The plant was first scheduled to be shut down in 2018. State lawmakers approved a tax break in 2019 that had kept the facility active.
WV gave this plant tax breaks to burn coal for an unspecified length of time. The hydrogen thing is supposed to make you feel good about it.
There isn't enough info in the article but it appears theyre producing hydrogen by burning coal.
Hydrogen could be a decent source of energy if it's produced from renewable sources as hydrogen is much more energy dense than lithium batteries. However, that doesn't appear to be the case.
Hydrogen is really bad as an alternative to batteries for transport. The energy efficiencies go out the window — too much energy is lost both making the hydrogen for use and for using that hydrogen. My recollection is it's about a 50% loss each at each step, meaning about 3/4 of the energy input is wasted. This is comparable to an ICE vehicle. Again by my recollection, BEVs are in the ~90% net efficiency range. The vast majority of the energy input is used for moving the vehicle, rather than being wasted.
In a world where we are decades from fully de-carbonizing the electric grid, wasting such enormous amounts of energy on hydrogen is pure foolishness. Especially when, in order to be practical, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will require even more infrastructure than BEVs require.
Hydrogen as it stands is a really bad option. For specific uses like airplanes or small/medium warships it might make sense: entities that are too small to justify nuclear power but where battery density is unlikely to be sufficient for a long time. But in general it's overhyped and just not a great choice.
No, hydrogen is a dead end with current technology. There is no good way to produce it at scale. We basically have two options:
Strip the hydrogen off of hydrocarbons, usually methane. The leftover carbon becomes CO and CO2 which is released into the atmosphere.
Split water molecules using electricity. This requires generating a ton of electricity using a traditional power plant. You're better off just making the electricity and skipping the hydrogen step.
Alao, once hydrogen is produced it really wants to burn. You do not want to get in a car accident with a tank of hydrogen under your back seat.
I'm not an expert, but I know poeple on Reddit say that storage is a drawback of renewables. Could energy be stored as hydrogen?
Potentially, yes. I'm not sure about the cost effectiveness compared to other solutions like pumped storage hydropower. There's also the risk of explosion when storing hydrogen, which is a tough problem to solve.
the explosion thing doesn't really seem like a problem because of our relationship with gasoline and lithium batteries. maybe there could be a hydrogen future after all :)