Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion

more on the complex offshore renewable projects. We are increasingly number of sophisticated specialized wind farm construction & maintenance ships now going into service

qingzhou-4 project has finished phase 1, installing all 25 11MW floating turbines. Still got 18 12MW turbine & 1 16.6MW turbine to go. 75km offshore. Very challenging project and claims to reach grid parity (I don't know about that)

also produces green hydrogen and powers aquamarine

btw, there are other even larger projects than this that Mingyang is involved in like this 1500MW offshore floating farm 东方CZ9海上风电场 (in Hainan)

tphuang said:

They are making good progress on H2 ships. Looks like the new H2 ship also comes with a large battery pack. That should provide it enough range and speed with 500kW engine

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looks like this ship has made its maiden voyage


This marks breakthru in hydrogen tech in inland ships

@tphuang do you happen to know where sinopec's green hydrogen projects in inner Mongolia and Xinjiang get their water? Both are arid regions. This has confused me for a while, especially since scaling green h2 production in inland regions will require using a lot of scarce fresh water.

Updates from Longji with their latest electrolyzers. Not only is economics improving, the production capacity is also going up.

Boltzmann said:

@tphuang do you happen to know where sinopec's green hydrogen projects in inner Mongolia and Xinjiang get their water? Both are arid regions. This has confused me for a while, especially since scaling green h2 production in inland regions will require using a lot of scarce fresh water.

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it's obviously challenging in some way, but the project sizes thus far aren't that large. We are talking about 20/30k ton of H2 per year for these initial projects. Some of the ammonia and methanol projects seem to be 100-200k t once they are fully ramped. So, that will be harder, but I don't think it's that difficult to get a few million t of water year.

I see that each person drinks 182 gallon of water a year (close to 700 kg). So basically you are using up equivalent water resource to feeding several million people. A lot of the industries use more than that.

Boltzmann said:

@tphuang do you happen to know where sinopec's green hydrogen projects in inner Mongolia and Xinjiang get their water? Both are arid regions. This has confused me for a while, especially since scaling green h2 production in inland regions will require using a lot of scarce fresh water.

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Water is 89% oxygen and 11% hydrogen by mass. So for every ton hydrogen produced, you will need 10 tons of water. Large scale hydrogen plants tend to produce something around a few tens of thousands of tons of hydrogen per year. Even rounding that up to say 100k tons per year for a super large scale facility, that's a million ton of water per year. Do note that if you're using this hydrogen for power in some sort of centralized power plant, you'll get this water back after the hydrogen is burned or electrolyised. Pure water too.

Meanwhile any thermal power plant, be it natural gas, nuclear or coal, they use a ridiculous amount of water for cooling, we're talking tens of millions of tons a day for a closed loop cooling system. And the mining/refining process takes a lot of water too, be it for coal mining or the water needed for fracking, billions of tons of water per year. And the water used for mining often comes out heavily contaminated. If renewables and green hydrogen means less coal power plants and coal mining or fracking, it will easily be a net gain in water resources, even if you're somehow producing billions of tons of hydrogen a year.

Every day in 2008, on average, water-cooled thermoelectric power plants in the United States withdrew 60 billion to 170 billion gallons of freshwater from rivers, lakes, streams, and aquifers, and consumed 2.8 billion to 5.9 billion gallons - coal plants were responsible for 67 percent of those withdrawals, and 65 percent of that consumption.

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Just found out about this, not sure to post it here or in the funny thread, so retarded:

It was hoped offshore wind in the latest round could have helped generate five gigawatts of power, enough to run five million homes, but wind farm builders had warned for months that the government was not taking into account how much the costs of developing them had soared.

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The technology has been described as the "jewel in the UK's renewable energy crown", but firms have been hit by higher costs for building offshore farms, with materials such as steel and labour being more expensive.

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Keith Anderson, chief executive of Scottish Power, said the outcome of the auction was a "multi-billion pound lost opportunity to deliver low-cost energy for consumers and a wake-up call for government".
He said the contracts had been "recognised globally as a lynchpin of the UK's offshore success", but said "the economics simply did not stand up this time around".

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You remember the manufactured hysteria about Chinese pollution and coal plants?

A few months ago, it looked like coal would smash through records in China’s power grid this year. It’s now touch and go whether it will increase at all.

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With falling output of cement and glass, and scant growth for steel and gasoline-powered cars, the country may yet experience its second-consecutive year of falling emissions — a sign that President Xi Jinping’s pledge of a peak by 2030 may have emerged nearly a decade early.

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