this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Economy
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I admit i am not well educated on this topic but isn't this basically an amazing opportunity to produce hydrogen for next to nothing?
Yes. Or any industrial facility that requires lots of power. Think how much the economy could zoom if people didn't have to worry about the price of electricity
I suspect the problem there revolves around “how fast can you produce hydrogen?” Generally, oversupply events (and resulting negative prices) are brief. To take advantage of oversupply / negative prices, hydrogen production (or other energy storage) needs to be able to convert energy to storage very quickly.
I don’t know much about hydrogen plants, but I would guess that they aren’t super “peaky” — meaning they don’t have the capacity to ramp up and generate a lot of hydrogen quickly like they would need to really take advantage of the situation. If that is the case, hydrogen plants can still take advantage (simultaneously helping the grid and helping to stabilize prices) but not to the extent we would like.
Hydrogen electrolysis meshes well with batteries. Having enough solar to meet non-heating needs in winter even on cloudy days, means having way too much power in other 3 seasons when sunny. Enough solar and batteries to charge in winter cloudy days, and dump into heat storage (or some H2 electrolysis) on winter sunny days, would also let you overcool till 3pm in summer, and do electrolysis in 3 seasons.
Not only is H2 import/exportable for backup power or heating, but the electrolysis equipment is sizeable into truck containers that let them move around seasonally. Canada/Europe long summers is good time for electrolysis from winter sufficient solar. Southern US, can be good enough other seasons, but southern hemisphere can gain more from other hemisphere's winter.