Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Hydrogen Hype is Dying, And That's a Good Thing" video.

ENGINEER HERE and you are 100% RIGHT I have recently defended Sabine in respect of criticisms she got to her criticisms of academia. Having spent time in academia she's right to criticise them. HOWEVER when it comes to engineering she, like many others needs to SHUT UP. We need hydrogen as an energy buffer NOT because its hyper efficient or economic factors but BECAUSE WE CAN MAKE IT WORK and over the next 20-30 years WE NEED THINGS THAT WORK THAT DON'T SCREW THE PLANET UP FURTHER. And I really am trying to scream that at everyone. If you want the engineers to keep the lights on and modern society as you know it to keep functioning then all the people in the road need to SHUT UP. Unlike Sabine and many others I am qualified to design electrical systems around explosive gases like hydrogen as well as explosive dusts like wheat & sugar dust (and yes dusts can explode). Hydrogen is one of the hardest gases to work with, design around AND THEN MAINTAIN. Sabine is right in that Hydrogen for practical purposes leaks from everything, explodes easily and makes many substances brittle. What she DOES NOT KNOW is we know how to engineer around those issues. The single biggest problem with hydrogen is having enough qualified maintenance personnel. That's WHY I never thought it would be practical for things like cars, buses, jets, heating & cooking in homes. Any poor maintenance in those areas could be catastrophic. HOWEVER for those few areas like energy, hydrogen is a good option because all the technical issues have been solved and being kept in a controlled environment like a power station makes the maintenance possible. As for the ongoing claim you can't get better than 40% turnaround that's pure nonsense. The latest PEM electrolyser technologies get over 90% efficiency NOT the 80% (and lower) people like Sabine keep quoting. The current generations of gas turbines form companies like GE and Siemens with cogeneration units get over 64%. That's over 57% on the main components which are available off the shelf AND THEY WORK. As for the problems with storage and compressors those problems exist for every gas. How do you think the gas actually gets piped around the world? How do you think they liquify natural gas for exports around the world? I have worked in gas plants and they use lots of energy. If the world is going to have a lot more renewable energy then that industry needs to be able to buffer that system so if can deliver as needed. Efficiency is far less important than simply having something that WORKS.
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@GeneBrown-c9q Thanks. I'm just finding it really frustrating that people are stomping on ideas that might not be perfect BUT CAN ACTUALLY WORK while they also promote things that NOBODY knows if they can work. And the arguments they use are often spurious or irrelevant. Part of the problem is that we don't end up having sensible discussions.
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ENGINEER HERE and you are 100% right I have recently defended Sabine in respect of criticisms she got to her criticisms of academia. Having spent time in academia she's right to criticise them. HOWEVER when it comes to engineering she, like many others needs to SHUT UP. We need hydrogen as an energy buffer NOT because its hyper efficient or economic factors but BECAUSE WE CAN MAKE IT WORK and over the next 20-30 years WE NEED THINGS THAT WORK THAT DON'T SCREW THE PLANET UP FURTHER. And I really am trying to scream that at everyone. If you want the engineers to keep the lights on and modern society as you know it to keep functioning then all the people in the road need to SHUT UP. Unlike Sabine and many others I am qualified to design electrical systems around explosive gases like hydrogen as well as explosive dusts like wheat & sugar dust (and yes dusts can explode). Hydrogen is one of the hardest gases to work with, design around AND THEN MAINTAIN. Sabine is right in that Hydrogen for practical purposes leaks from everything, explodes easily and makes many substances brittle. What she DOES NOT KNOW is we know how to engineer around those issues. The single biggest problem with hydrogen is having enough qualified maintenance personnel. That's WHY I never thought it would be practical for things like cars, buses, jets, heating & cooking in homes. Any poor maintenance in those areas could be catastrophic. HOWEVER for those few areas like energy, hydrogen is a good option because all the technical issues have been solved and being kept in a controlled environment like a power station makes the maintenance possible. As for the ongoing claim you can't get better than 40% turnaround that's pure nonsense. The latest PEM electrolyser technologies get over 90% efficiency NOT the 80% (and lower) people like Sabine keep quoting. The current generations of gas turbines form companies like GE and Siemens with cogeneration units get over 64%. That's over 57% on the main components which are available off the shelf AND THEY WORK. As for the problems with storage and compressors those problems exist for every gas. How do you think the gas actually gets piped around the world? How do you think they liquify natural gas for exports around the world? I have worked in gas plants and they use lots of energy. If the world is going to have a lot more renewable energy then that industry needs to be able to buffer that system so if can deliver as needed. Efficiency is far less important than simply having something that WORKS.
