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They're focusing on transportation fuel (cars and airplanes), but another area of great potential is power generation. The current trend is to build solar/wind

• ReadTheLicense 4y ago
  Yes! The same way, using CNG or bio-diesel (for example wood or algae-derived) in plug-in hybrid vehicles with smaller batteries (50 km) would be much more ecological than large battery vehicles.
  • marcinzm 4y ago
    Would they be more efficient? Burning gas is horribly inefficient and has engines have weight as well.
    • weq 4y ago
      They are more efficent because they last longer then current battery tech. China has miles of graveyards of green energy veichles. they are environmental hazzards after their useful life and run off rare earth minerals. not sustainable in any sense of the word; other then being an alternative source of fuel.
    • ReadTheLicense 4y ago
      The conversion might not be as efficient but all cars having a 350km battery for the rare occasion when they leave the city 2-3 times a month seems like a bigger waste. They would normally use the 50km battery and the lesser efficiency would kick in only during long distance trips. Modern range extenders can be pretty lightweight... It could even be modular/take-out in your frunk.
      • marcinzm 4y ago
        >Modern range extenders can be pretty lightweight... It could even be modular/take-out in your frunk. Not sure how that'd work. To get over 50km range you need a gas engine that provides 100% of the power to the car at highway speeds. A small engine won't pull that off.
        • aurelianito 4y ago
          That's not true. It needs to recharge a part of the electricity used. For example, if it provides 2/3 of the electricity being used it would potentially triple the range.
          • bryanlarsen 4y ago
            Which means it would have to run continuously. Which completely defeats the purpose of having a plug-in hybrid, which is to make most trips using only battery.
            • aurelianito 4y ago
              Only on long trips!
              • bryanlarsen 4y ago
                And how is the car supposed to know if it's a long trip or not?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar I would start making a regulation that says all parking-lots MUST have a light-weight roof on top of them on top of which are solar panels. Imagine all (outside) parking lots having solar-panel covered roofs. This would be easy to enforce in regulatory terms, which regulating all of deserts is not. You want to have a parking lot? You must have solar panels as well. And it could double as a charging station.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    I think you'd crush any brick-and-mortar business smaller than Walmart like that.
    • MH15 4y ago
      They've got smaller parking lots.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        • toomuchtodo 4y ago
          The Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law today, provides incentives for this. Here’s an Australian dairy farm that just went solar and storage: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/08/05/australianstorage-gets-victorian-diary-farm-to-95-renewables-saving-at-least-70k-in-bills-per-annum/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/08/05/australians...
        • hnick 4y ago
          I got solar recently because the payback time was around 5 years taking rebates into account. We often talk about how negative externalities of things like coal are not priced appropriately, however it goes the other way and renewable rebates exist due to the positive benefits. I wonder if in the situation you mentioned, whether it would be profitable for a third party to handle the roofing and capture any value while covering the costs. The ROI might be a little too low for a traditional business but it seems fairly low risk and effort and would scale nicely if they get installation discounts. It would still be a lot of friction starting a business if you have to wait for them to do it, so many laws like this often only activate for businesses over a certain size (such as GST in Australia based on revenue, or WorkChoices based on head count).
• nagisa 4y ago
  My intuition would be that it is overall cheaper in the long run to produce green hydrogen and build new or adapt existing plants so that they can consume hydrogen. Just a few percentage points in efficiency of the fuel generation would entirely negate any capital cost savings of reusing the old plants.
  • philwelch 4y ago
    But there’s also utility gas. I wonder if hydrogen powered home appliances would be any good.
  • natmaka 4y ago
    New gas turbines are able to generating electricity by burning hydrogen (up to 100%). https://www.get-h2.de/en/project-lingen/ https://www.get-h2.de/en/project-lingen/
• dvirsky 4y ago
  > Use all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural gas plants I don't know what the efficiency of the process described in TFA, but from Wikipedia I see that Electricity->Gas->Electricity has an efficiency of 30-40%. There are other alternatives like pumped hydro stations that are way more efficient.
