Hydrogen Hubs

Hi Matt:

I believe Hydrail and backup generation will be among the first applications. These are already starting early deployments, and will spawn larger electrolyzers, which will also drive down the cost of making green hydrogen. Electrolyzer production volumes will increase over time, decreasing their component cost and improving technology. 

See my earlier post below. The full story will be in "The Economics of Green Hydrogen," which I will post next month.

Hi Charles, thanks for the comment.

The main need for hydrogen is to replace existing technologies that work perfectly well, but also pump huge amounts of greenhouse gas into our atmosphere. Since you live in CA like me, you are aware of some of the major negative effects of climate change. 

The next question is, when will green hydrogen be cost effective. I'm writing a post on that subject right now, but it will not post until mid to late May. I've pasted a couple of excerpts from that post below.

The Economics of Green Hydrogen: 

Most that have looked at the economics of the title fuel believe that it will play an important role in the transition to a greenhouse gas (GHG) free economy in future years. However the big question is, when?

First of all this answer depends not only on the specific application of the fuel, and the technology to convert the fuel back to energy, but also where it is being evaluated. For instance, in a recent post on clean backup generation, I found a similar application in large, long-range buses (commonly called coaches). I also found an economic evaluation that found fuel-cell-electric buses would be competitive with battery-electric buses as soon as in the mid-2020s. Also, California offers a $240,000 incentive for the purchase of a large fuel-cell electric bus (verses $120,000 for a large battery-electric bus).

There are several factors that control the economics of green hydrogen. This is really a production method, not a form of hydrogen. The molecules of hydrogen are the same whether it is grey hydrogen (made from natural gas), blue hydrogen (ditto, but the carbon dioxide emitted by this process is captured and sequestered) or green hydrogen (made from water using renewable electricity to disassociate the hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis). Thus the main consumable (from a cost standpoint) used to produce green hydrogen is renewable electricity, and it is one of the main contributors to the cost of the green hydrogen...

In the best-case scenario, green hydrogen can already be produced at costs competitive with blue hydrogen today, using low-cost renewable electricity, i.e. around USD 20 per megawatt-hour (MWh)...

Note that the cost of renewable electricity, based on actual power purchase agreements throughout the U.S., is already at or below $20/MWh for large utility-scale PV projects (200 to 400 MW) in the Western U.S...

So the two answers to the original question are; (1) it's complicated, and (2) for some specific applications / locations, now.

-John