The Promises and Perils of the Hydrogen Economy with Peter Kelly-Detwiler | EP207

The hydrogen economy is all the rage, with billions in government funding and skyrocketing private investment. But should we buy into the hype? Energy and utility guru Peter Kelly-Detwiler joins Tim Montague to separate fact from fiction about the promises and perils of the hydrogen economy. 

They discuss the existing hydrogen economy, which is largely centered around industrial processes like refining and fertilizer production, and the potential for decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors like steelmaking, high-heat industrial processes, and long-haul transportation using green hydrogen.

Peter explains the challenges and opportunities associated with producing green hydrogen cost-effectively, including the need to drive down renewable energy costs, improve electrolyzer efficiency, and achieve economies of scale.

They also delve into the complexities of transporting and storing hydrogen, including the limitations of existing natural gas pipelines and the potential for leakage, which could indirectly contribute to global warming.

The conversation touches on various pilot projects and initiatives, such as the Inflation Reduction Act's incentives for green hydrogen, the Department of Energy's Hydrogen Hubs program, and hybrid power plants aiming to blend hydrogen with natural gas (ACES in Utah) or potentially transition to pure hydrogen.

Peter emphasizes the importance of failing fast and discarding approaches that don't work, as well as being cautious about investing in the wrong areas, which could provide ammunition to those who don't wish for a successful energy transition.

Overall, the episode provides a nuanced and balanced perspective on the role of hydrogen in the energy transition, highlighting both its potential and the need for careful consideration of its costs, efficiency, and environmental impacts.

Peter emphasizes hydrogen is a tool in the decarbonization toolkit but not a "Swiss army knife" that solves all problems. The next few years will provide more clarity on its optimal role in the energy transition.

Social Media
Peter Kelly-Detwiler
Website
Hydrogen Ladder 5.0

Transcript

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 0:38

Certainly Hydrogen is a tool in the toolkit. It's not the Swiss Army knife that everyone thinks, you know, solving all the problems, but it does have a place. And I think in the few next few years, we'll get a much clearer sense as to what's real, you know, what's the hope and what's the hype and, and hopefully, like I said, hopefully we fail fast and discard the stuff that's not gonna work.

intro: 0:59

Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, I want to go deeper into decarbonisation. We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it. Together, we can speed the energy transition.

Tim Montague: 1:27

Today on the Clean Power Hour, the promises and perils of hydrogen, I'm Tim Montague, your host Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. And please reach out to me I love hearing from my listeners, check out my YouTube channel and connect with me on LinkedIn. Today, we're going to be geeking out on the hydrogen economy. My guest today is Peter Kelly Detweiler, otherwise known as PKD. He is the author of the Energy Switch, fantastic book, if you haven't read that book, check it out. And he is a well known industry consultant in the utility space. And he's very interested in the energy transition. And he is a well known consultant and trainer in the energy transition. Welcome to the show, Peter. Thank you, it's

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 2:16

a pleasure to be here.

Tim Montague: 2:17

It is your second time being on the show, I want to make sure we our listeners understand that the first episode we did a couple years ago, we were focused on the Energy Switch your book, today we are going to go deep into hydrogen. And as our listeners know, hydrogen is a fantastic element. It is the most common element in the universe. If I if I recall, correctly, the Sun is made mostly of hydrogen. And so we have this thing called a fusion reactor in the sky that is raining photons down on us. And, and so you see immediately there just in the life of Earth, how important hydrogen is to our, our solar system on earth and to the universe at large. And, you know, when you when you when you grok, how abundant those photons are, you realize that, wow, we're a water planet, we have lots of water. And when you take photons and turn them into electrons, then you can create green hydrogen with green photons with this process called electrolysis, so there is a tremendous opportunity for green hydrogen, but we already have a hydrogen economy. It's based on the fossil fuel industry. And so why don't you set the table for us, Peter? What is the the existing hydrogen economy? And in a few short words, like, what is the next 510 20 years look like for you? And then we'll, we'll go deeper into some of the segments.

