Member Info for toneman

Cowie's all over ITM today. You'll need a subscription (2 articles free) to read it, so here's the link anyway.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/money/claims-for-green-hydrogen-will-turn-out-to-be-more-than-hot-air-7g37q3h6z

I don't think so.

https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/low-cost-clean-hydrogen-from-underground-oil-fires-could-kill-off-green-h2-sector/2-1-752473

This might be one way to make (green!?) hydrogen, but it can't kill the electrolysis method because we still need a suitable storage for excess renewable electricity. Neither fires nor batteries are suitable for that job, only H2 storage. So it may be additional H2 they're making, but it's not H2 storage.

...Bill Gates.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/08/bill-gates-becomes-first-buy-500m-hydrogen-powered-super-yacht/

This yacht's been posted before. Looks like the buyer is a certain Mr Bill Gates. Lucky man.

Bilbs, one of the troubles with choosing nuclear, for the uk at least, is it takes us way too many years to approve then build one, and even Hinkley Point C is only around 3GW. We'll be decommissioning them as fast as we're building them at this rate.

Perhaps when we've constructed enough renewables to supply enough overcapacity for allowing hydrogen generation in the first place it'll mean that the distributed nature of the renewables almost guarantees enough grid generation even on low generation days (poor sun, low wind). After all, it's nearly always a little bit windy somewhere.

If we have to go nuclear then I think that the small modular reactor solution could have some legs. Small enough not to be too dangerous. https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/small-modular-reactors.aspx#/

Based on your day's energy from earlier of 200,000 tonnes per day should take around 500GW of electrolysers...so 500 years of production in the in-progress factory. But as you suggested previously we might get away with only 70% of that if we are using the energy more efficiently than combustion engines.

Also, those big gasometer storage facilities in taskmaster's youtube and 13th's image could hold about 20 tonnes of hydrogen without any pressurising...so 10,000 of those around the country would do it. Take the storage pressure up to two atmospheres and we could halve that number.

I think your final additional renewables is wrong.

33% of 335TWh is 110TWh.
Additional energy required 2175TWh x 70% = 1522 TWh.
1522 / 110 = 14. So an additional 14 times more renewables than we have today meets your target, not 200x.
...or have I just not spotted my mistake yet?

I wonder how many current EV drivers don't plug in every night and are willing to begin their next journey with only 70% capacity remaining after their previous day's commute. We do it all the time with our fossil cars, but I'm not an EV driver so I don't know if there's a mindset change that happens when you can recharge at home.

It sounds to me like the people advocating v2g to support renewables intermittency haven't really done the numbers. If you took around 30m cars (roughly 75kWh battery each) and said you'd take 33% of their capacity to support the grid (so that you could still drive around a bit afterwards) you'd still only be providing around 32GW back to the grid continuously for 1 day. So after one week of low wind and limited sunshine, all your cars would be flat and immobile and you'd be back to cranking up the gas fired power stations.

In my opinion, hydrogen is the only true mobile energy storage that can tackle this problem and ultimately it will be countries like Australia, USA and Africa with vast land masses capturing solar and wind, converting excess to hydrogen and shipping all over the world (on hyrdrogen fuel-cell tankers). Thinking the world can run on batteries is missing the scale of the problem.

Vehicle to grid...

It would be better to see a big-picture plan of how full scale v2g is supposed to be implemented. If you've got enough generation capacity without vehicle support then you don't need v2g. If your generation capacity is not enough then what do you do if your v2g customers don't cooperate according to your master plan. Trying to control that sort of cooperation sounds like a nightmare to me.

As soon as we get the gigawatt green hydrogen storage sorted out then someone needs to redefine that term 'baseload' to be "the level below which the grid demand never falls". That way anything green generated above grid demand can be converted into the fuel-of-the-future to be used as additional power, or industrial gas supply, or transport fuel as we see fit. I'm not a massive fan of nuclear, but at least it's classified as low carbon and helps renewables reach the point of oversupply a bit quicker. We just need to get the politicians to understand that paying windfarms NOT to generate is counterproductive. That oversupply should be seen as orders into ITM for generating green hydrogen for storage.