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@flothus What your missing is the 8+ years I have been studying economists and how they behave. I haven't gone and done ay courses. I have been listening to them and their critics and there is now a lot of criticism of economists. I am more convinced than ever that economics is an incredibly important subject. The problem is economists are NOT trained to understand how economies work. They are trained to understand how MARKETS work. So they frame everything in terms of markets. They have absolutely NO understanding of how things like education systems, health care systems and energy supply systems actually work in a modern economy. This is why energy is such a mess. All the decisions (or lack of) are being heavily influenced by or MADE by economists. One of the things they really can't understand is that any society needs certain things in place NOT for the purpose of making money but so everything else can make money. Roads don't need to every make money but they need to be there so everyone else can move stuff and make money. Education doesn't need to make money it needs to supply business and industry with a workforce so they can make money. But if you try and explain to an economists 99 out of a 100 will have a melt down. Here's the even bigger problem. IT DOES NOT MATTER if you have Lefty clowns howling renewables or Right Wing nutters howling about fossil fuels, THEY ALL LEARNED THE SAME ECONOMICS. Every politician in the developed world is either an economist or have an economics advisor and they all studied similar text books written by professors at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge... or written by people who went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge... AND in many cases those text books are printed by Harvard Press, Yale Press, Oxford Press, Cambridge Press... Its a major problem and why no matter who gets elected these days nothing changes. This is why so many populations are getting frustrated. Economists have stuck their noses into everything in the belief that "the rest of us are problems they have to manage." (Mark Blyth) Right now in Australia (my country) there's a massive debate raging about nuclear power. So far I have only seen 1 engineer interviewed and he was a university professor who said NOTHING because all he was asked about was the economics. We have 2 reports. One by the political Left who claim science is on their side and nuclear can't work in Australia because of the economics. The other report by the political Right claiming that science and economics says the only way to save Australia is to go nuclear. YES both reports in Australia were written by economists for economic arguments. NO engineers were involved in either report. Both reports should have been printed on toilet paper so we'd know what to do with them. I'm NOT arguing Hydrogen on economic grounds or Nuclear for that matter. I'm for Hydrogen right now because I can (as an engineer) make it work in the time frame we have been left with by the stupidity of economists interfering for the last 30+ years. You have no idea how close to an energy collapse Australia is or a few other countries for that matter. Right now Hydrogen is the answer for a lot of countries IF WE CAN GET THE ECONOMISTS and ACTIVISTS and SPECIAL INTERESTS to GET OUT OF THE WAY. In the longer term a lot of countries NEED to have sensible discussions on nuclear and that can't happen while these clown fests continue.
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ENGINEER HERE I have recently defended Sabine in respect of criticisms she got to her criticisms of academia. Having spent time in academia she's right to criticise them. HOWEVER when it comes to engineering she, like many others needs to SHUT UP. We need hydrogen as an energy buffer NOT because its hyper efficient or economic factors but BECAUSE WE CAN MAKE IT WORK and over the next 20-30 years WE NEED THINGS THAT WORK THAT DON'T SCREW THE PLANET UP FURTHER. And I really am trying to scream that at everyone. If you want the engineers to keep the lights on and modern society as you know it to keep functioning then all the people in the road need to SHUT UP. Unlike Sabine and many others I am qualified to design electrical systems around explosive gases like hydrogen as well as explosive dusts like wheat & sugar dust (and yes dusts can explode). Hydrogen is one of the hardest gases to work with, design around AND THEN MAINTAIN. Sabine is right in that Hydrogen for practical purposes leaks from everything, explodes easily and makes many substances brittle. What she DOES NOT KNOW is we know how to engineer around those issues. The single biggest problem with hydrogen is having enough qualified maintenance personnel. That's WHY I never thought it would be practical for things like cars, buses, jets, heating & cooking in homes. Any poor maintenance in those areas could be catastrophic. HOWEVER for those few areas like energy, hydrogen is a good option because all the technical issues have been solved and being kept in a controlled environment like a power station makes the maintenance possible. As for the ongoing claim you can't get better than 40% turnaround that's pure nonsense. The latest PEM electrolyser technologies get over 90% efficiency NOT the 80% (and lower) people like Sabine keep quoting. The current generations of gas turbines form companies like GE and Siemens with cogeneration units get over 64%. That's over 57% on the main components which are available off the shelf AND THEY WORK. As for the problems with storage and compressors those problems exist for every gas. How do you think the gas actually gets piped around the world? How do you think they liquify natural gas for exports around the world? I have worked in gas plants and they use lots of energy. If the world is going to have a lot more renewable energy then that industry needs to be able to buffer that system so if can deliver as needed. Efficiency is far less important than simply having something that WORKS.