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 3:54

Sure. So the just hydrogen economy is largely centered around two industrial processes in this country. One is hydrogen is used in large quantities in refining. And the other one is it's in the fertilizer industry, because ammonia, NH three one nitrogen three hydrogen is the precursor to ammonia, which goes into nitrates making making, you know, fertilizer. So we've been doing that in this country for decades. And in fact, there's a very well developed hydrogen economy down the Gulf Coast and into from Texas, across Louisiana, and over 1000 miles of hydrogen dedicated pipelines down there. So we've been doing that for a long time. What we're now trying to do, though, is to decarbonize the hard to abate sectors of our global energy economy. Yes, maybe hydrogen and transportation, I think not. And we can talk about that later on why, but certainly, areas for example, like high heat that you need for industrial processes, hydrogen could be a suitable replacement for Coke slash coal or natural gas there. And then in the steel industry, which is responsible for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Today, what what do we do we take iron ore, and we smelt it with huge amounts of heat, driving out the impurities, including water and oxygen, excuse me. And what you do with direct reduction is you actually infuse hydrogen into this ore, and it goes off in the form of steam taking out those impurities, and then you can throw it into an electric arc furnace and thereby decarbonize the hydrogen industry. So there's lots of potential to use this simple molecule for decarbonizing the economy through Real devils in the details and in the cost and the fact that it is a simple molecule with its own unique behavioral characteristics.

Tim Montague: 5:48

So what are the major let's let's quickly review the major industries. You mentioned industrial heat and steelmaking. There's the possibility of using hydrogen in transportation that is still very nascent. And holds promise mostly for long haul, like trucks and trains and ships and planes, perhaps. But what are the what are the major segments? You mentioned fertilizer? does? Does green hydrogen play into all of those spaces?

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 6:22

Well, potentially hydrogen it, irrespective of how it's made, could play into all those spaces. The real question is, where are you eliminating carbon from the economy at the lowest cost? Ultimately, this doesn't, you see a lot of discussion around well, we could create and use this much hydrogen. But then the question really is, well, it's the carbon stupid. And so you hear conversations around well, with the hydrogen hubs, for example. And with the tax credits, well, let's use the grid 24/7 With electrolyzers. If we were to do that, we might have solar in the daytime and then all kinds of great power at night, we could we could result in a perverse outcome with more greenhouse gas emissions than less if we do this the wrong way. It's really complex. And so you know, when you first look at it, it's sort of this wonder drug, you run it through a fuel cell, or you run it through a combustion turbine and you get water, right. You're wrong without it's really all the nuances and the costs. And then how does this really ultimately impact the decarbonisation strategies that we're trying to employ globally? At what costs? That's where it gets really tricky. And you know, one person in this industry who's really figured this out to my mind, in a great way, is Michael Liebreich. Here you II founded Bloomberg, New Energy Finance was way ahead of the curve on batteries, solar, a lot of other energy conversion technologies. And now he has this thing called the hydrogen ladder. And what he does, and I find it a useful way of looking at this is, think about all the different sectors of the economy are trying to decarbonize, and where are their alternatives to hydrogen? And where are their knots? And therefore, so for example, but take one simple case, transportation, a passenger vehicle? Originally, people think, Oh, great, let's get more Toyota rise out there and other hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles. Well, if you take green hydrogen, let's say you take 100 kilowatt hours of green electricity, and put it through an electrolyzer and then compress that hydrogen, and then store it someplace, and then run it through a fuel cell, which ultimately feeds an electric motor like an electric car. By the time you get through the whole process, you've lost two thirds of that raw green energy, right? So why not take that electricity and put it into a lithium ion battery, where you're going to have 90%, round trip efficiency and only lose about 10% in the battery technology, and another 5% or so getting energy to the wheels. So really, again, it's all about what end uses are we trying to focus on? And where are there alternatives that are more cost effective. And ultimately, we only have so much capital in the world to decarbonize this economy. being smart about what we were what we're using for what end users is the name of the game, and his ladder is a really good explanation of the priorities, and how we should think about that.

