Member Info for toneman

Check out the after hours trades. Pretty substantial buying went on there. Let's see if that bodes well for tomorrow. And if anyone needs a reminder the AGM kicks off at 10am tomorrow. Not sure if anything can be added there as I guess all the big news came out last week, but despite today I'm pretty sure it'll be up-beat.

Albert, Plug Power on US market seems to be bucking the trend. Up a little yesterday and today. Maybe because Jim Cramer featured it again, he seems to have properly got behind that stock now.

Bellers I think what you're seeing there is Smithy's new day-trading position building. :D

Cheer up Smithy. This is just the start of the hydrogen journey. The big money you've made on hydrogen so far is arguably just in the past 12-18 months. That's just as we crossed the start line. The finishing post is a tiny spec in the distance. My expectation is for these companies to show market cap growth at least doubling every 3 years for the rest of the decade.

Thanks taskmaster. At least that backs up my point, you can maintain grid stability with a synchronous timer and some power electronics. You know, if satnav was left to the dinosaur inertia brigade it would consist of a chap walking in front of every car whilst carrying a stopwatch, a compass, and waving a red flag.

Two good points, thanks Bilbs. Otherwise pretty much what I thought. I guess we've got to keep feeding the dinosaurs.

Yay. Back to 10p. Now where did I put that bunting?

psmith64, your expectation of other shareholders seems unrealistic. It's hard to imagine that so many shareholders have invested their entire cash position on shares so as to not leave themselves a buffer for emergencies. I do hope you're wrong in anticipating that people have to sell shares to live, that would be a shocking mismanagement of personal finances.

Additionally, I'm pretty sure that individual shareholding is a minority sport, particularly in this country. Sure many people are invested through their pension funds at work, but really not many take part in this sort of individual portfolio management, and even fewer of those are actually holding ITM shares. It's a numbers game and I don't believe it's statistically relevant.

Of course, I may be wrong.

I just can't believe that with modern day power electronics that you can't keep a grid stable with a reasonable battery storage. This flywheel nonsense seems like stone-age thinking. I get that the intrinsic simplicity of old-school mechanical generators and their inherent flywheel design does give you exactly what they're trying to recreate, but can someone please explain to me why you can't replicate the same thing with a power electronics control circuit.

Yes, thanks taskmaster, very useful series. To get the live event to work I had to enable all cookies. There was a link to open in a new window as well, and that seemed to work better than the default event page. The presentations you missed yesterday should be available from 24 hours after the live event. Thanks again for the link. There was too much going on yesterday for me to wind back to see who had posted the original PowerGen link.

So, a few take-aways from today's Investor Presentation...

1. They acknowledged that once of the things they learned from the REFHYNE project is that EPC is not their skillset. Their equipment quote was accurate but their on-site engineering quote was not. Going forward they are comfortable that this will now be handled by ILE with the Linde expertise that brings.

2. ITM Motive is being refocused toward larger centralised refueling solutions, i.e buses, trucks, trains. - where there is more chance of financial return.

3. Snam discussions were over a year.

4. A second 1GW factory decision probably won't trigger until the first has reached around 60% capacity. So my guess would be maybe 3 years away. Second factory location would depend on factors including local staff competence and possible government manufacturing incentives in the country.

Maybe the immediate demand is a result of the Investor Presentation which is in progress as I type. They've just mentioned again their expectation to build another factory to take manufacturing capability up to 2GW a year so they can halve lead time.

Seaangler, just recalling your post from yesterday morning...

"Indeed , future fund raises are likely to be on the back of really good contract news. Where I would differ with the majority , and Smithies of this world , is in the timing of this news.... it could actually arrive at any time."

Nice shout. You were spot on.

I remember reading before about Snam testing hydrogen in the gas grid before our Keel University test this year. I've just been to dig out the info...