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@earlyrobotmind Yeah what's NOT TRUE? My degree is in aerospace and in the 1990s Rolls Royce, GE and others all worked out how to make gas turbines work on Hydrogen because it looked like the fuel of the future. They made the turbines work over 20 years ago. What they could NOT get past was the storage and re-fuelling issues. Which in part goes to what I have been trying to tell people - IT WON'T WORK for some applications but will for others. I don't know how many times I have to say that before people start listening. Right now both Siemens and GE have combined cycle turbines up to 800MW that can run on hydrogen. Rolls Royce has 1MW gensets with piston engines running on Hydrogen. There's also been major advances in hydrogen electrolysis since 1992 like the PEM (proton exchange membranes). Anyone can look it up these things but its just easier for FCKWITS LIKE YOU to simply spit out garbage replies.
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@SabineHossenfelder ENGINEER HERE I have recently defended Sabine in respect of criticisms she got to her criticisms of academia. Having spent time in academia she's right to criticise them. HOWEVER when it comes to engineering she, like many others needs to SHUT UP. We need hydrogen as an energy buffer NOT because its hyper efficient or economic factors but BECAUSE WE CAN MAKE IT WORK and over the next 20-30 years WE NEED THINGS THAT WORK THAT DON'T SCREW THE PLANET UP FURTHER. And I really am trying to scream that at everyone. If you want the engineers to keep the lights on and modern society as you know it to keep functioning then all the people in the road need to SHUT UP. Unlike Sabine and many others I am qualified to design electrical systems around explosive gases like hydrogen as well as explosive dusts like wheat & sugar dust (and yes dusts can explode). Hydrogen is one of the hardest gases to work with, design around AND THEN MAINTAIN. Sabine is right in that Hydrogen for practical purposes leaks from everything, explodes easily and makes many substances brittle. What she DOES NOT KNOW is we know how to engineer around those issues. The single biggest problem with hydrogen is having enough qualified maintenance personnel. That's WHY I never thought it would be practical for things like cars, buses, jets, heating & cooking in homes. Any poor maintenance in those areas could be catastrophic. HOWEVER for those few areas like energy, hydrogen is a good option because all the technical issues have been solved and being kept in a controlled environment like a power station makes the maintenance possible. As for the ongoing claim you can't get better than 40% turnaround that's pure nonsense. The latest PEM electrolyser technologies get over 90% efficiency NOT the 80% (and lower) people like Sabine keep quoting. The current generations of gas turbines form companies like GE and Siemens with cogeneration units get over 64%. That's over 57% on the main components which are available off the shelf AND THEY WORK. As for the problems with storage and compressors those problems exist for every gas. How do you think the gas actually gets piped around the world? How do you think they liquify natural gas for exports around the world? I have worked in gas plants and they use lots of energy. If the world is going to have a lot more renewable energy then that industry needs to be able to buffer that system so if can deliver as needed. Efficiency is far less important than simply having something that WORKS.
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@tarant315 Let me be simple. I am getting damn farking tired of people who ARE NOT ENGINEERS TELLING ME HOW TO DO MY JOB. Its clowns like you who can't STFU and listen WHY we are in the mess we are in. I can tell you have no clue because of the flippant way you just think its that simple. Here's some facts. We can't buffer with batteries because we simply don't have enough Lithium. The World's known Lithium reserves don't have enough Lithium to do 1/3 of the cars let alone the Mega batteries. At the current lithium production rates we need around 300 years of supply in the next 10 years. All those Mega Batteries put in 5-8 years ago need all their cells replaced and we still DO NOT have a viable recycling plant ANYWHERE. We need an alternative battery technology and other than the Sadoway Battery there's nothing currently available at any viable rate. There's a lot under development but we need stuff in production NOT development. Mega batteries are loved by investors cos they pay off in around 18 months and then make a giant pile of money until the cells degrade. Renewables are loved by investors because they are fast to install and cheap to operate compared to nuclear, coal, hydro, gas turbines... etc. Plus you need 100% of the capital up front for those technologies. With wind and Solar you just need enough of a project done so you can start connecting it to the grid and start earning money to help pay for the rest. Plus because of the way the construction bandits operate Nuke, coal, hydro,..... ALWAYS COST MORE than budgeted. FINALLY THE RENEWABLE PROBLEM is NOT what most people think. Its NOT the irregularity of the power. Its NOT the base load issues. Its HOW renewables inject power onto the grid. It causes harmonics on top of the power wave and those harmonics are an issue few know about and fewer understand. Ireland has already hit this wall. My country Australia is also close to hitting that wall.
