The Baltic nation of Estonia has launched an ambitious 100% renewable energy goal for 2030. As part of that goal, energy industry stakeholders plan to showcase the entire country as the world’s first nationwide, integrated “hydrogen valley” hub, with a focus on green hydrogen.
Currently, hydrogen production requires more energy to produce the equivalent amount of hydrogen.
Which is why it should not be produced on a fossil fuel based grid, but is perfect for stored portable energy on renewable grids. For example, converting excess wind and solar power to hydrogen fuel.
It sounds like Estonia is on the right track, and intending to leverage their access to water and other renewables to generate “green” hydrogen. This sounds great, I hope they can pull it off.
I’m not sure what you meant by your first sentence. There are words missing. But any energy conversion will have efficiency losses. That includes for lithium batteries too.
Hydrogen should be used for portable energy, like you said. Are electric cars also not considered green unless they are charged with non-fossil fuel sources? I think everyone understands that they enable us to use other energy sources but they don’t in and of themselves reduce dependence.
“Green Hydrogen” is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. There’re no carbon emissions in that process, but to be truly “green” the electricity must come from a carbon free source like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.
The process of electricity to hydrogen to compressed hydrogen to fuel cell to electricity is about half as energy efficient as electricity to li ion battery to electricity. As a form of electricity storage green hydrogen is significantly less efficient than batteries.
Green hydrogen only makes sense as a fuel in situations where batteries are not feasible.
And right now making green hydrogen at all does not make sense because if you build a new low carbon source of electricity it will make a larger impact if you use it to displace fossil fuel based electricity generation rather than using it to create green hydrogen.
What you wrote is essentially true of Li+ ion batteries (not truly green unless the electricity is too). The part I was missing was the efficiency of electrolysis being half that of Li+ charging.
Fuel cells can also run cars, and refilling is much faster than recharging. So you can build cars which can go long ranges with quick stops. But of course the infrastructure for hydrogen fuel is well behind even car chargers, let alone gasoline.
I’m usually very suspicious of anything related to hydrogen but this seems like a great way to go about it.