Tim Montague: 9:24

Yeah. And if you just Google hydrogen ladder, you'll find it on LinkedIn, hydrogen ladder, version 5.0. So thank you for referencing that. We'll put a link in the show notes. Of course, you know, it boggles the mind sometimes, Peter, what things we do do. There's this vehicle called the Mariah, for example, right? The Toyota. It's a passenger vehicle in California only, as far as I know. And when you buy MRI, it's like a $50,000 car. So it's a premium vehicle. But it comes with some incentive, like you get free hydrogen fueling for a couple of years when you buy MRI. And there is, you know, a small network of fueling stations in in a few markets in California, in LA and in San Francisco. But the as you pointed out, like the the first energetic principles of that are really not very good. And and you know, I always say, Well, why isn't Elon Musk going after hydrogen for consumer vehicles? If if there's a there there, and I don't think that there is a there there. I think there is perhaps a there therefore For larger vehicles for trucks, or trains, and you see this on the, on the ladder, but I guess, how do you how do you help my audience of energy professionals who are very interested in the energy transition, they're very deep into solar wind and energy storage and hydrogen is a a form of storage. Okay, it can be used like a battery. But the round trip efficiency of that is is problematic. You know, so how do you let's let's continue to paint this picture because I think it is still hard for people to kind of grab on to it seems rather nebulous, unless you already work in, say, the fertilizer industry where hydrogen is common thing. If you work in transportation, you know, we're all all of us energy professionals are becoming more and more versed about electrification of transportation. For example, if you're a solar installer, tomorrow, you're a solar and Evie, charger and infrastructure installer, right? It's not it, you can't rely on that single basket. Have I put solar panels on rooftops anymore? I don't think I think that business model is fading away. So entered, you know, transportation is very important to my audience, but but how to paint a picture of how to get our arms around this.

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 12:02

Sure. And mentally, it is complex. So and you're right, it is for the most part, hydrogen is a is a carrier, if you think about it is a chemical battery. It's not an electrochemical battery, but chemical in that sense, right. And so let's look at decarbonisation of the grid for one moment. Right now we've got, say, 30%, renewables in various grids. And we haven't had to add a lot of storage yet. Because you can essentially flex the gas generators, make them work harder and deal with the variability, then you start to get 4050 60% renewables, now you need some kind of medium to long range, storage, longer duration storage. So you start to look at flow batteries that get you 810 12 hours, some gravity assisted batteries, certainly some more pumped hydro, although those are really expensive. And you've got batteries like the reverse iron, the reverse rust, iron your battery from form energy that gets you say, 40%, round trip efficiency, still better than hydrogen, which is, you know, 30 to 35%. Now, but the form gets you 100 hours. Okay, so now you get to maybe with those technologies, maybe you could decarbonize seven 70% of your bread. Well, what about those days, when you have seasonal, you know, what the Germans called, don't go fly out and whether, you know, the sun's lower in the sky, and then maybe you have a front that comes through through installs the wind turbines, and suddenly you don't have the energy you need. Now, what do you do? Well, the thinking is, maybe in the future, we do what they're already working on in Utah, which is build these massive caverns in salt domes, hauling them out with water, and store gigawatt hours of electricity in the form of hydrogen, and then run that through turbines, which now advanced turbines can burn it about 50 or 60%. Mix with methane, they can't do 100%, the simple frame turbines can but the more complex ones, like the H classes cannot. So that's like one area where you look at hydrogen and think, okay, there are some potential long term use there as you get further and further out, because it costs about $200 a megawatt hour to generate with hydrogen. Because of all those inefficiency, then you look at other sectors like long haul trucking, you mentioned that one, one of the things I'm always cautioning people on in the conversations is, you can't look at anything separate from everything else. And it's really dangerous to take a snapshot view. So first, let's look at hydrogen itself. How do we get the cost down? Well, first thing you want to do is get the cost of renewables as low as you possibly can. And where you can when you have longer duration renewables. So for example, wind at night solar in the daytime, that's helpful. Why? Because your electrolyzers are expensive. And so the more you can use them, the higher capacity utilization factor you have, the more you can lower your cost of h2. So that's a piece of the equation, then you got to drive down the cost of the electrolyzers themselves. And there's four major tech was four technologies but two major ones which are alkaline, which are low cost, but they don't follow the variability of renewables the same way PMS do which are higher costs, but they use materials like platinum so they're more expensive. And part of the challenge with electrolyzers is making them more efficient. Just converting the energy into water you know, taking the water turning it into hydrogen by the way, you use a Up to 30 kilograms of water for for the cooling of the electrolytes, everything else and just also for the raw chemical formula of separating the h2 into the O two and in that, you know, hydrogen. So you got to think about those issues. And ultimately, then you want to do what we've done with batteries and solar panels, which is the experience curve, you know, driving down the cost and hoping that with every global doubling of cumulative output, the cost can fall by 20, or 25%. So there's this huge banner on the calm that we can follow the same sorts of curves that we've done with solar and batteries. And that's one of the reasons you see so much money being thrown out this from the Europeans and the US is, maybe by just throwing billions of dollars, this 10s of billions of dollars at it, we can jumpstart this thing and scale it and get it to at some point in the future where we'll be cost effective as cost effective because it is by no means cost effective. Now, a kilogram of gray hydrogen made from Steam methane reformation, taking natural gas, CH four and separating out the carbon and hydrogen that cost you like $1 right now per kilogram, green h2o is somewhere in the five to$8 range By most estimates. So ethic come way down in order to become cost effective.

