydrogen is just a fantasy. We don't have time and we don't have the renewables, and we have real alternatives, like bikes and electric trains. Or to paraphrase Mal in Serenity, "It's a long wait for a hydrogen train don't come."

Emphasis added.

For perspective:

(The big one for 10-hours/day = 150kWh, i.e. not quite 198kWh)

Additional quote:

Physics, people, physics! Hydrogen atoms are super-small, so the atoms leak out of any container, just like helium leaks out of balloons for the same reason.
Chemistry, people, chemistry! Hydrogen is also super-reactive, so it's hard to keep pure and hard to keep your container/pipeline from reacting with it.
Economics, people, economics! Just because you made hydrogen through electrolysis in your school's science class doesn't mean it's cheap to do.

[mr_lebowski]

1. Great post ... Hydrogen 'fuel' is a sick joke, and I doubt the physics of that are going to change

Now, if we could stick a pipe the ground and slurp up H2 gas by the metric ton, that'd be different. But hydrogen simply does not exist in that form, unfortunately.

So like the article says, for all practical purposes, H2 functions like a battery, not like a fuel.

[mitch96]

2. I was just wondering about solar produced H2 after reading NPR article...

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/700877189/japan-is-betting-big-on-the-future-of-hydrogen-cars
It sounded very good to use H2 for cars but they mentioned that the H2 was produced using carbon fuels.... not good. I'm thinking how about solar???
Boom your article comes up on DU..
I understand that the H2 car uses a H2 fuel cell to produce electricity so it's not a internal combustion car. Quick to recharge, not like a total electric car..
I wonder about using all the renewables for H2 production... Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric and add the balance of Natural gas and maybe safe Nuclear??? Is safe nuclear an oxymoron?
m

[Kaleva]

3. 2858 square feet is about the size of a tennis court.

16 tennis courts together is about an acre. Edwards Air Force base takes up over 300,000 acres and much of that land is unused. The Navajo Nation is a Native American territory covering about 17,544,500 acres.

An area in the Southwest dedicated to solar panes and about the size of the Navajo nation could potentially be able to produce enough hydrogen to power 272 million cars.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Researchers propose a cheap nickel-hydrogen battery for grid storage

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/researchers-propose-a-cheap-nickel-hydrogen-battery-for-grid-storage/

Researchers propose a cheap nickel-hydrogen battery for grid storage

Substitute out some of the platinum catalyst, and the battery gets much cheaper.

Megan Geuss - 10/31/2018, 10:21 AM

Battery technology is extremely important for a world that uses more and more renewable energy. Renewable energy is variable—no electricity can be produced while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing—so being able to store excess electricity that's made when those renewable sources are producing is key to putting more of it on the grid.

The problem is that very large batteries can be expensive. A lot of research has been devoted to making batteries lighter and smaller, given how focused we've been over the last several decades on consumer technology. But now, researchers are relaxing size and weight constraints and trying to find battery chemistries that are cheap and extremely long-lasting instead.

Researchers from Stanford and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) are suggesting a new configuration of a nickel-hydrogen battery that could be cheap enough for mass-adoption on the grid. Traditional nickel-hydrogen batteries can last for up to 30,000 cycles and are extremely reliable and durable, which makes them great for grid use. But they often rely on a platinum catalyst that can make them prohibitively expensive for large installations.

In the new work, the researchers substituted out the platinum that would have been part of a nickel-hydrogen battery and replaced it with a "bifunctional nickel-molybdenum-cobalt electrocatalyst as hydrogen anode." The estimated cost of a full-scale version of this battery is about $83 per kilowatt-hour, below the Department of Energy's 2040 goal for $100/kWh target for grid-connected storage. For context, last year Tesla appeared to offer a record-low price for its lithium-ion battery installation at the Hornsdale wind farm in Australia at $250/kWh.

…

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809344115

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/new-fuel-cell-could-help-fix-renewable-energy-storage-problem

New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem

By Robert F. ServiceMar. 12, 2019 , 1:00 PM

If we want a shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one crucial thing: technologies that can convert electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa. Commercial devices that do this exist, but most are costly and perform only half of the equation. Now, researchers have created lab-scale gadgets that do both jobs. If larger versions work as well, they would help make it possible—or at least more affordable—to run the world on renewables.

The market for such technologies has grown along with renewables: In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States; in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the demand for electricity often doesn’t match the supply from solar and wind. In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home.

Some utilities are beginning to install massive banks of batteries in hopes of storing excess energy and evening out the balance sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the grid for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by converting it into hydrogen fuel. Devices called electrolyzers do this by using electricity—ideally from solar and wind power—to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. A second set of devices called fuel cells can then convert that hydrogen back to electricity to power cars, trucks, and buses, or to feed it to the grid.

…

Now, two research teams have made key strides in improving this efficiency. They both focused on making improvements to the air electrode, because the nickel-based fuel electrode did a good enough job. In January, researchers led by chemist Sossina Haile at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported in Energy & Environmental Science that they came up with a fuel electrode made from a ceramic alloy containing six elements that harnessed 76% of its electricity to split water molecules. And in today’s issue of Nature Energy, Ryan O’Hayre, a chemist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, reports that his team has done one better. Their ceramic alloy electrode, made up of five elements, harnesses as much as 98% of the energy it’s fed to split water.

…

[NNadir]

7. We're at 412 ppm of carbon dioxide and still using the word "could."

How about we could delude ourselves into complete and total inaction and inattention by using the word "could" every time some university issues a news release?

We've been doing that for about half a century. I think the state of the atmosphere reflects the result.

Week beginning on March 10, 2019: 412.16 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 409.02 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 388.71 ppm

Last updated: March 20, 2019

Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

How about the future of humanity could be lost because people live in a fantasy?

[Duppers]

6. K & R

[NNadir]

8. There is no way in hell, that a 15 kw solar system even in the desert produces 150kWh in a day.

Last edited Thu Mar 21, 2019, 03:31 AM - Edit history (1)

The capacity utilization of this future electronic trash is, even under the best circumstances, more like 20%, not the sloppy 41% figure suggested by "10 hours a day" = 150kWh.

10/24 is, after all, 41%, way too generous, but that's not surprising, since the people who bet the planetary atmosphere on the solar scheme do nothing but to misrepresent the usefulness of their trash approach to the future, which in fact, they are stealing from all succeeding generations.

It is interesting to note that even if this future electronic waste did produce 150 kWh - which it won't - that amounts to 540,000,000 joules. A gallon of gasoline contains about 131,700,000 joules

This means that the "15kW" "big" solar cell produces, in the fantasy land where the capacity utilization is 41% and not 20% (at best, in a desert) the equivalent of about 4.1 gallons of gasoline per day.

It doesn't matter whether the storage medium is hydrogen or cobalt (mined by enslaved children in Africa) laced lithium batteries for Elon Musk's car for bourgeois millionaires and billionaires, this crap still needs to either store energy or burn gas, both at an economic and thermodynamic penalty.

This obviates the mentality of people wandering around "nuclear free" websites, carrying on about Fukushima while millions upon millions of people die every year from air pollution created by burning fossil fuels and "renewable" biomass.

It's a festival of ignorance, hydrogen or no hydrogen. It's amusing to see hydrogen fuels attacked in the context of acting as if the solar industry were significant. It hasn't been; it isn't; and it won't be.