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@flothus Since you claiming to be a fellow engineer let me give you this little benefit of hindsight for 35+ years. If it doesn't work as required then it doesn't matter what it cost and economics are irrelevant. RIGHT NOW one of the single biggest issues in the world is energy for the very simple reason (quoting economist Steve Keen) "Capital without energy is a statue and Labor without energy is a corpse." No matter what you want to talk about it needs energy. People & machines in that respect are the same they just need different forms of energy. All of the machinery of modern society needs electricity, either to build it or to run it. AND RIGHT NOW the most important thing is installing cleaner energy systems THAT WORK. All the BS about SMRs means nothing because NONE of them have anything yet that people can buy. All the BS about Fusion means nothing because NOBODY has anything that works yet. All the fossil fuel clowns can shut p because they've done so much damage to the planet its barely comprehensible. All the renewables people can shut up because their solutions all have giant holes in them BECAUSE THEY WONT LISTEN. That's why we are in so much trouble. Too many vested interests with too much too say and everyone NOT understanding that our energy systems MUST WORK.
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@flothus And I forgot to mention YES ABSOLUTELY: the German Energiewende is a catastrophe. But its exactly what you get when blind ideology overrides common sense.
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@biankacosma I'm Australian and, as I have been pointing out, we have 2 reports in Australia on nuclear. One by the LEFT wing government that says nuclear is utterly uneconomic AND The other by the RIGHT wing opposition that says its economically the only way to save the economy. BOTH were written by economists making economic arguments with the same data AND BOTH are totally worthless.
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@tripper0354 Good point and it will be interesting. Fortescue Metals have been trialling hydrogen powered dump trucks for a couple of years but have been fairly quiet about it. What bugs me right now is that these companies HAVE PROVEN that you can make the technology work at the driving end and its NOT being acknowledged. For example GE have the 9HA 500MW turbine (800MW with combined cycle) and it RIGHT NOW run on 50% Hydrogen-50% natural gas with a pathway to go 100% hydrogen. The 9HA turbine by itself gets over 46% thermal efficiency and over 34% in combined cycle. In Australia we have 2 quite old gas thermal plants. They are just like a coal fired plant except they burn gas. So they are a little cleaner but they are also limited by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and Carnot efficiency. At their best those plants got about 35% and they are well past their best. We had one of our coal fired units down to 20% by the time it closed. By chance 1 is 800MW and the other 500MW so they are the prefect size for a 9HA replacement. Replacing the 800MW unit would drop the Natural Gas required by ~50% WITHOUT using Hydrogen and would reduce it by ~75% with Hydrogen. That would have an incredible effect on both the local energy and gas markets on just costs alone. I have struggled for several years to get anyone to listen because every door is guarded by swarms of economists, think tankers and special interests. Hence my frustration levels.
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@flothus I'll give you a couple of minor corrections and they are NUANCE. There's nothing wrong about Green Sentiment ITS HOW THEY ARE GOING ABOUT IT THAT'S THE PROBLEM. Having a functioning healthy planet is a good thing for everyone - Marxist, Capitalist or I-hate-all-politics-ist it doesn't matter if we can't feed ourselves or breath the air its all over. HOWEVER dismantling industries that we need to get there DOES NOT HELP ANYONE and I can't scream that loud enough. Secondly Nuclear is incredibly dangerous. WHAT MAKES IT SAFE are very well trained engineers operating in an environment where they can tell everyone else and their opinions to F--K OFF. I hope you get the nuance in both points.
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@flothus You are absolutely right the STRATEGY IS OFF. And worse the technical explanation of WHY those big Hydrogen Turbines are needed is incredibly important. This is about the simplest I can explain it. Most people know AC power is a sine wave. What they don't know is that every time something is switched on or off it taps that sine wave and as a result of the stuff going on that sinewave is noisy. In the past this wasn't that much of a problem because behind that sine wave were large lumps of spinning metal called turbines and they have inertia. The actual physical inertia of those turbines HELPED keep power grids stable. However these days we have lots of energy being pumped onto grids via DC-to-AC inverters. I know how these things work because its the same tech used in AC motor control which I have been doing for 30+ years. They don't put out a clean wave form just like music CDs don't put out perfect wave forms because its digital. So in recent decades we have been taking out the big turbines that help keep the grid stable and replacing them with inverter technology DOESN'T. If that sounds like it can't be too much trouble to fix the answer is NO. One simple way to help is build a couple of big nuclear plants. If you're in Europe that would be a couple of EPR 2s and with their big massive turbines, but they take 10years and cost a lot. And somewhere in the next 10 years we will all see grids having more and more issues. Ireland is first off the rank in that game and I expect here in Australia we aren't far behind. That's the main reason why I want a couple of these big hydrogen turbines. Even at only 50% hydrogen they lower emissions which makes even the greenest greenie less disappointed. Plus they can off take the excess wasted energy all wind/solar farms produce and use it. The efficiency isn't really a problem because the benefit of the turbines for grid stability is huge and actually helps the renewable industry work. Also they can help nuclear if you want to go that way in the future. No matter what the design is nuclear power works best at 100% output form the plant. They can but they aren't that good at following the daily swings in power demand that you can see on the "duck curve." So having a system with renewables, hydrogen turbines and nuclear can work because the hydrogen turbines help both the renewable and nuclear run better.