Tim Montague: 16:57

Yeah. So let's reiterate this. You mentioned first and foremost, bringing down the cost of renewables, that is absolutely an essential thing for for for the energy transition writ large. And my guest, my previous guests, Matt Campbell, Tara bass, and Jim Tyler Earth, those are beating this drum very hard, trying to figure out ways to reduce the cost of large scale solar, for example, down to about a penny a kWh is, is what they consider to be the tipping point that's $1 a megawatt hour. And, you know, some very large PPAs solar PPAs have been done around the world, in the one to two cent range. And, you know, as panel prices come down, and they are coming down, eventually we will get there. And you know, eventually when you look fine, when you fast forward 30 years, the grid is going to be about 50% Solar 30 40% Wind and the and the rest is Hydro and Nuclear. And so we will we will make that transition, right. It's a question of how decarbonized it will be. And then there's also this question, which I encourage my listeners to also think about is how do we get back to 300 PPM and hydrogen doesn't necessarily solve that problem whatsoever. It's just a it's a tool for the energy transition for decarbonizing the economy and decarbonizing aspects of heavy industry, steelmaking, food processing, and then transportation and other forms of manufacturing. So, it's a wonderful thing. We want green hydrogen, we have to be careful, as you said, because we could invest money in the wrong ways and, and talk about money. Okay. The inflation Reduction Act is incentivizing green hydrogen, I think with a couple of dollars, is it $3 per kilogram? Yeah, yeah. So carbon intensive. So it's trying to create parity between what you you know, call status quo, brown, gray, hydrogen from from hydrocarbons at $1. And then current market is, say, five if we're lucky. Okay, you're getting closer with that $3 incentive. Is that truly working? I know that the DoD announced a network of hydrogen hubs last year. Tell us about that. Yeah,

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 19:30

they put$7 billion into ultimately seven different hydrogen hubs, some which will be using blue hydrogen, which is seeing methane reformation with carbon capture and storage, some using pink, which is nuclear power, and then some using green. And by the way, there are some other colors. White is hydrogen that comes from industrial processes as a byproduct. We use a lot of white right now in this country, about 20% of the hydrogen in this country is white. So it's essentially free. And then there's this other thing you might have been hearing recently gold, hydrogen or naturally occurring hydrogen, which there's hydrogen that seeps out of the earth all over the world. And there are companies like Coloma they think they just raised almost a quarter billion dollars. And they're drilling for naturally occurring hydrogen here in the United States. And then ARPA e actually just gave out about $20 million to companies to help to stimulate naturally occurring hydrogen. It occurs in iron rich rock, a think it happens well, they know what happens when water comes into contact with that rock. And this thing called serpentinite serpentinization occurs That releases hydrogen. And they're thinking, Well, maybe if we inject water in, we can accelerate that process. So there's some other, you know, funky little things going on in this space as well, back to the hubs. So there's basically the seven hubs, the regional hubs, they're meant to do all these different things and accelerate the process. But none of them while they, while they mostly got just a little bit under over a billion dollars each, they're meant to catalyze a lot of industry from the other stakeholders. And what they've got to do now is they've got to submit more technically detailed papers in terms of who the players are and what they're actually going to do. And then there's a bunch of stage gates, they have to jump through to eventually access all the financing. And the thinking is, most of these won't get built until closer to the end of the decade, because there's a lot of pieces that you have to pull together. Each one of them involves production, middle infrastructure, you know, getting the hydrogen from the production to the end users, and then a community of different end users. So can be transportation can be industry can be, can be fertilizer can be methanol, for example, one of the other things hydrogen is finding its way into is not just pure h2, but also into derivatives, like turbines that can burn ammonia or methanol, sustainable aviation fuels can be based on hydrogen, with carbon capture from the stack, etc. So it is a really cool little molecule that can be used for a lot of other compounds. It's

