SouthernDude
Active Member
This statement assumes large scale hydrogen storage is significantly cheaper than battery storage. Do we have prices on hydrogen grid storage?
This is true. It is an assumption and I have a rational on why I think it is generally true. Batteries work very well for short term duration storage and are great at meeting daily peaks and smoothing out near instantaneous variations in grid voltage/etc. While this is great and all, seasonal storage is a different animal.
Seasonal storage basically creates a market condition where you have a small period of time during the year to earn revenue. The service is generally high-value, but it's not going to earn the same revenue for providing yearly services. All this to say that a battery LCOE for daily grid services isn't correct to use in this comparison.
We can assume that transmission costs for both Hydrogen and batteries are negligible because its possible to use the existing infrastructure for both. The same assumption can be made with existing natural gas pipelines if necessary.
The capital cost of existing natural gas plants is incredibly low and its possible to do the same for hydrogen or the same facility that generated the hydrogen could run the electrolysis process in reverse and generate the electricity. The additional capital cost would just be the hydrogen storage tank itself in that case.
Hydrogen storage tanks can store hydrogen at various different pressures. This effectively means that there is a range of total energy storage where the marginal cost of for increasing the total energy storage by an additional unit of energy is essentially equal to the cost of the hydrogen when it is produced.
Batteries don't have that advantage. The marginal cost of adding additional battery storage is effectively the same over the same energy amount. That's not even getting into space considerations with batteries either.
Both the tank and battery will 'leak' energy over time and I'm not sure what that looks like for a grid scale battery.
I could be wrong, but that doesn't matter. I just don't want arbitrary regulations that would prevent market competition between the two.