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@danielduggan7126 You have 1/2 said the right thing. We use H2 WHERE its the best or better solution to other options. Actually one of the key places where H2 can be incredibly good is in energy. Sorry I am an engineer and I am damn tired of people who DO NOT know what they are talking about mouthing off on social media. Sabine is a physicist NOT an ENGINEER and her numbers ARE WRONG and the numbers she presents are taken out of context.
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@colayco You know how I can tell you're NEITHER an engineer or a physicist??? Because you make stupid claims about the Laws of physicists without any explanation. The answers below are not just for you they're for everyone else in this thread. FIRST Batteries as we now have then CANNOT do the type of grid level power storage needed. Here in Australia we have some of the largest Mega batteries on the planet. CASE 1) The 750MWH battery on the site of the now closed Liddell Power station (2,000MW) can put out the same power as the power station for 23 minutes. That can't replace a power station except for short time duration peak demands. CASE 2) The Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage system is designed to supply 2,000MW constant for up to 7 days. That's 336,000 MWH of storage which is almost 450 times the capacity of the unit at Liddell. That's what grid level storage looks like. It can't be something with minutes of supply it has to be something with DAYS OF SUPPLY. And that's the reality of complex energy grids. Batteries are good for short term peak demands and utterly uneconomic for long duration AND THAT'S a COMBINATION OF PHYSICS and ECONOMICS SECOND THE LITHIUM ISSUE Then there is the giant issue of Lithium. If you go and look up Lithium on Wikipedia there's a table form the US geological survey for reserves and resources. Most people do NOT understand the differences. Resources are what's ESTIMATED to exist whole reserves are what's KNOWN to exist in minable quantities. You can go to any spot on the planet and dig up a cubic meter of dirt and process it and you'll find some gold, iron, aluminium, uranium, lithium and everything else. The problem is that in most cases it is utterly unfeasible to extract those quantities AND THAT'S AN ECONOMIC ISSUE. Currently EVs need about 65kg of lithium (Tesla S needs 66kg). With known reserves of lithium we only have about 1/3rd of what's need for the 1.5 Billion cars on the planet. So there's just NOT enough Lithium to do mega batteries AND THAT'S A PHYSICAL LIMIT. THIRD THE GRID STABILITY ISSUE We use AC power to transmit energy and AC power is based on a sine curve and the problem is that every time anything is switched on or off that curve is disrupted. Most of the time the noise on the grid is harmless and goes unnoticed but sometimes you get harmonics which combine into dangerous energy spikes. Those spikes can cause all sorts of issue from simply frying electrical equipment to causing blackouts. Some cities or parts of cities and even buildings can be incredibly susceptible to harmonics and they need surge divertors and expensive filter systems. The problem with ANY TECHNOLOGY that stores energy in DC needs to put that energy onto the grid via an INVERTER and inverters are noisy and cause harmonics. I know this because its the same technology used in motor control systems. One of the main reasons harmonics were less of a problem in previous decades was the supply of energy onto the grid came from turbines spinning generators. The actual mass of the turbines had enough inertia to absorb most of the grid disturbances. Now that we are decommissioning power plants that have large turbines with systems using inverter technology that problem has gotten WORSE and THAT'S A STRIGHT ENGINEERING PROBLEM based on the PHYSICS of GENERATORS versus INVERTER SYSTEMS. THE FACT IS (not the Laws of physics) that we can't do large expansive energy grids how people think and many clowns keep claiming. We need to do certain things on those grids to overcome the shortfall in various technologies and EVERY technology has its limits. Pumped storage is great is you have the geography for it. Current Mega Batteries are brilliant if you want to make money and only have shirt term goals. But id you have other needs that can't be done with batteries or pumped storage then OTHER technologies must be considered and RIGHT NOW Hydrogen technology is not only available IT WORKS and compared to many other options it is economical.
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