Agreed darien, mine too. And you may be right about near term overbought, but that's just short term volatility, still there's nothing wrong in taking a position. You will find a lot on this board are taking the opposing view though. And many taking near term drops as top-up opportunities. Many of us are in this one for the long term, and there are a great many investors yet to be aware of hydrogen's role which could grow substantially through this decade. Either way, best of luck.

darien, those numbers you stated are just product development numbers. They're peanuts. No one's backing this company thinking that those numbers mean anything. There's a £0.5bn a year factory to get up and running. Now if they fail to win orders, can't fill the factory, or simply fail to supply successful production volumes to big customers then I'll be joining you on your short. But until then I think you need to check out the bigger picture. Losing money during development is not the right thing to focus on. [Caveat - it's volatile so could plummet at any point...but that still doesn't make you right].

As far as the UK is concerned, we're basically not using any oil already. And coal never went above 5GW at any point last year, with several consecutive days of 0GW. I know generation from gas is useful because it's quite responsive so you can raise it and lower it easily throughout the day to balance the supply/demand. Is the same true for nuclear? Can it be turned up and down for balancing or is it really just switched on, and left on, like base load? I'm not familiar with the operation if someone can enlighten me.

Well if governments/industry stay serious about their intention to decarbonise (and not just with CCS) then there should be no shortage in orders for electrolysers. Here are some interesting/bizarre numbers I've been working on (feel free to double check)...
From approx 2025 onwards (in the UK) we could need at least 1GW of electrolysers each year towards grid balancing as the night-time wind-power electricity production starts to overtake demand (unless EV adoption takes up the excess instead...which it might do easily).
Anyway, if EVs don't perform that role then we should be conservatively targeting 15GW balancing demand. So 15 years current factory production.
If all HGV trucks in UK became hydrogen we'd need 5m kg hydrogen per day. That's approx 13GW of electrolysers...so another 13 years.
If 1/3 UK cars became hydrogen that's another 5m kg hydrogen per day. Again, 13GW, so another 13 years production.
I haven't bothered to add in trains and buses.
And then consider current actual global demand for industrial hydrogen is around 70m tons annually. If you only take the USA demand (I don't know the UK figures) at 9m tons annually (over 24000 tons per day), you would need 62GW of electrolysers to produce it. Another 62 years of production.

Conclusion...we're gonna need a bigger factory.

...alternative conclusion: this technology doesn't even scratch the surface and governments instead look for a different solution.

...you decide.

So we're all agreed then. In four years it'll be worth somewhere between £2bn and £6bn...and we'll all be rich :-D

...now where did I leave that superyacht magazine...ah, there it is. Night all.

Here's how I justify the current market cap...
2MW electrolyser now standardised for production.
1GW capacity factory to be completed this year.
Enough green hydrogen demand to reach full capacity production in 4 years.
I assume a 2MW electrolyser sells for about £1m so full capacity production is £500m annual revenue. Assume £200m profit.
There's probably support and service contracts on top of that so it would be quite easy to get to £1bn revenue. Assume £400m-£600m profit and that's got to be worth a £2bn market cap in four years. To get there from here, surely a £500m market cap is a fair starting point (requiring 40% annual market cap growth).

The company already say the factory will enable them to reach 1GW capacity within 3 years, so they must have a feeling that scale of business is out there and not far off that timescale either.

Anyway, tell me what you think of my numbers, and why...especially if you have better knowledge of the revenue generated per MW of electrolyser and the likely profit made.

Seaangler, I'm happy because I'm not a fan of the European political project and pleased that as of 11pm the UK will no longer be a member of it. For me, that's good news. For me, that is Brexit done.

Your air will be worth a lot more when we get all the trucks, buses, trains and ships running on hydrogen (and a few cars too, 'cos I want one of those new Mirais they're updating later this year).

Happy Brexit Day. I've got my bubbly chilling ready to crack open at 11pm.

Ah, actually it's not inc., someone's put inc. in their Linkedin profile, but inc. is someone else. Forget the inc., it's just plain Ceres.
https://www.ceres.org/about-us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(organization)

...nothing to do with seeds

Be careful oneandonly1, that article is not related to Ceres Power (other than indirectly being an EV related article). It's actually Ceres inc., "a sustainability nonprofit organization" in USA.