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.
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 :)