this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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This was a peak situation, but long term with even more renewable energy, that's when Hydrogen becomes relevant.
And when we have enough surplus production of electricity to produce cheap hydrogen the sky is the limit. Because cheap hydrogen can replace oil and gas everywhere.
We are not there yet, but I think it's not too far away.
And we are far from alone in this, all European countries are working towards more renewables. Which is why I think the above will become reality soon. Hydrogen is wasteful and cost a lot of electricity to make, but when electricity becomes plentiful enough that renewable production goes to waste, that's when hydrogen becomes really really relevant, and can replace everything that can't be replaced with electricity and batteries.
doesn't hydrogen have way worse round-trip efficiency than batteries, even before things like embrittlement? i've heard as low as 45%, with the rest just becoming heat.
Yes, but it can be stored where batteries lose power over time. And a lot of the infrastructure doesn't need to be build but can be converted from natural gas use.
In the end batteries and hydrogen fill two very different gaps. You can use batteries to shift the renewable production peak at noon (thanks solar) to the demand peak in the evening, maybe even flatten fluctuation (in production and demand) over a few days. But they are entirely useless as seasonal long-term storage.
Also plans to produce green hydrogen exist independently. It's a requirement to decarbonise a lot of industry processes where direct use of electricity doesn't work. It's also a raw material in chemical industry.
So if decarbonisation of more than just electricity production is the goal, large scale hydrogen production is a given. As is large scale storage as production from renewable energy will always have seasonal fluctuations. From there having it also double as long-term on-demand stored energy means just scaling up what is already there.
i don't remember if you and i spoke about this before but i did talk to someone on here about the fact that hydrogen can't really be stored for long periods either. whoever it was linked a statement from a german gas company claiming that their existing infrastructure could handle hydrogen without modification, and i remember coming away from that entirely unconvinced.
i'd be happy to be proved wrong but i don't believe green hydrogen is going to play a big part of the grid. i'm personally hoping for pumped hydro and thermal storage.
Sounds indeed like bullshit. More so as here in Germany there are indeed a lot of projects using natural gas infrastructure for the planned hydrogen transport network. But definitely not without modifications.
Europe seems to disagree, with projects worth more than ten times of those in North America and Asia combined.
Edit:
Here's the already approved part of Germany's planned hydrogen core network (new lines, converted lines, opened by 2025):
And an article about one of the earliest segments of 55km opened 1½ years ago, based on 95% pre-existing lines.
And an article (but only available in German) claiming that the planned capacity for 2025 (converted or newly build) is met with new ~525km out of ~9000km by 2032. Of which ~60% will be converted pipelines, 40% new construction.
huh, i thought only japan was betting on hydrogen. i hadn't heard of expansion here. although that's more likely because everything we get about germany is how it's their fault that our electric bill has gone up.
Fun fact: the other big investor in hydrogen pipeline projects is your neighbour to the east... planned to go all the way through the Baltic Sea to Germany.
Also the French energy concept (see: RTE's (French grid provider) study about energy by 2050) is at its core entirely based on nuclear base load in a renewable/storage system making electrolysis more economical because on top of producing hydrogen with excess renewable power during the day, you then also have a steady production of excess electricity throughout low demand night times.
i still find it strange to build out a technology with such a low efficiency. but with CHP plants it could probably be more economical.
Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It's not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve "boil water and run a turbine").
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn't work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
for peaker plants i've always assumed we'd do fuel cells. just plumbing it in to existing gas infra (aka just fucking boiling water again) seems like it doesn't really solve the problem.
but yeah for applications that require heat rather than electricity it's a good idea. i think having generators on site is probably the more likely solution there.
Yes but how will the oil companies take their unnecessary cut if you use batteries?
why do you think lego is so expensive now
Because it has strong marketing and a cult-like fan base.
oil money
That's why it will never IMO be feasible until we have surplus electric power that it can be made with. Power that would otherwise be wasted.
Before using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, you need to ensure that no fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity. Otherwise you would increase carbon emissions, not reduce them. I don't see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.
The world is currently at 42.6% green electricity. Also 100years are a very long time.
It seems like hydropower is doing a lot of lifting across the developing world. Spots like Ethiopia, Paraguay, and Brazil are all heavily dependent on hydroelectricity to power major municipalities and industrial centers.
