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No, that is beyond the scope of his blog post. Certainly hydrogen is more challenging to handle than methane, but it can be stored in underground caverns the same way methane can, and it can be moved by pipelines also. Generally you need specially built pipelines and it probably only makes sense...

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221208005226/en/Vast-Solar-Signs-Letter-of-Intent-to-Purchase-13500-Sodium-Ion-Batteries-from-Natron-Energy-in-2023 This is a new battery chemistry being used for grid storage. It a type of sodium ion battery, but a different chemistry than what other...

This blog post by Michael Liebriech at BloombergNEF was from 2020 but is a good read: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-hydrogen-part-one-the-supply-side/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-hydrogen-part-two-the-demand-side/ By 2050 ...

https://www.energy-storage.news/getting-ahead-of-the-market-mitsubishi-power-americas-on-li-ion-long-duration-and-green-hydrogen-storage/ In the interview, they discuss the cost adder of going from 4 hours to 6 hours for a 10MW li ion battery they installed in San Diego: “going from four to...

Antora Energy is clever implementation of thermal storage. They use blocks of graphite heated by resistive heating. They describe it as like a big toaster. It costs very little to dump a lot of power into resistive heating and heat the blocks as high as 2500 C. The blocks are stacked in...

CATL is working on a sodium ion battery that is comparable to li ion. Cell cost is about 10% cheaper and about 10% lower energy density than LFP. The biggest advantage is that is is much easier to source sodium than lithium. If this works, not only will it be a big help for ramping up stationary...

I have been thinking about high renewables grid. There are some major challenges on the transmission side. Grid storage can help optimize utilization of existing transmission resources, but that won't be enough to solve the issue. The current grid in most places uses natural gas pipelines to...

Elon has said that Tesla Energy will scale to match the size the the auto business. There has been on and off discussion of this in other threads, but I wanted to have a single thread to focus on this topic. It is a deep topic and many interesting developments are underway. To get things...

A well optimized system will have a moderate amount of curtailment. California’s grid today has very little curtailment, far less than what a well optimized system should have. Far better to have too much capacity than too little. It is not at all realistic to expect a resource to have 100%...

Maybe grid storage needs a separate topic, as it can be a rabbit hole. For Texas, they have a price cap on wholesale electricity of 900 c/kWh ($9/kWh) which they seem to hit every few years. If you truly had a system cost of $8 per kWh for grid storage, which is not the case for this...

Individual ground source heat pumps are interesting, and dandelion energy is an example of a company working to bring the costs down. However, a networked approach to ground source heat pumps is maybe more interesting. Some advantages: 1) customers with waste heat (grocery store refrigeration...

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/maersk-secures-green-fuel-supply-for-12-methanol-powered-boxships/ Container shipping giant Maersk is planning to use green methanol to power ships. "The Power-to-X project with Maersk will expectedly be powered by approx. 1.2 GW of new onshore wind and solar...

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-cheapest-way-to-ship-green-hydrogen-is-via-e-methane-we-will-help-wean-germany-off-russian-gas/2-1-1177575 Interesting idea and nonintuitive. The concept is the best way to ship hydrogen it to convert it to methane at the source, and then at...

Even Renewables Are Bigger In Texas "The grid operator’s latest figures indicate that they expect, by the end of the year to have 31,069 MW of wind and 6,035 MW of solar on the system, up from 23,860 and 2,281 MW of wind and solar at the end of 2019." "The total capacity of energy storage...

The Texas energy market is fascinating. I was reading about a utility where you pay them $10 a month plus the wholesale cost of electricity. In exchange for some price volatility, you get some very cheap energy. Not for everyone but very interesting. That provides strong incentive to reduce...

Just to follow up, I focus on desert southwest because that will be the first region in the US, with large cities, where a 100% renewable electrical grid will cost less than fossil fuel. When that happens, it will be a tipping point and it will happen soon after in other regions as well. So...

For the sunny desert southwest, I previously said: So what about the remaining 5%? Here is an estimate of capital costs for 2 different options. Costs are normalized for 100MW average demand. This is designed to supply 100MW during 5% of time. Option 1) Long duration storage using hydrogen...

While we are talking hypotheticals, I would like to see $10k refundable tax credit with only 1 lifetime credit per person. This would help get everyone who has never tried an EV an incentive to buy one and the impact of credits will gradually ramp down over time.

This one is a good resource: "Costs of Storing and Transporting Hydrogen" https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/25106.pdf

Any economic use that can be found for otherwise curtailed energy will improve, perhaps substantially, the economics of a renewable energy system. Electrolyzer is one such use case. And as you say, it will change the optimal mix of over generation vs storage.

Portland is 45deg north. San Diego is 33deg north. The average world population lives 24 degree from the equator (to account for southern hemisphere). So solar will dominate for much of the world without necessarily dominating in the northern US. Portland has hydro and wind and a big...

Good point about the future grid supplying more winter heat. A future grid will power more EVs and we tend to drive less during the winter, so that helps. A heat pump is maybe 3x more efficient than fossil fuel heat, that helps some but even so it looks like it we will still use more energy for...

I did some wind modeling for California a long time ago, but stopped modeling it for various reasons. 1) California has excellent solar resources and mediocre wind resources. 2) The best wind locations in California have already been built out, so hard to model what happens if you try to build...

My model shows 150% solar + 16 hours storage can cover 95.2% of electricity. One way to model this effect of large electrolyzers that can be curtailed on demand is that you effectively have additional solar power at the same price point. So instead of 150% solar power maybe you get 300% solar...

Thanks. Modeling is pretty powerful way to understand system trade offs. I tried to build the simplest model that would provide some insight. I downloaded demand data and solar production from California ISO (caiso.com). This data is available for 1 hour time periods. I used a presimulation...

The timing is a function of the value it provides and the time it takes to prove out a new technology. Based on modeling I have done, in the sunny desert southwest solar + li ion can cost effectively provide 95%+ of electricity. But getting all the way to 100% is hard. For the final few...

Spodumene ore concentrate is 6% spodumene. Spodumene is 3.73% lithium by weight. 6% * 3.73% = 0.224% lithium by weight. Lithium hydroxide is 7.94% lithium by weight. Therefore, it takes 7.94/0.224 = 35.5 tons of 6% spodumene ore concentrate to generate 1 ton of lithium hydroxide. It is about...

As someone unfamiliar with the Nikola business model, I thought this 7/31/20 podcast was interesting: E1090: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton on competing with Tesla, hydrogen over battery, going public as a pre-revenue company & more | This Week In Startups Notes: 21:13 they don't build a...

If you are aiming for a renewable energy dominated grid, studies on the most cost efficient mix of wind/solar generating capacity vs energy storage show that significant over capacity on the wind/solar generation side is the most economical mix. See "Storage Requirements and Costs of Shaping...

I think the economics of the two different approaches is very interesting. To play devil's advocate, I think the analysis to support nikola's case is a bit different. Lets say you are a company that develops wind farms in kansas. There are already many wind farms in kansas, and when the wind is...