"In April 2019, Snam was the first company in Europe to introduce a mix of 5% hydrogen and natural gas in its transmission network. The trial, which successfully took place in Contursi Terme, in the province of Salerno, involved supplying H2NG (hydrogen-natural gas mixture) for a month to two industrial companies in the area, a pasta factory and a mineral waters bottling company. The project has generated international interest, with articles from Bloomberg (who wrote about the "first pasta" cooked with hydrogen) and the Financial Times (which called it "historic")."

https://www.snam.it/en/hydrogen_challenge/snam_hydrogen/

If they're ready to roll this out that would explain why they want first dibs on 100MW production.

Incidentally I should remind people that the main reason it is unattractive right now for wind farms to generate hydrogen at £2 per kg (£34 per MWh) is because instead of doing that with their oversupply they get paid £75 per MWh constraint payments to simple stop generating...totally ludicrous. Our rule-makers should be ashamed of themselves.

You're right taskmaster, that is worrying. I assume you mean that it's worrying that the deputy director of the GWPF can be so wrong in his assessment.

Perhaps someone else can check my figures and I'll eat humble pie if I've got it wrong...

A 2MW wind turbine connected to a 2MW ITM electrolyser (forget the intricacies for the moment let's just stick with basic arithmetic) can generate 16.7 kg per MWh. Earlier in the year a Canadian company was testing the market for green hydrogen pricing it around £2 per kg (about 80% premium on grey hydrogen). So that would be £33.40 for your 16.7kg. So that's like saying you can receive £33.40 per MWh of generation which is almost exactly in line with current wholesale price for electricity. Hydrogen for transport is currently about £12 to £15 per kg so seems like a decent margin to me.

He's right that converting hydrogen back to electricity for grid usage makes more expensive electricity, but that should be a minor thing we're using it for and therefore can be justifiably more expensive.

The only thing I question going forward is the cost of heating homes from green hydrogen and I haven't done that calculation yet so I don't know how £2 to £12 per kg of hydrogen would equate to today's consumer gas grid prices.

Adding to that Bilbs, I like to follow a piece of old, but regular advice from Jim Cramer...don't buy your entire holding in one go. If it falls and you still like the story then you're still a buyer with a better price. Worst case scenario is it just keeps going up and you don't make all the profit you'd have wished for...and I'm sure that's a problem we'd all be happy to have.

Fair point taskmaster, they could have done more to help us in the right direction...give them a kick from me too.

I've got some sympathy for big oil like BP and Shell. Sure they've played their part through political lobbying which has delayed our advance over to renewable energy. But I blame the politicians for being dumb enough to fall for it rather than the oil companies themselves. Where big oil grew was not through an in-built desire to dig up fossils but from our demand for the products they were mining/drilling for. Now, for the last 5 years since the penny started to drop with the population, they're just in self-preservation mode. But it doesn't make sense to me that we blame them for our past demand for products, heat, light and travel.

The fact is that it's still us that can demand better from ourselves. Sign up to a renewables-only electricity tariff. Fit solar. Buy an EV. Tell your local car dealership that your next car is going to be electric, not the diesel he's offering today. Invest in green companies. Attend green company presentations. Sign up for green company newsletters. Subscribe to green podcasts and youtubes. As long as all these little things reach critical mass, there's no going back.

Sermon ends.

taskmaster, this is what I love about this board, I've been asking myself the same question and now you've reminded me to go and find out.

I found this...https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24591/how-do-rockets-keep-their-fuel-in-a-liquid-state
which suggests that boil off helps keep rocket tanks cold. I'm pretty sure it's the same as when you spray an aerosol can for a long time and it feels really cold afterward - pressure drops so temperature drops.

But I'd have thought that on a big ship they might actually have enough space on board to also have a cryogenic chiller. As long as the tanks are well insulated it may not take too much energy to keep it chilled.

Either way, I think you have to do one or the other if you're going to keep it on board in liquid form. Otherwise, if you let it return to normal temperature the tanks would have to withstand the resultant pressure of the gas form.