Tim Montague: 22:09

a cool but devilish molecule, right? Because it's it's very small and light, it wants to escape, it wants to float and it and it gets its way into other elements. So let's talk a little bit more about that, for example, you can take existing pipelines that move methane, and retrofit them to move hydrogen, but you can't use them in their existing form, you have to reformat those pipelines and treat them in other ways, because hydrogen will make traditional metal pipelines brittle and ultimately break. And so it's not a no brainer to convert a methane economy, so to speak to a hydrogen economy in terms of our ability. I mean, when you look at the methane network, the natural gas network around the United States, it is a grid of its own, right, those pipelines are everywhere. 10s, hundreds of 1000s of miles of those of those natural gas pipelines, and you just don't see them because they're mostly underground. But they're there, trust me. And, and of course, we've, you know, we've run this pipeline, to our end user to consumers in many, many places. Now, we're starting to step that back. But tell us more about the challenges and opportunities in terms of getting hydrogen around, it's, it's totally doable to make it but can we package it and transport it around to use it the places we need to use it? Yeah,

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 23:41

that's a really good point. So for short distances, you use two trucks, they're basically trucks with multiple tubes in the back, and companies like plug power, and others are already moving hydrogen and these two trucks. And then you know, for longer distances, middle distances, you use pipelines, and then for really long distance overseas, you ships, but usually you're gonna put, you won't put it in a ship in the form of pure hydrogen, because liquefying, it's super expensive, and you have this thing called boil off, where it warms up a little bit, because you have to keep it at really cold temperatures. And so you have to vent it and you lose hydrogen in the process of shipping it so much more stable to ship it in the form of ammonia, and or methanol, CH three Oh H, with the pipeline itself, sort of those middle distances. The challenge, as you alluded to is, first of all, that little h2 molecule is way simpler than the CH four molecule so wants to get out everywhere. So you have to essentially redo all your valves. And one thing about hydrogen a lot of people do not appreciate it is not a global warming gas, per se. But when it wanders up into the atmosphere, it has this unfortunate tendency to slow down the degradation of methane and methane in its first 20 years or so is 80 times more effective at trapping the radiative heat as co2 is. So unfortunately, hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas. And the first studies have come out of the UK in the last year. Now, there's some other evidence so that it could be actually another significant global warming gas if a lot of it leaks out or we're not careful, then as you mentioned, as well, because of the way it behaves as a molecule and an atom. It likes to infiltrate into steel pipelines, especially steel pipelines that have been used in the gas network and subjected to multiple pressures over time. You know, we pack our pipe mines with gas sometimes to store amounts of gas before heavy uses heavy periods of usage, the gas pipelines down in the Gulf Coast that we use for pure hydrogen, they pick them recently tested them under pressure, they've been around for decades, they're fine. But you can't take an existing natural gas pipeline and do what you did, or do with those hydrogen pipelines dedicated to h2, because a lot of them are older, and they do have some molecular deformations in them, and then the molecules, the hydrogen molecules like to get in there. And then they cause the impediment of the steel. So right now, places like California limit the amount of hydrogen that can be blended up to 5%. And no more, you actually can put 10 5% h2 into the pipeline, and with a membrane, pull it out someplace else. So you actually can can move it through a pipeline right now, in small amounts that are blended, Europe's Europe's actually trying to repurpose a whole lot of existing pipelines. But there are going to be cost challenges, and then certainly safety challenges. And nobody really knows right now, what the upper limits should be part of the reason why is because all the pipelines are of different ages, and have been subjected to different operating regimes. So yeah, it's gonna be a really interesting challenge to retrofit pipelines. If we go beyond some kind of a blending approach, which is what we're looking at now.

Tim Montague: 27:07

The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, the maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over six gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters ranging from 25 to 275 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 252 75, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts, the 250 to 75. pairs well, with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions, go to chintpowersystems.com. To find out more. You know, a big part of the energy transition here in the United States, Peter is that we're converting coal plants, coal power plants, to natural gas power plants, which have lower emissions than coal. And then we're converting, so we're shutting down coal, we're ramping natural gas slightly still. And eventually, we're transitioning away from natural gas power plants now, converting them to solar wind and batteries. But there's a project called Asus, which you can Google, which is a hybrid where they're generating the ideas to generate and store hydrogen and then burn it in thermal generators, turbans, that that today burn natural gas, and then they will blend in hydrogen, and then maybe, potentially, maybe you can tell us about this Convert to pure hydrogen, is there such thing as a pure hydrogen thermal power plant in the future? Yeah,

