That's what hydrogen production from water electrolysis is for.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
279 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59770 readers
3095 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Ohh, you gave me an idea! Given that it also happens in CA, maybe we should use the excess for freshwater production from seawater.
That still leaves the brine problem. Youve just traded one for another.
Hydrogen wouldn't cause another problem.
Some could be used in molten salt reactors/batteries, no?
I imagine so, but were talking about at best case of a 50% water 50% brine solution with reverse osmosis, and worse if it's a thermal desalination plant. It's a fuck ton of liquid, more than we could ever hope to use in a reactor like that.
Some other ideas are evaporate the brine and use the salt for roads in winter, but again, it's more than we could manage at scale, and salting roads isn't ideal either.
Are you saying that we could make use of sodium metal for batteries of all sorts at reasonable prices due to it's over abundance by just getting more of it using solar power?
I don't know if the output of the desalination is what we actually need or how much refinement it would need, but the salt output would probably still outpace our ability to use it. Sodium is just 1 factor of building these newer batteries.
e.g Tesla has a factory with a 40gwh storage output when fully scaled, and it's taken years to get there. Cells weren't the only factor in that.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Brine, eh? Well we do grow lots of cucumbers....
;-)
Seen some math on the mountains of salt we would have to move. Very discouraging for desalinization and/or getting hydrogen that way.
We don't have to get the hydrogen from sea water. It really just depends on where the excess is. Maybe that's not great for Australia or California... but for other places it could be.
Ka...booom!
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yeah I'm getting to that point where I'm willing to pay more to install solar, and a battery or two, just so I don't pay electrical providers as much each quarter.
We're also contemplating batteries because the amount you get paid to feed solar in isn't like for like with usage. 25c cost vs 3c feed in.
I couldn't care less about the 'profit' for feed in, it's just about not relying or paying energy providers. I keep getting told by Solar companies that batteries aren't cost effective yet.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Good for them! Theoretically that should attract industries that need a lot of electricity and everything balances out cost and demand wise.
So, bitcoin miners
Fuck bitcoin. It should be allocated to desalinisation so less water is pulled from the rivers of the driest continent on Earth. The ecology around waterways is already in the shitter, and global warming is going to 10x that clusterfuck.
That is a good option too. How long does it take to spool up or ramp down desalination? I mentioned Bitcoin mining because it's super fast to come online or go offline depending on the energy requirements at the moment.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Steel, aluminium and battery production can also make good use of lots of cheap renewable energy.
load more comments
(5 replies)
How about investing in grid energy storage, to cope with intermittent production?
They are. Modeling has shown that getting Australia to 98.8% renewable is highly achievable.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/energy/grid-renewable-electricity-simulation/
Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.
It's just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.
30GW of solar is not much. Germany built 13GW this year.
Germany has more than 3 times the population of Australia, and the article linked needed to be able to generate 30GW peak so likely required more installed capacity, and solar is only 1 element out of 5 required in that scenario.
Again it does seem to be feasible to get renewable only in Australia (or close to) but I dont think that tells you much about elsewhere
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
I want those problems.