  • weq 4y ago
    And destroy the earth. Hydro is not green energy, its an energy tradeoff. nuclear is much greeener then hydro. with nuclear, its only a possibility of screwing the environment. with damns, its garenteed.
    • peterashford 4y ago
      How are you seeing hydro "destroying the earth?". New Zealand has a lot of hydro and we don't appear to be destroyed, as of yet
      • Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Hydro makes major changes to the local ecosystem and kills a lot of wildlife that can't breathe water. Although p\enty of things can live in a dam they're not what was there before. It also makes major changes downstram People like to equivocate this with making entire countries uninhabitable or ongoing destruction. It also requires vast quantities of concrete (and thus has high one time emissions) We should still avoid it where we can now that we know better.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          This is not true at all. Hydro power dams use up a watershed, but those are not being built for storage systems. Pumped hydro storage does not consume a watershed or harm wildlife or fisheries. Pumped hydro does not need concrete for construction. Please do not repeat this falsehood.
          • 4y ago
• thrown_22 4y ago
  > Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the land can handle (imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar). This is called a dystopia.
  • sneak 4y ago
    IMO a dyson sphere is not a dystopia. Where is the line? Is a desert covered in solar more or less a dystopia than the smog clouds that currently engulf LA?
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      That smog cloud is from China.
    • tppiotrowski 4y ago
      I thought the smog is just dust from the desert. Isn't this why LA skies are so clear after a rainy day?
      • sneak 4y ago
        Smog is sulphur dioxide and other anthropogenic air pollution, mostly from vehicle exhaust and other sources of combustion.
        • tppiotrowski 4y ago
          I wasn't challenging what smog is. I was pointing out that LA air quality no longer suffers from smog like it did in the 1970s. Any hazy skies around LA are now more a product of dust in the air and not vehicle emissions.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Carbon fuels are bad, fossil or not. Same as Green Hydrogen, you'd only burn these if you couldn't directly electrify or battery power it. Otherwise you're using electricity you could have used directly, to make the fuel at a big loss of efficiency.
  • s_tec 4y ago
    The main reason to keep hydrocarbon fuels in a green-energy future is for their energy density. Rockets and airplanes will always want the best density and weight available, and that’s hydrocarbon fuel for now, barring some order-of-magnitude battery improvements. Hydrogen rockets are a thing, but their tanks are huge compared to methane or kerosene rockets.
• Aperocky 4y ago
  > simply a form of energy storage A very bad one at converting from/to electricity. Obviously, if you start from something else, e.g. dinosaur, then it's great. But if you want to use it to store electricity, it's extremely poor due to the conversion involved, any kind of battery (and iron battery is a promising one!) is much better.
  • ephbit 4y ago
    > ... any kind of battery (and iron battery is a promising one!) is much better. Good luck trying to break even with as many batteries as would be needed for weeks or months worth of energy/electricity.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      Nobody needs "weeks or months" of storage. If local storage looks likely to be used up, and you can't schedule power from a transmission line, you order a shipment of ammonia from any of many tropical solar farms.
      • ephbit 4y ago
        Sure everyone does. Let's say renewable electricity generation capacity increases significantly (which needs to happen as we all know), then due to fluctuations around the year of solar irradiation alone there need to be weeks if not months worth of electricity storage (in whatever form). Ammonia is exactly that, storage of energy that gets converted to electricity, to keep up with grid demand. Ammonia then _is_ your weeks/months worth of storage.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          Hint: many places do not, in fact, experience annual reduced insolation, and can produce equally year-round. We call those places "tropics", maybe you have heard of them. Do you think utilities store months of fuel, nowadays? Or do they rely on regular deliveries? Do you think relying on regular deliveries of ammonia, in winter, would be much different from relying on deliveries of NG year-round, as today?
• vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  This would be great for utilities, who could keep stranded carbon burning assets for their operational lifetime. Although the carbon emissions would be net neutral, Such a system would not be greenhouse gas neutral. Some methane from the natural gas plants will leak out. This is a gas that is 25 times more potent than CO2 over a 100 year timeframe [1]. Nitrous oxide, which is a byproduct of the combustion process, will be emitted and this gas is 298 times as potent as CO2 over a 100 year timeframe. [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Ammonia is injected into gas turbines to scavenge nitrogen to prevent NOx production. This is a solved problem. Please do not engage in idle, misinformed concern-trolling.
