In a recent study, researchers from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) questioned the planned development of new nuclear capacities in the energy strategies of the United States and certain European countries.
The growing idea is to just have a shit load of renewables, everywhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun shines through the clouds. If you have a ridiculous excess total capacity then even when you’re running at limited capacity you could still cover the demand. Basically, most of our renewable infrastructure would actually be curtailed or offline a lot of the time.
And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there’s an excess of energy
I’m all for green hydrogen production, it’s using hydrogen in place of fossil fuels that bothers me. We already have a shit load of demand for hydrogen from industrial uses, and it would take 3x the world’s total renewable capacity in 2019, dedicated solely to hydrogen production, to meet this with green hydrogen. If we start adding transportation into that demand we’ll never make it, and it will be far less efficient than other energy sources (eg batteries).
So yeah, we should have green hydrogen production, but we shouldn’t listen to those same people when they say they think it should also be used for transportation. That’s just trying to increase the size of the market to increase profits.
Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn’t just go to waste.
We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. “this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen”, even though that’d be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).
As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that’s not going to flip.
However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they’d be replaced by rail, but that’s not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.