Our latest Investing Matters Podcast episode with QuotedData's Edward Marten has just been released. Listen here.
Many thanks Dennis for taking the time to reach out to us on the forum. What a pleasant surprise yesterday to see such a hive of activity. I'm sure we all look forward to being able to communicate with you again in the future. In the meantime, good luck with the rest of the 12 month plan.
There is currently about 1GW (average) of curtailed power from UK windfarms. It's enough (annually) to replace 10% of UK grey hydrogen with green hydrogen. Given that equates to approx 1 year of ITM electrolyser production capacity, do you get enquiries from any businesses serious about resolving that waste of energy? If not, perhaps you should set up your own ITM grid-balancing service? That's a bit like having National Grid pay you to lifetime test your own products.
The green hydrogen space already feels like it is not a level playing field. e.g. New battery chargers or new data centres don't have to be paired with a new solar/wind farm, but green hydrogen does. In addition, there is talk about electrolysers (from 2027 I think) having to be matched on an hourly basis to a renewable generator source. All this must make the electrolyser sales business much more difficult than needed in that it takes two extremely complex projects and effectively shackles them together. Do you think you and other leaders in your industry are going to be able to make the politicians see sense and to not overregulate green hydrogen, otherwise I fear they could kill it before it has even got started?
Topped up down here as well. I'd like to think that their investments will continue to produce solid returns and others will consider this well undervalued being so far below NAV. The spread here looks a bit wide, but HL always gives me a buy price near the bottom of the spread, so always shows up here on LSE as a sell. I imagine that's the same for some of the other displayed trades. A good number of them must be actual sells though for the price to steadily drift lower as it's been doing. Fingers crossed it will stop falling as my capital losses are certainly outweighing my dividend.
It's a weird spin they put on the Synchroster award - "10 hours, longer than current battery technology". 10 hours at 1MW is only a 10MWh system. IES will be a 30MWh system and its 4 hours duration is based on its ability to deliver 4MW. But surely if you ran the same IES 30MWh battery at a 1MW discharge it would theoretically last for 30 hours - 3x longer then Synchroster. Sounds like they're pulling the wool over a few eyes in order to justify the Synchroster award.
Have any of you taken a look at Tesla's Master Plan Part 3? They've finally got on board with the hydrogen electrolysis use case we've been discussing for the past few years. It'll be interesting to see how much traction this gets from this accommodating stance. Ever since Musk's "Fool Cells" jibe, the worshippers have effectively claimed that hydrogen is dumb simply because the Messiah says so, and as a result would never countenance any application of it anywhere. Presumably those same followers must now change their views...or else decide that Elon's lost his mind.
btw, he/Tesla is still not suggesting it ever gets used for direct transportation.
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
Here's a snippet of one of its mentions...
"Sustainably Produce Hydrogen for Steel and Fertilizer
Today hydrogen is produced from coal, oil and natural gas, and is used in the refining of fossil fuels (notably diesel) and in various industrial applications (including steel and fertilizer production). Green hydrogen can be produced via the electrolysis of water (high energy intensity, no carbon containing products consumed/produced) or via methane pyrolysis (lower energy intensity, produces a solid carbon-black byproduct that could be converted into useful carbon-based products).
To conservatively estimate electricity demand for green hydrogen, the assumption is:
• No hydrogen will be needed for fossil fuel refining going forward
• Steel production will be converted to the Direct Reduced Iron process, requiring hydrogen as an input. Hydrogen demand to reduce iron ore (assumed to be Fe3O4) is based on the following reduction reaction:
Reduction by H2
• Fe3O4 + H2 = 3FeO + H2O
• FeO + H2 = Fe + H2O
• All global hydrogen production will come from electrolysis
These simplified assumptions for industrial demand, result in a global demand of 150Mt/yr of green hydrogen, and sourcing this from electrolysis requires an estimated ~7.2PWh/year of sustainably generated electricityh.
The electrical demand for hydrogen production is modeled as a flexible load with annual production constraints, with hydrogen storage potential modeled in the form of underground gas storage facilities (like natural gas is stored today) with maximum resource constraints. Underground gas storage facilities used today for natural gas storage can be retrofitted for hydrogen storage; the modeled U.S. hydrogen storage requires ~30% of existing U.S. underground gas storage facilities. Note that some storage facilities, such as salt caverns, are not evenly geographically dispersed which may present challenges, and there may be better alternative storage solutions.
