Windpower

[Andy Burns]

Yes, I only know of one LPG station in this city, maybe there are others that I haven't noticed ... seems there a 3 (or 4 counting one on the motorway)

[Roger Hayter]

The problem with that is having plant and employees lying idle when there isn't any wind.

[Roland Perry]

And I bet none are at a supermarket, selling for 10% off the BP-franchise price.

[Pancho]

Yes, but the devil is in the detail. How much it costs to have a hydrogen production operation lying idle. How much it costs to generate wind electricity. How much it costs to integrate wind energy into the grid.

I don't know the economic answers. It just seems that, theoretically, hydrogen production is a potential answer to the obvious problem of wind variability.

It is even possible that hydrogen production could be coupled with hydrogen power generation to balance wind variability, with only the surplus hydrogen going to power cars.

I don't know the answers but it is an interesting problem.

I'm also very dubious of the suitability of hydrogen as a fuel for cars due to the problems TNP mention earlier, i.e. volume, leaks and maybe explosion risk. .

[The Natural Philosopher]

Uranium is pretty good., Comes already charged up.

Of course the obvious answer is 'I wouldn't'

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is the ontrinsic problem of intermittent reneables., The high peak to mean ratio is inefficient in terms of capital resources, Build for the peaks, get returns from te mean#

[The Natural Philosopher]

But the cheapest solution to that problem is to stop paying subsidies on museum tgarde technology and build nukes instead

No, its a very boringt propblerm if te quality of 'if we only had a dead rabbit and potatoes for diunner, what would we use to flavour it' sort

We have better than that. The question is academic.

Only the EU is insisting on 'renewables' We are leaving the EU. There is no earthly reason why we would therefore schackle ourselves to expensive mediaeval technology when we will have control of our own nuclear authority.

Exactly. Far better to make synthetic diesel. With nukes.

[Andy Burns]

Unlikely to end up cheap though, the wind farms already have their subsidy, no doubt the hydrogen farms will lobby for a subsidy on top ...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Well, we seem a bit short of nuclear power stations at the moment. To provide all that constant cheap electricity everyone wants. Remember when it was going to be too cheap to bother metering?

[Steve Walker]

More like 30%.

35% for GDI.

60% is perfectly possible. I know of work that has produced higher efficiencies than that ... the limiting factor is cost as that vehicle cost over £2.5m The work colleague who was driving it for a few weeks was scared of the cost.

SteveW

[Tim Streater]

You don't store electrical energy by flooding valleys, you store energy.

And if anyone thinks that batteries will solve our problems, dream on. They are nearly as good as they will ever get.

[Steve Walker]

Haven't you come across a flow battery? ;)

SteveW

[charles]

Very true, but you use electrical energy to fill the valley and when it is allowed out electrical energy is created.

[Tim Streater]

Only if you pass the water through a generator. If you just open the sluices you get nothing.

[Roger Hayter]

You xould drive all sorts of machines if you wanted to. There is a waterwheel driven blast furnace near us. Not in use, obviously.

[dennis]

What a stupid statement, if its more efficient at low power then you make it bigger and it will be just as efficient.

Of course you can charge a betteryin minutes if you want to and make hydrogen redundant.

You use a liquid to store the energy add to fill up you suck the used fluid out of one tank and put the fresh fluid in the other reusing the stuff you sucked out at the filling station.

No need for standard sizes just standard connectors and control.

liquid battery technology is a better investment for research than hydrogen fule cells both for the grid and vehicles.

[dennis]

But nowhere as good as superheating steam using nukes and then breaking into hydrogen and oxygen. Most of the energy comes from the cooling of the reactor. The rest from electricity.

The french wouldn't need to shut their reactors down when its hot if they were designed that way.

[Swer]

All of ours do LPG and the entire taxi fleet is LPG powered.

[jeikppkywk]

Not when you still have to compress it and move it to where you plan to use it.

If it does ever make sense to use hydrogen as a transport fuel, and that?s very unlikely, it makes a lot more sense to use nukes to generate it directly and not via electrolysis.

And even that only makes sense because it is likely to be much less polluting that making say methanol using nukes.

But again, not economically viable instead of nukes.

[tabbypurr]

Refineries could be eliminated from the vehicle fuel cycle. Engines have most of what they need to produce their own fuel from light sweet crude as they run. There are also IC engines that can run on LSC, so starting on it doesn't seem undoable. Maybe in future cars will drop the leftover tar into potholes as they go :)

NT