A tech news sub for communists
They didn't mention the round trip efficiency of this process in the article.
For a country like China, Hydrogen should be very low on their list of priorities, unless they are planning to sell this equipment to Japan or South Korea
I think it's a question of how cheap these are to make and maintain compared to alternative energy storage solutions. Any excess energy from renewables that's not captured ends up being wasted, so even an inefficient way to store it is better than not storing it at all.
Compared to no storage, I agree that anything is an improvement. If this is cheaper and easier to maintain than flywheel storage, or flow batteries, or Li-ion batteries, I assume they would have made that the headline of the article
The ecosystem of grifters forming around Hydrogen as a renewable energy alternative is my main concern. There are very few scenarios where hydrogen is the best option
The fact that these turbines are being built suggests there's an economic reason to do it over other types of tech. Hydrogen does have disadvantages as it has lower energy density, but that's mainly a problem for vehicles. It looks like hydrogen use in China has been fairly successful so far https://rmi.org/insight/chinas-green-hydrogen-new-era/
If this approach takes off it's likely that hydrogen production can be made more efficient as well. Solar panels are a good example of how technology can improve dramatically over time.
It's also important to consider the whole lifecycle cost when comparing different storage tech. For example, stuff like lithium batteries requires mining and lithium itself is a limited resource. From what I've seen China is pursuing a lot of different approaches right now, and they're seeing where each one has advantages.
This rmi.org article is talking about production of green Hydrogen to replace black Hydrogen. Which I agree is necessary, no issue there.
The original article is discussing the use of green Hydrogen to store and dispatch power.
According to exhibit 3 of the rmi.org article, "power" is the smallest sector of Hydrogen usage, which is the point I'd like to make, Hydrogen for power (and power storage) should not be high on the priority list (especially for a country like China).
I don't think it is though, it's not like China is pursuing hydrogen at the expense of doing other things. They're trying a whole bunch of different tech right now to see what works. I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do when you're developing something new.
It's also not a bad idea to start developing alternatives to fossil and nuclear backups for otherwise-green grids. It could be a good gap filler for countries whose people have been propagandised against nuclear, for instance.
And it doesn't hurt to see where certain tech will take you. Once you get some engineers together to build and run this thing, you never know what other applications will come to them and other observers. If all you have is coal plants, it's hard not to look at them and think, 'maybe we could burn something else instead' in terms of innovation. I hope that makes sense.
Very much agree, there is a lot of value in taking a broad spectrum approach to these things. As you note, a lot of the time you stumble on things you never expected, or find synergies between different technologies as you put them into use.
The problem with turbines is that they need to be on all the time. You can't turn them on and off constantly. They need several hours of warm-up to achieve efficient conversion of fuel to electricity, when turned on. The article sort of speaks about this midway, but it's jargony.
But, regardless, electrolysing water with excess electricity to make a reservoir of electricity is an amazing idea.