Global sustainable green hydrogen eliminates 6 PWh/year of fossil fuel energy use, and 2 PWh/year of non-energy usei. The fossil fuels are replaced by 7PWh/year of additional electrical demand."
It was tongue-in-cheek Jeff. ITM has been in electrolysers far longer than Plug Power. Plug Power only purchased Gener ELX in 2020 and at the time Gener would have been considered quite well behind ITM. ITM had already announced their 1GW factory, the largest in the world. Even when Plug Power bought ELX they had nothing like that, not even in the pipeline. Plug Power has been relentless in the meantime signing agreements, joint ventures, winning contracts, and building factory space. Seems like a clear overtake to me, but not exactly a surprise. Along with many others here I've been in and following ITM and Plug Power for quite some time. Perhaps you already know all the history, but if not, it's very interesting. Most here already know that I'm invested in both, so it doesn't really bother me which one is 'winning'. I think the market is big enough for both. Would you rather I keep my 'gallows' humour of the forum Jeff? If so, I rather fear you're out of luck.
Looks like we've been well and truly overtaken.
https://www.ir.plugpower.com/press-releases/news-details/2023/Plug-Announces-Record-Production-of-PEM-Electrolyzer-Stacks-in-Q1-2023-On-Track-to-Meet-100MW-per-Month-Target-in-Q2/default.aspx
Putting my pessimistic hat on, does this risk cancellation of the Linde 200MW if they're directly comparing alkaline and pem? What if they find the 10MW alkaline received from Sunfire more cost effective, more efficient, or cheaper?
Not only do we have that abundance at times already on windy days, we even pay the windfarms to turn them off and produce nothing instead...ludicrous. Converting the current level of curtailment into hydrogen would already supply 10% of the UKs industrial hydrogen demand.
"The EU's e-fuel exemption will allow a synthetic alternative to petrol which is made by mixing carbon dioxide captured from the air with hydrogen obtained by splitting water molecules using renewable energy."
On the face of it this move ought to boost electrolyser sales. Of course they could water it down even further by permitting e-fuels to be made from blue hydrogen as well. Alongside Nas-k's useful post below we should really be starting to see an uptick in expectation for the hydrogen sector, but maybe it just can't get through the nay-sayers and the current market jitters holding the sector back. Funny, if the cork flies out of this bottle again we're primed for another 10x and a repeat of last time. I hope Dennis manages to get all his ducks in a row.
I don't know if the link below will work but the original is a telegraph article at the bottom for those subscribed.
https://archive.vn/R6zVZ
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/03/28/net-zero-ban-petrol-cars-chaos-brussels-climbdown/
It's only been 2 months since the new CEO laid out a 12 month plan to fix things. Hopefully we'll get a few progress updates along the way, but it's not going to be suddenly fixed in 2 months. Until we see real progress the price is a coin toss based on the overall market and maybe some sector news. Anyone brave enough to trade around the volatility may as well. You're likely to have a few more months of playtime.
Might have something to do with this site's over-enthusiastic vulgar words filter. They've obviously got a list of vulgar words to strike out from each post but I can't understand why they wouldn't have a continually updated list of vetted words that happen to have a vulgar word hidden inside. The so-called "S****horpe problem" is well documented and should be so easy to fix.
I know Savvy, but surely it can only be manipulation if it has an actual manipulative effect on the price, which it doesn't. If it manipulates others without them doing their own research to substantiate Phat's claims then more fool them. I accept it's annoying and tedious, and they are just scare stories, but sadly it's the only way we'll hear from that side of the market. You must be able to see that it would not be beneficial to simply have an echo chamber of unicorns and rainbows.
Although I do not agree with Phat's current view I would like to defend his position on this board. What many of these stocks require before they can return to a positive trend is capitulation (not specific to CWR). To me Phat's recent reversal of sentiment indicates that we are approaching that point and his posts reflects those on that side of the trade. So just ignore the ramping/deramping nature of the posts as they have zero effect on the stock price, but it is important to measure/observe sentiment.
On the plus side, it might bode well given the UK Government always backs the wrong horse. From today's budget they are clearly backing CCS and nuclear. No idea how they expect to reach net zero targets by 2050 backing those two...especially stating their goal of only 25% of electricity from nuclear by 2050. Right, I think I'm going to back the other 75% then.