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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-257
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Color Revolutions:
> The opposition, which has been divided into four main political forces, had claimed victory before preliminary results of exit polls were announced. <
U.S. Election:
Ukraine:
BRICS:
Palestine:
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Other issues:
China:
Zio-Europe:
Miscellaneous:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
@Tom_Pfotzer #101
Tom: It wouldn’t surprise me to find that these projects are subsidized. Like solar panels and electric cars and windmills before them, people (and I think you are one of them) argued that such products would never stand on their own.
And yet they do, after all. The reason they were subsidized is that the nation doing the subsidizing wanted to establish first-mover status in a growth industry. Are you going to argue that solar panels, and elec cars and wind turbines are not growth industries?
Solar PV and wind turbines are built with generational subsidies: not just subsidies for construction but guaranteed payments for output. This results in laughable, if it weren’t so economically devastating, mismatches of production vs. demand.
For example: let’s look at UK wind
UK wind has been “increasing” in numbers, but so has the amount of wind curtailment.
It is so bad that the UK has already exceeded 6 terawatt-hours of curtailment in 2024 – and it is not even November yet. 7 million terawatt-hours of curtailment for 2024 is very possible now. Curtailment payments are already over 300 million GBP and will certainly set a new record in 2024.
To put this 6 million TWh in perspective: the entire UK annual electricity consumption is in the 260 Twh range – in other words, wind curtailment alone is already more than 2% of all electricity consumed in the UK in 1 year.
So no, solar PV and wind are not growth industries in the traditional sense: they cost ever more and deliver ever less actual societal benefit.
Solar PV and wind are growth industries in the sense they drive up electricity prices and enrich these subsidy farmers.
Tom: Solar or wind turbines provide power. Hydrogen plant uses elec-power hydrolysis or related tech to split water into H2 and O2. H2 is stored in a metal-hydride tank (safe storage of hydrogen). H2 is used as-nec to:
a. Provide hydrogen for the smelter, and
b. Provide uniform, continuous power for all plant operations, which might include ore dryers and smelter heater system, possibly a rolling mill. Depending on where the plant is, might also include a cement plant if limestone is nearby
You’ll note I mentioned the “renewables intermittency problem”, which of course is associated with … solar and wind, and the reason to mention that in this context is because it’s obvious that a hydrogen plant needs electricity … I was thinking I didn’t have to spell that out all the way. Clearly I did need to state the obvious.
🙂
All you demonstrate is your complete ignorance.
First of all, the water cracking plants cannot operate intermittently. They are so expensive, capex wise, that they must operate 24/7/365. So while solar PV contributes electricity during the middle of the day, and wind contributes electricity intermittently at all hours (especially including midnight to 4 am), the cracking plants are actually powered by dispatchables most of the time.
So no, they do not address diddly squat.
And that of course addresses your batteries, and lithium issues, as well, correct?
No, because the batteries drive up capex cost even more. If the hydrogen cracking plant were to install the batteries to “truly” operate just on wind and solar, then the already ginormous capex goes up by multiples.
Yet again, you are clearly accepting bullshit from proponents as opposed to looking at actual numbers – which I note you have provided none.
C1ue: what is the actual projected cost of this green steel vs. steel from China (ie. coal derived)?
Tom: don’t know yet. I’m guessing it’ll be cheaper, because hydrogen plants aren’t that expensive (one time cost), nor are solar arrays, and coal and iron ore don’t have to be shipped (big recurring cost). I’m expecting reduced shipping to easily pay amortization on the power systems
Hydrogen plants are extremely expensive. Yet another example of your obvious innumeracy and/or lack of any actual business planning capability.
Here are some actual numbers: 4 MWh of electricity (theoretical) for green steel. NREL estimates of hydrogen cracking cost are over $1000 per kW capacity; this number does not include any costs like siting/permits/installation/maintenance/inflation. The numbers also use ridiculously low electricity prices ($0.03 to $0.06 per kWh).
So let’s look at a real world example: Sweden is proposing a green steel plant, feeding off a dam, that will produce 5 million tons of steel a year. That’s roughly 571 tons of green steel per hour. 571x4x1.2 (because there are losses in the system) = 2,740 MW of electricity per hour. Now multiply by over $1000 per kW = $2.74 billion. That’s just for the hydrogen cracking plant.
Cheap? Like hell it is.
Australia would need 20 of these to replace all of its steel consumption with “green steel” so now we’re looking at $55 billion just for the hardware for the hydrogen cracking plants for the green steel plants.
Oh, but that’s not so much money. Except these 20 Sweden scale cracking plants will consume 55 GW of electricity every hour.
Australia’s entire annual electricity consumption is 188 TWh = 188,000 GWh = 21 GW per hour (188000/365/24).
So Australia would have to over triple its electricity production just to replace its steel with “green steel”. LOLOLOL
C1ue: How much steel does one of these plants produce?
Tom: I see no reason, at the moment, why these plants can’t replace existing systems over the next 20-30 year horizon, and so scale up to meet or exceed current scale. I would expect smaller pilots to get built first, work out any bugs, and then scale up.
I’ve already addressed this with the above example. Electricity consumption is so high, that its Nah Gah Happen.
C1ue: I guarantee the answer to all of these questions is quite unpleasant.
Tom: I’m not tracking with you, C1ue. What I stated above looks pretty good, and you haven’t (yet) rebutted any of the core points.
All you have demonstrated is that you are innumerate.
The big issue is “what’s the hydrogen cost” .vs. “what’s the coal cost” (delivered cost, and the ore delivery cost, too). I assert that the H2 “cost” is the amortization cost of the hydrogen plant and the renewables system (plus ops labor), which is very likely to be less than the cost to transport coal and ore, let alone to procure the coal. //
Nope. The real problem is that green steel electricity consumption is greater than double the entire nation’s present electricity generation capacity, in the Australia example.
For a nation like China that is actually using industrial scale amounts of steel – the notion that their steel consumption/production can be replaced by green steel is literally laughable. 900 million tons times 4 MWh per ton = 3600 Terawatt-hours of electricity.
China’s entire electricity consumption is only about 8000 Terawatt-hours total.
China would have to build 600 new 1-GW power plants just to fuel the “green steel”.
One guess as to what type of plants these would be: coal.
Thank you for another demonstration of your utter lack of contact with reality, Mr Pfotzer.
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 29 2024 9:26 utc | 112
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