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 28:39

so the what they're planning to do is starting in 2025, when that gets commissioned, it's an 840 megawatt facility, burn a 30% blend, and then ultimately, by 2045, which is when California has its 100%, green grid legislation, burned 100%. And it's dedicated to Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Now, actually, when I was writing the book, I had a chance to talk to the GE turbine specialists a couple of years ago in Schenectady. And what they explained is, there are a couple critical challenges here. First of all, we talked before about the lack of density of hydrogen, it holds about by volume of third the amount of energy as methane does. So you gotta move three times through the same space pipeline or turbine to generate the same amount of electricity, that creates its own physical challenges, then it burns hotter than natural gas, which means you have more nitrous oxide formation, and nitrous oxides are damaging to kids lungs, and they also are the precursor to smog. So you got some issues there, then you also have the fact that there's this thing called flame speed. And so you know, in the movies, when you see the guy, the bad guy in the car, and the gas is tripping out, and you see this source of ignition, you're like, oh, yeah, this guy's gonna get it. And then you see basically the flame travel up the gas and explode the car with the bad guy in it. Yeah, that's flame speed. So, flame speed in hydrogen is faster than flame speed, and methane and ch four and what that means is that the combustion takes place in a different part of the turbine. So the turbine itself actually has to be designed somewhat differently than your typical gas turbine. And so there are a couple of challenges that have made it possible. So with the, with the more rugged frame turbines that Siemens and Mitsubishi and GE have had up there for a long time. They can Burn and have been burning under percent hydrogen and different applications. But for the turbines that are more efficient, that are basically the ones that are being moved into the marketplace now, they're at if you look at GE is most recent numbers on this third about a 60% plan. Now, they, and especially Mitsubishi are already selling hydrogen compatible turbines to those levels to companies like Entergy and the Asus project and some other places around the country where the thinking that okay, soon we'll see come some kind of a blend, but the cost is still prohibitive. Last year constellation proved an a plant in, in the south either Mississippi, Alabama, I think it was Mississippi, it will be plant, they burned a 28% mix in an existing turbine to prove they could do that. Near a Power Authority also burned and mix with the last couple of years. And then in Ohio, there's a facility in Hannibal that's been consistently mixing 5% h2 into methane, and burning that now for a long time, and they wanted to prove that they could consistently mix. So there's some steps being taken to move towards hydrogen compatible turbines. But again, you get to get into this issue of where's the hydrogen coming from? how cost effective we can you produce it? And then how do you deal with those efficiency losses from the production to the handling of it? The shipping, and ultimately, you know, storage, and then running it through the turbine that's gonna get you there was miserable rounds for deficiencies.

Tim Montague: 32:12

Yeah, and I'm looking at the map of the ACES project. I mean, the the, the geographies covered here are, are stunning. It's a huge geography. There's elements of the project in Utah, Nevada, and California, California being the end user of the electricity. But where are they going to get all this water? For example, in Washington in Utah? Yep.

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 32:37

I was just about to raise that. Yes. Where are you going to get the water. And that's, that is a constraining factor in a lot of places, in fact. So here is where you do see these massive projects going forward. Look at the neon project in Saudi Arabia, 4000 megawatts of renewables feeding electrolyzers on the Red Sea, they're going to desalinate that water. Okay, same thing in Oman, it's all going to be ocean based water that they take the salt out of

Tim Montague: 33:05

this solar thermal or how are they desalinating? They'll

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 33:08

probably I'm not even sure what the tech is for that whether it's solar energy that there, but the the membranes in the electrolyzers need to have pure water, sure, impurities gunk up those membranes. So that's another critical piece of this thing. But yes, water is sort of the dirty little secret and a constraint that hasn't yet adequately been addressed. Some folks say, Well, if you shut down a coal plant, or that cooling water could be used, but you still got to look at what are the quantities and as I mentioned before, the cooling of the electrolyzers actually a very considerable part of the water equation.

Tim Montague: 33:44

So the electrolyzer gets hot? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. We have a little pilot project here in Champaign, Illinois, where I live Champaign Urbana. It's a Trent Mass Transit District project where we have Enel electrolyzer would Nell is a Norwegian electrolyzer company? I believe that's a PEM. electrolyzers. Is that right?