As climate change impacts the volume and flow of major waterways, I'm a little worried how that ends up.
That really shocked me. And, I gotta say, these numbers look deeply suspicious. I work in the Houston energy sector, and I can say we're not slowing down development of the Permian Basin. US fossil fuel exports are only going up. Then there's the big investment in data center fossil fuel plants that doesn't seem to be in the forecasts.
That's not to say we're also not building out enormous new solar and wind facilities, even in the belly of the Texas Beast. But the Flint Run plant alone is more than they're reporting. And that's assuming Trump doesn't get his 1.25-gigawatt Terra Energy Center in Alaska.
I think liquid hydrocarbons are much more likely to be used directly in combustion engines, rather than electricity generation. So even as oil production increases, the percentage of electricity coming from high carbon sources might still be dropping, while the primary energy numbers might go the other way.
So for our electricity mix in 2025, we reached 17.4% nuclear, 10.3% wind, 8.6% solar, 5.4% hydro, 1.0% bioenergy.
But if you look at primary energy mix, fossil fuels are much, much higher percentage: something like 16.8% low carbon (renewable + hydro + nuclear), 35.0% gas, 38.8% oil, 9.3% coal.
Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for clarifying.
This statistic includes nuclear and bioenergy. I'm unsure about bioenergy, but nuclear certainly can not qualify as green. Unless you mean green glowing stuff, like nuclear waste is often depicted.
Yes and humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.
They’re probably using green to mean “not CO2 producing” given the context of the discussion being about CO2 emissions. As far as I’m aware nuclear energy fits that criteria.
I understand the argument and yes CO2 emissions are indeed lower. However, only marketing/sales/lobbyists/politicians would use that to sell it as green energy. It's not green, it's not environment friendly, it's not renewable.
Actually one could argue that it is extremely environment friendly, seeing as Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary.
In terms of carbon emissions, it's pretty lean. You're only really talking about the cost of concrete and of harvesting uranium fuel, which is negligible beside the cost of coal or natural gas.
The turnover to wind and solar has been genuinely shocking in its rapidity. Market forces are one hell of a drug.
True, but with a constant 100% plus generation from renewable, there obviously wouldn't be any fossil fuel burned to generate electricity. Here we are already at 80% of our total yearly electricity generated by renewables.
When that reaches 100%, it can be done by utilizing surplus at peaks to generate hydrogen, exactly to completely prevent any use of fossil fuels.
100 years is a very long time, back in the 70's it was considered a lofty goal to achieve even 10%, and now we are at 80!!
I don't think you have historical perspective.
Personally I think within another decade we will surpass 100% here, and have the ability to export a lot of surplus renewable energy.
I was also mostly thinking about civilized countries, not so much for instance USA.
"here" is nice and good, but "here" is not global. This is not about a local incident. It's easy to have "too much green energy" in one place, just build a single wind turbine and don't connect it to a grid. But using that excess power to produce an inefficient expensive fuel in one part of the world doesn't solve the global energy- and emmission- problem. It's cheaper and more efficient to transport energy all over the world and shut down local fossil fuel power plants than to produce hydrogen, ship that all over the world and burn that.
It's not as easy to ship electricity around as you might think. Electricity attenuates over distance, and when green sources are far from population centers, that effect is higher. To use electricity, you have to be physically tied to the power grid, or carry batteries. Those are heavy and require a bunch of heavy metals sourced from questionable places.
Hydrogen is more portable and transferable than electricity. It can be used for off-grid purposes, like vehicles and wherever you'd use propane now. And its efficiency compared to electricity doesn't really matter if you're producing it using waste voltage from surplus.
Both have their places. Converting away from fossil fuels isnt going to have a monolithic solution.
Exactly.
It could be not far away. That's the reason we see such a big uptick in funding and publicity for basically every right-wing moron on the planet fighting against (among other stuff) renewables.
One of the reasons. The other ones are Russia and China wanting to split the West and low birth rates meaning the low cost workers are harder to come by(2/3of the growth in the 25-64 year old population will be in Africa in the next 25years and the richer the country the more likely a shrinking workforce, so imagine unions lowering the work week or similar).