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[–] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (34 children)

This was a peak situation, but long term with even more renewable energy, that's when Hydrogen becomes relevant.
And when we have enough surplus production of electricity to produce cheap hydrogen the sky is the limit. Because cheap hydrogen can replace oil and gas everywhere.

We are not there yet, but I think it's not too far away.

the Danish Energy Agency is spearheading an ambitious plan to produce even more wind power for both export and domestic use.

And we are far from alone in this, all European countries are working towards more renewables. Which is why I think the above will become reality soon. Hydrogen is wasteful and cost a lot of electricity to make, but when electricity becomes plentiful enough that renewable production goes to waste, that's when hydrogen becomes really really relevant, and can replace everything that can't be replaced with electricity and batteries.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago* (17 children)

    doesn't hydrogen have way worse round-trip efficiency than batteries, even before things like embrittlement? i've heard as low as 45%, with the rest just becoming heat.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Yes but how will the oil companies take their unnecessary cut if you use batteries?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    why do you think lego is so expensive now

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Because it has strong marketing and a cult-like fan base.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Not quite. I mean, partially that is the case, but the good Chinese competition costs on many sets at least 50% of Lego if not more, so the extra margin is there but not astronomically high. Turns out, Lego is one of the most challenging toys to produce (hence it took China so long to catch up in quality, even though they have fully caught up by now), it needs ridiculously high injection molding precision and each product consists of hundreds if not thousand individual parts that need to be correctly sorted.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    Hydrogen has other uses too. Currently we use gas which results in carbon emissions. But with cheap enough energy, you can get hydrogen from water. There is also an option to not emit the carbon when using gas, but you get less hydrogen for the same input so no one is going to do that at scale.

    Another major use for hydrogen is the haber-bosch process.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    most hydrogen is produced from natural gas unfortunately :(

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    It is currently. But cheap renewable energy makes renewable hydrogen a more viable option.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (7 children)

    it's currently about 5x the cost to produce so i think some other incentives are probably needed as well...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (6 children)

    Currently, but a large part of that cost is due to energy prices. If you have cheaper energy, or periods of excess energy that bring the cost down to/near zero, that is what brings down the cost.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

    if only we actually got there... here the prices have been climbing more and more the more wind turbines we install because of grid instability.

    honestly a great pilot area for energy storage.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    Variable tariffs are an option here and can give you periods of very cheap, free or even negative cost energy.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Think of negative cost energy as paying someone to dispose of something you don't need, like how trash haulers get paid to take stuff away.

    If we get to the point where we have a bunch of generation for peak demand plus storage, and still have excess energy in other times, we can and should investigate fixing that excess energy into stable chemical molecules that are useful for other things (whether it's good for a material, for energy storage, for some other consumable like fertilizer, or even simply reversing carbon emissions by fixing carbon into stable non-CO2 compounds).

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    here too, but it doesn't really help the people who live in apartments :(

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    No but I don't expect you to make hydrogen or ammonia in your apartment beyond perhaps some hydrogen chemistry experiments for fun. Ammonia is probably a bit much to do at home.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago* (15 children)

    Before using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, you need to ensure that no fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity. Otherwise you would increase carbon emissions, not reduce them. I don't see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    The world is currently at 42.6% green electricity. Also 100years are a very long time.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm gonna be a bit nit-picky here. You linked the "Low-carbon" source, which includes nuclear energy. Granted, long discussions can be had, whether nuclear counts as green energy, but besides that, I'd argue that nuclear should not be used to generate hydrogen - if at all it should be used the same as hydrogen would be used: to bridge gaps when not enough renewable energy is available.

    If you switch to renewables-only in the source just above that graph, the world is, according to latest data (2025), at 33.76% electricity generation from renewables. So when it comes to share of electricity generation with renewables we're on par with sometime around the 1950s. If you switch that graph to absolute generation and fossil fuels, you can see that electricity generation from fossil fuels has not yet started to decline.

    On top of all that, this is electricity generation, not primary energy use. For primary energy use we're currently at 8.59% world-wide.