    • vegetablepotpie 4y ago
      I assume you’re talking about Selective Catalytic Reduction. Although you can reduce the amount of NOx from emissions using SCR, you cannot eliminate it. I would not call it a solved problem so much as a mitigated problem. Furthermore, with catalytic reactions involving ammonia, depending on ratios of ammonia vs the emitted NOx gas, and the age and quality of the catalyst used, you may see slippage, which is the injection of too much ammonia, which results in its release into the atmosphere. This too can result in the creation of NO2. Constant monitoring of the emitted gasses and maintenance is required. Point here being that you could avoid this whole class of problem with energy storage technology. Although Lithium Ion batteries present their own technical issues to solve, there are other energy storage technologies that show promise [1]. Regarding your comment, you took a leap in assuming this was assuming it was idle, misinformed concern-trolling. It could be that I am ignorant of the NOx scavenging, it could be that I am aware of it and take issue with it. Both possibilities you ignored. Please review the HN guidelines, you may find this passage relevant, Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [1] https://aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ https://aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/
• adrianN 4y ago
  > Everyone assumes that energy storage will be batteries Power-to-gas has been the proposed solution for seasonal storage for a long time now. Few people who are interested in the topic believe that current battery technology can scale to store a couple of weeks worth of power. Maybe something like iron-air batteries, but the proven technology is elecrolysis optionally followed by upgrading the hydrogen to methane or ammonia.
• aivisol 4y ago
  > imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar What is an average life time of a solar panel? What happens after it ended its service? Can you recycle them or they will just end up in a massive landfill?
  • adrianN 4y ago
    https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling But I wouldn't worry about putting them in a landfill either. They're not particularly dangerous.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      They will be recycled, because ultra-pure silicon is very valuable. Likewise, cadmium and tellurium. Voicing worries about used up solar panels is cheap concern trolling.
• ncmncm 4y ago
  Deserts are about the worst imaginable place for solar panels. The only reason desert solar farms are constructed is that idiot investors think they are a good idea, and pour money into them. Deserts are a dumb place for panels because the panels get hot and dusty. Heat cuts both conversion efficiency and panel lifetime. Accumulating dust can block as much as 80% of light. The best place to site panels is floating on reservoirs and canals, where temperature is kept in check. Nobody knows how long floating panels could last. At the same time, they cut evaporative loss and biofouling, and provide complex habitat under for water creatures. Next best is in farm fields, in rows with room for a tractor and equipment between. There, they cut heat stress and water loss, and run cooler than in desert or on rooftops. Most plants can use only a very limited amount of full sun in a day, and just endure more, welcoming shade. The panels produce year-round, complementing seasonal farm revenue. A good way to deploy in fields is bifacial panels in vertical fence-rows running north-south to pick up morning and afternoon sun, during peak demand. Panels stay cooler, don't gather dust, and are out of the way of farm equipment; and fence mounts cost less than others. This works well in pasture, too, where livestock keep down weeds and benefit from shelter. (E.g., sheep produce better wool.) For some crops, growing directly under (near-) horizontal panels protects them from harsh weather, often multiplying yield. A T-shaped mounting is practical here, with room under, and a gap between, for farm equipment. Since the land is doing something else of value, there is no need to pack panels as tightly as they will go. There is way, way more viable dual-use farmland than could ever be needed for energy, so only the best places for it need be used. Hydrocarbons are a poor choice of storage medium, because you need a source of carbon to make them, which is then released into the atmosphere when you burn it. Hydrogen just needs water for feedstock. It is easily stored underground, including in used up fracking fields. It may be transported in liquified form, similar to LNG. Ammonia needs just water and air as feedstock. It stores in liquid form under light pressure at room temperature, and transports well. Hydrogen and ammonia are both massively valuable as feedstock for myriad industrial, transport, and agricultural processes, so when your tankage is full, all your excess production may be sold for ready cash.