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 34:07

Probably, yeah, I believe. I think it is. Yeah, the Chinese are pretty much the alkaline folks. And then the Europeans in the US have the Pam's okay.

Tim Montague: 34:15

And so then they have a solar array on some leased land across the street. It's like a two megawatt solar array generating electricity, that they then are making local hydrogen. And then they have a small fleet of Hydrogen buses. Now, the only thing that I've heard, unfortunately, I haven't been able to interview the MTD on this. But I've heard through the grapevine that the buses were not charging very well, meaning it was hard to get enough hydrogen into the bus to make it run long enough to make it economical. So anyway, good pilot project, exciting that little things like this are happening. But as you know, I think my listeners are aware we need to do this on a massive, massive scale. And that delta $1 current burn, you know, gray, hydrogen to $5 of green is a big Delta. That's a 5x Delta and Money Talks man. The reason we haven't made the energy transition yet, is because it's cheaper to not make the energy transition yet we will eventually make the energy transition and economics are getting there on our side. And it's an important role that the government plays in in seeding that and incentivizing that because the government incentivizes all forms of energy and transportation. The fossil fuel industry is heavily subsidized globally. I think the global subsidies for fossil fuels are something like $6 trillion. Peter, you would know this. Yeah,

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 35:43

I saw a number. It depends upon whether or not you assume their right to basically treat the atmosphere as an open sewer is considered as one of the subsidies or not. And that

Tim Montague: 35:53

is borrowing from future generations basically, right? Where barring from the livelihoods, the economic well being and the health and safety of future generations, it's very strange. How, when you look at the hierarchy of priorities that living the current generation has, down at the bottom of the list of those priorities is future, the well being of future generations, we're not very good at making that a top priority.

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 36:21

That's what an economic discount rate is all about is saying, I do not value my future or anybody else's as much as I valued today. Yes,

Tim Montague: 36:31

indeed, that is a conundrum that humanity absolutely is going to have to solve. If we're going to get to the next 500 years or so we're in, we're experiencing a bottleneck, and it's starting to show up, right, climate change is starting to show up, the weather is weirding and people are migrating food systems are being disrupted. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg, honestly, even though we have had major disruptions in some places. And we see the rise in temperature in sea level in the frequency of storms, fires, droughts, etc. It is happening. But it's gonna get a lot lot worse. And maybe you and I will be in the ground by that time. But you know, we're very concerned for future generations. So what else should we talk about? Peter, I really appreciate this conversation. But what else should our listeners know that they may not know about the hydrogen economy? You

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 37:25

know, what I think patient know, that we are very much in the early stages, I like to say about some incipient technologies that, you know, if this were a baseball game, we'd still be hauling the batting cages onto the field. What my biggest concern is, there is a large segment of the world that doesn't wish to clean energy transition well, and it's pretty entrenched and always looking for the failure story, the Evie that caught fire in the garage in Montreal. And they usually point to one failure to say, see, like Solyndra classic example, right? The 500 plus million dollar loan that went bad, even though the whole program made money for the American taxpayer. And my biggest concern with all these subsidies with hydrogen, where it's already clear, there are some and uses that shouldn't be considered, and others that probably should, and we should always have carbon in our minds, that we're going to end up doing some things where we can look back and say, Well, that was really dumb. And it gives ammunition to those who don't wish the transition well. And it also makes your average person wonder, was this a really good thing. And so the peril for me of hydrogen is a perceptional peril. Because there's plenty of ways to spend billions of dollars and put them in the wrong places. And what we need to do here is fail fast as quickly as possible recognize, oh, this thing doesn't work, even if there's inertia behind it, and pull the money from that and reallocate it to other places. And I fear that we're already building up a lot of inertia in this space, because there's so much money at stake and large companies involved. And, you know, classic example right now are those tax credits, where, right now you can say, Oh, I'm going to offset all of my hydrogen production with solar, but you're going to run the the electrolyzers, all day long. And so you're going to be feeding them with great power. And therefore you actually could have a situation where the hydrogen is worse in terms of carbon intensity than blue hydrogen. And those are the sorts of things that really cause me, agita around this issue.