    I'm not saying this to make us give in, I'm just saying that there is a long way to go - 100 years are (hopefully) a bit too much, but it's definitely not around the corner. And as an aside maybe also highlight that reductions in (primary) energy consumption are as important as ever.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    nuclear should not be used to generate hydrogen - if at all it should be used the same as hydrogen would be used: to bridge gaps when not enough renewable energy is available

    Nuclear power can definitely not fill this role of a fast switching on and off tool, it works most efficient as a steady long term output. Technically it can stop sending electricity to the grid, but that wastes all the heat that keeps being generated and is immensely inefficient. Heat storage in liquid salt seems to be an upcoming thing for nuclear power, but is not used there yet.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Share of electricity generation from low-carbon sources

    Renewables include solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal, wave, and tidal.

    It seems like hydropower is doing a lot of lifting across the developing world. Spots like Ethiopia, Paraguay, and Brazil are all heavily dependent on hydroelectricity to power major municipalities and industrial centers.

    As climate change impacts the volume and flow of major waterways, I'm a little worried how that ends up.

    United States: 43%

    That really shocked me. And, I gotta say, these numbers look deeply suspicious. I work in the Houston energy sector, and I can say we're not slowing down development of the Permian Basin. US fossil fuel exports are only going up. Then there's the big investment in data center fossil fuel plants that doesn't seem to be in the forecasts.

    That's not to say we're also not building out enormous new solar and wind facilities, even in the belly of the Texas Beast. But the Flint Run plant alone is more than they're reporting. And that's assuming Trump doesn't get his 1.25-gigawatt Terra Energy Center in Alaska.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    And, I gotta say, these numbers look deeply suspicious. I work in the Houston energy sector, and I can say we're not slowing down development of the Permian Basin.

    I think liquid hydrocarbons are much more likely to be used directly in combustion engines, rather than electricity generation. So even as oil production increases, the percentage of electricity coming from high carbon sources might still be dropping, while the primary energy numbers might go the other way.

    So for our electricity mix in 2025, we reached 17.4% nuclear, 10.3% wind, 8.6% solar, 5.4% hydro, 1.0% bioenergy.

    But if you look at primary energy mix, fossil fuels are much, much higher percentage: something like 16.8% low carbon (renewable + hydro + nuclear), 35.0% gas, 38.8% oil, 9.3% coal.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    This statistic includes nuclear and bioenergy. I'm unsure about bioenergy, but nuclear certainly can not qualify as green. Unless you mean green glowing stuff, like nuclear waste is often depicted.

    Also 100years are a very long time

    Yes and humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    They’re probably using green to mean “not CO2 producing” given the context of the discussion being about CO2 emissions. As far as I’m aware nuclear energy fits that criteria.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    They’re probably using green to mean “not CO2 producing” given the context of the discussion being about CO2 emissions

    I understand the argument and yes CO2 emissions are indeed lower. However, only marketing/sales/lobbyists/politicians would use that to sell it as green energy. It's not green, it's not environment friendly, it's not renewable.

    Actually one could argue that it is extremely environment friendly, seeing as Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    nuclear certainly can not qualify as green

    In terms of carbon emissions, it's pretty lean. You're only really talking about the cost of concrete and of harvesting uranium fuel, which is negligible beside the cost of coal or natural gas.

    humanity is sometimes very very very slow to change for the better.

    The turnover to wind and solar has been genuinely shocking in its rapidity. Market forces are one hell of a drug.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    True, but with a constant 100% plus generation from renewable, there obviously wouldn't be any fossil fuel burned to generate electricity. Here we are already at 80% of our total yearly electricity generated by renewables.
    When that reaches 100%, it can be done by utilizing surplus at peaks to generate hydrogen, exactly to completely prevent any use of fossil fuels.

    I don’t see the whole worlds energy consumption going purely green within the next 100 years.

