Easier than we thought

By Ian Page - 

A paper from Stanford last year estimated how much more electricity the world needs to generate to totally replace fossils.

Early estimates by many ( Including me ) were 5-10 times today's capacity.

However, the paper pointed out that electricity is far more efficient in its home and industrial uses than fossil, whether it be house heating, transport, or steel making and came up with a much lower estimate.

The IEA has just reduced a very high estimate for Hydrogen production in 2030 by a third. ( although it kept its 2050 figure the same)

As I showed in my hydrogen talk, most of the uses for hydrogen proposed make no sense energetically or commercially., and the large proportion currently consumed in oil refineries will go away over time with oil and gas, and doesn't need to be replaced. Replacement of home natural gas by hydrogen makes no engineering, or commercial sense which eliminates another large proposed use, transmission of elegy over pipes makes little sense if the need is for electricity, or heating and the development of batteries and innovative approaches for transport, has eliminated the vehicle market, even trucks.

Thus the actual enhanced demand for hydrogen is likely to continue to diminish. settling down as ammonia production and Dunkel Flaute storage.

The generator capacity needed for a given demand is also reduced below that anticipated, as a result of grid-controlled demand. Electric cars apparently only need charging about once a week currently, so can be charged at low-demand times. Well-insulated houses lose about 1 degree C per 5 hours, so  a house that is allowed to vary from 21C to 19C provides a ten-hour period when zero demand is possible

At present smoothing of electrical demand is by storage, typically batteries with a 1-4 hour storage period. A projection shows that the 4-6 hour period will be about half of the storage need by 2050, but considering that heat pumps will consume most of the electricity used by a house ( UK 1Kw for general use, up to 5KW in peak winter for heat pump based heating)  the 1-10 hour storage needs could be provided by controlling the demand not by storage reducing the cost of storage dramatically.

All these examples show that simply assuming direct replacement by electricity or storage, can seriously overestimate the cost of transitions.

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