Tim Montague: 39:34

Yes, yeah, we don't want to make the problem worse, we already have a massive problem. Remember, listener, ppm in the atmosphere of co2 is 420. And climbing at about a percent a year. Okay, we have not turned the corner yet. We're starting to slow down a little bit. And basically, even though solar was more than 50% of new power on the grid in the United States last year, okay, that's a good signal. We're just replacing the addition to the grid. We're growing the grid, we're going to triple the grid when we electrify transportation, right, because it takes a lot of electricity to power batteries to drive vehicles and we are going to do that. And the economics of that will be on our side in a few years. We're still not quite there yet. There's a lot of FUD in the in the market as you put your finger on. And that's not actually credible fun. There's a lot of casting of shade on the electrification of transportation, and the vested interests are very powerful the fall So lobby is very, very powerful. And government has been captured by capitalism, basically, our democracy is highly flawed, it is the best thing that we seem to have been able to invent as a system of governance in the you know, in the world. It is very good at accumulating wealth and power, but it is flawed. And, and so we had to be very careful. That's all I can say. Like, the challenges are still many. Anything else you want to say about the hydrogen economy or any other resources you want to point our listeners to?

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 41:17

Other resource, you know that, do you he has the hydrogen liftoff report. And so it's worth looking at, as some of the US government documents just to get a sense of what they're thinking about this and what is driving, where they're putting their money. I think also, one of the thing that will be interesting to watch is right now those hubs, they don't have a lot of documentation out in the public yet. It's pretty scant at this moment, but they will start to because they're accessing public money, we're gonna start to see more definition of what they're actually trying to accomplish. I think that's going to be really interesting for for those of, for those of us in this space, who are trying to figure out well, what's really going to happen here? And is this going to catalyze the right investments and as a coin to lead us to the cleaner energy future that we want. Certainly, Hydrogen is a tool in the toolkit. It's not the Swiss Army knife that everyone thinks, you know, solving all the problems, but it does have a place. And I think in the few next few years, we'll get a much clearer sense as to what's real, you know, what's the hope and what's the hype and, and hopefully, like I said, hopefully we fail fast and discard this stuff. That's not going to work. I

Tim Montague: 42:24

hope we've whetted your appetite. I appreciate everyone being here and giving us your time today. You if you go to Ari plus events around the country, you should know that you can run into PKD. There he does give workshops. That's how I knew PKT was doing workshops on hydrogen, I took one and RA plus ne. So reach out to Peter, check out all of the events. At our events page, there are links to some of the regional Ra plus events, cleanpowerhour.com, go to the events tab. And please give us a rating and review on our content on Apple and Spotify. Those are the two best ways you can support the show and tell a friend about the show. Of course, word of mouth is bar none the best way to help spread the show. Peter, how can our listeners find you?

Peter Kelly-Detwiler: 43:15

The best way is peterkellydetweiler.com. And of course on LinkedIn, I think there's only one of me in the world, which is why I stopped committing crime a long time ago. And it's just Peter and then ke ll y hyphen d et wi l er, oh, I also have a reading list of 42 things I read every day, including hydrogen newsletters and so on. happy to share that with anybody who wants to know where all this raw material comes from. Fantastic.

Tim Montague: 43:43

All right. Well, thank you so much. Peter Kelly Detweiler, author of The Energy Switch and global expert on the energy transition. Thank you so much. And thank you listeners for being here. I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about. You are part and parcel of the energy transition, whether you're an energy professional today, or an aspiring energy professional. So thank you, I want to let you know that the Clean Power Hour has launched a listener survey. And it would mean so much to me. If you would go to cleanpowerhour.com. Click on the About Us link right there on the main navigation that takes you to the about page and you'll see a big graphic listener survey, just click on that graphic and it takes just a couple of minutes. If you fill out the survey, I will send you a lovely baseball cap with our logo on it. The other thing I want our listeners to know is that this podcast is made possible by corporate sponsors. We have cin power systems, the leading three phase string inverter manufacturer in North America. So check out CPS America. But we are very actively looking for additional support to make this show work. And you see here our media kit with all the sponsor benefits and statistics about the show. You know we're dropping two episodes a week. We have now over 320,000 downloads on YouTube and we're getting about At 45,000 downloads per month. So this is a great way to bring your brand to our listeners and our listeners are decision makers in clean energy. This includes projects executives, engineers, finance, project management, and many other professionals who are making decisions about and developing, designing, installing and making possible clean energy projects. So check out cleanpowerhour.com both our listener survey on the about us and our media kit and become a sponsor today. Thank you so much. Let's go solar and storage