Apparently Energy Is Becoming Too Expensive in Germany to Make Batteries There.

[NNadir]

VW Boss Warns Europe Is Losing Competitiveness Due To Energy Costs

The head of Volkswagen Passenger Cars believes manufacturing battery cells in Europe could become unfeasible if energy prices are not controlled.

In a lengthy post shared to LinkedIn, chief executive Thomas Schäfer warned that Germany and the European Union are rapidly losing attractiveness and competitiveness compared to the likes of the U.S., Canada, China, Southeast Asia, and regions across North Africa.

“Europe is not price-competitive in many areas,” Schäfer wrote. “Especially when it comes to the costs of electricity and gas, we are increasingly losing touch. If we do not succeed in reducing energy prices in Germany and Europe quickly and reliably, investments in energy-intensive production or in new battery cell factories in Germany and the EU will be practically impossible. Value creation in this area will take place elsewhere...”

Amazing, isn't it?

One hears again, and again, and again, and again, and again and again...ad nauseum that solar and wind are "cheap," and that the world will be saved by attaching them to batteries, the 2nd law of thermodynamics be damned.

It's a worldwide chant. Of course, no one has ever been able to explain to me in a satisfactory fashion why Germany and Denmark have the highest consumer electricity rates in the OECD. When one points this out the subject quickly gets changed.

And yet, energy is too expensive in Germany to make...batteries...?

The longer we lie to ourselves and to each other, the worse it's going to be.

Batteries and land trashed for wind and solar facilities will not save the world. They're making it worse, not better. It might be time to wake up. We're pushing toward 420 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide again again, and are sure to surge over 422, maybe 423, this April or May.

[cachukis]

1. Is the only escape nuclear?

Never thought I'd say that ten years ago, but the energy needed to save us will probably kill us.
I exaggerate, of course.

[NNadir]

2. Yes. It's not even a close contest.

[keithbvadu2]

3. You may not be far off concerning local areas.

Chernobyl, Japan tsunami, almost Three Mile Island.

[NNadir]

6. The emphasis on these relatively MINOR events is killing the whole damned planet.

It is dangerous, nonsense thinking, grotesque and frankly deadly selective attention.

It is a form of ignorance writ large.

Have a nice weekend.

[keithbvadu2]

7. At least you raised a chuckle.

[NNadir]

8. I'm not laughing. Ignorance kills people on a grand scale. OK?

[magicarpet]

4. Will technology provide a solution ie: sand batteries ?

(snip begin))

FUTURE PLANET | RENEWABLE ENERGY
How a sand battery could transform clean energy

Could a sand battery help us store renewable energy more cheaply? (Credit: Polar Night Energy)

By Erika Benke
3rd November 2022

A new way of storing renewable energy is providing clean heat through the long Nordic winter.

At the end of a winding, tree-lined country road in western Finland, four young engineers believe they have a possible answer to one of green energy's biggest challenges.

The challenge is how to provide a year-round, steady power supply from renewable energy during changing seasons and variable weather conditions. The answer nestling in Vatajankoski power plant, 270 km (168 miles) north-west of Finland's capital, Helsinki, is remarkably simple, abundant and cheap: sand.

The Vatajankoski power plant is home to the world's first commercial-scale sand battery. Fully enclosed in a 7m (23ft)-high steel container, the battery consists of 100 tonnes of low-grade builders' sand, two district heating pipes and a fan. The sand becomes a battery after it is heated up to 600C using electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels in Finland, brought by Vatajankoski, the owners of the power plant.

The renewable energy powers a resistance heater which heats up the air inside the sand. Inside the battery, this hot air is circulated by a fan around the sand through heat exchange pipes.
(end snip,.. more at link below,..)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221102-how-a-sand-battery-could-transform-clean-energy

~~~~~~~~

(snip begin)
Engineers Make Green Hydrogen From Air

Engineers Make Green Hydrogen From Air Direct-air electrolyzers could produce hydrogen without the need for fresh water access, but using the water from humidity found in the air.


The most sustainable way to make hydrogen fuel is to split water using renewable electricity—but that requires access to freshwater. Now, researchers have reported a way to make hydrogen fuel from just humidity in the air.

Their electrolyzer extracts moisture from air and splits it via renewably powered electrolysis to create hydrogen. It is the first such electrolyzer to produce high purity (99 percent) hydrogen from air that has as little as 4 percent humidity, says Gang Kevin Li, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Melbourne, in Australia. The success could open up the possibility of producing hydrogen in semi-arid regions, which also have some of the highest solar- and wind-power potential.

Tests of the prototype direct-air electrolyzer over 12 consecutive days showed that it could produce almost 750 liters of hydrogen a day on average per square meter of electrolyzer. Li and his colleagues reported the details in the journal Nature Communications.

Hydrogen offers the prospect of clean, emission-free energy, and the hydrogen economy has gathered steam in the past few years due to increases in funding and improvements in technology. But most of the hydrogen around the world today is still produced from natural gas or coal. Green hydrogen from electrolysis is still a nascent technology because of the need for electrolyzers on a large scale.

Many teams are working on alternative ways to make green hydrogen. Solar-powered water-splitting devices, for example, use photocatalysts, which absorb sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen but have a low solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of only 1 percent. To overcome the need for freshwater, there have been attempts to produce hydrogen from saline and brackish waters, but the devices have to deal with contamination and chlorine as a by-product.
(end snip,.. more at link below,... )

https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineers-make-green-hydrogen-from-air

[NNadir]

5. Energy storage is thermodynamically wasteful, and mass intensive.

This sort of thinking has been flying around ever more desperately for my entire adult life, endless "breakthrough" announcements, and I'm not young.

Many of these fantasies over the years involve hydrogen. For the entire period of 50 years I've been hearing it, raising its head like a hydra, hydrogen has remained what it still is, a very dirty fuel, produced at an unacceptable thermodynamic expense.



The caption:

Figure 1. Global current sources of H2 production (a), and H2 consumption sectors (b).

Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084]


I referred to this graphic, and reproduced it, discussing a paper in the journal I discussed above here: The current sources and uses of hydrogen.