    100 years is a very long time, back in the 70's it was considered a lofty goal to achieve even 10%, and now we are at 80!!
    I don't think you have historical perspective.
    Personally I think within another decade we will surpass 100% here, and have the ability to export a lot of surplus renewable energy.
    I was also mostly thinking about civilized countries, not so much for instance USA.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    "here" is nice and good, but "here" is not global. This is not about a local incident. It's easy to have "too much green energy" in one place, just build a single wind turbine and don't connect it to a grid. But using that excess power to produce an inefficient expensive fuel in one part of the world doesn't solve the global energy- and emmission- problem. It's cheaper and more efficient to transport energy all over the world and shut down local fossil fuel power plants than to produce hydrogen, ship that all over the world and burn that.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It's not as easy to ship electricity around as you might think. Electricity attenuates over distance, and when green sources are far from population centers, that effect is higher. To use electricity, you have to be physically tied to the power grid, or carry batteries. Those are heavy and require a bunch of heavy metals sourced from questionable places.

    Hydrogen is more portable and transferable than electricity. It can be used for off-grid purposes, like vehicles and wherever you'd use propane now. And its efficiency compared to electricity doesn't really matter if you're producing it using waste voltage from surplus.

    Both have their places. Converting away from fossil fuels isnt going to have a monolithic solution.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Hydrogen is more portable and transferable than electricity. It can be used for off-grid purposes, like vehicles and wherever you’d use propane now.

    That's a good valid point for it. For such extreme edge use cases this would make sense.

    Electricity attenuates over distance

    I'm pretty sure transporting energy over a long distance power transmission over extreme distances like between eg Portugal or South Africa and eg China or the far tip of Russia is more energy and cost efficient than transporting hydrogen. So hydrogen only wins when the target location actually needs hydrogen, not when they need electricity. But I argue that the majority of power demand would be of electric nature.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    CleanTechnica is doing shoddy reporting.

    They talk about Denmark hitting 140% peak production "last Friday" in an article from 2026-09-09, so presumably that would mean 2026-09-04. Then they link an 11 year old Guardian article from 2015-07-10.

    The rest of the article is also barely about Denmark at all, it is just bait.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    CleanTechnica is a garbage source. It consists entirely of reposts scraped from elsewhere on the internet, except summarized poorly by people (or possibly LLMs) who have barely more than a surface level understanding of the topic at hand. I don't understand why it has the popularity it does.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago

    WOKE NONSENSE! HELP!

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    What does this mean? The 100% all for Denmark and they could now sell the 40% to other countries? That is fantastic! (Have rates come down at all for the citizenry?).

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    It was one peak moment during a time of low usage at night with simultaneous strong winds. Assuming this is about the July 2015 moment (which CleanTechnica seems to be hiding


    or even completely ignorant of).

    So yes those 40% surplus were automatically exported (the European power market is integrated), but no that didn't move the needle on consumer prices.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Exported only if the grid needs it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I'm still wondering what you might have meant by this.

    If you produce 40% over current usage you have to get rid of that 40% immediately. For a small country with no appreciable amount of pump storage they could quickly spin up this must mean mostly by export. Otherwise the frequency rises sharply above the 50 Hz such that substations start dropping like flies.

    In other words it seems obvious to me that the grid needs it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I almost don't care, so long as fossil CEOs starve.

    Also, no oil wars.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    If suddenly without fossils, 95% of the population will starve.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    They must have a really good electrical grid. I remember 'brown' outs because too much electricity was generated in Vermont.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Denmark is integral part of CESA, a snychronous electrical grid, connecting almost all of Europe, except for the British Isles, the Nordic countries and Mordor to the east. It even includes Ukraine, Turkey and the Maghreb. If electrical infrastructure is not insufficient and/or the operator incompetent then this is no issue at all.

    PS: I know that Vermont is, unlike Texas, part of a large synchronous grid as well but I guess either the infrastructure is not up for the job or the operator isn't.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    As I mentioned in another reply, this was a decade ago. The population of Vermont is less than a million and very spread out. Mostly the issue was that the grid wasn't ready for it.

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