9/11/24
Emails between R. Ellenbogen and Roger Caiazza
When I did the calculation, I figured in the 80% capacity factor and the 60% generation efficiency but I left out the loss of efficiency when turning using the electrolysis to turn the water into hydrogen.
That 80% efficiency will add 25% ( 1.0 / .8) to the energy usage and as a result, it will also add 25% to both the costs and the land area occupied by the solar arrays, so the arrays will occupy 17.5% of farmland in the state and it could add $250 billion to the cost.
Rich Ellenbogen
9/11/24
The $120 billion H2 storage cost you calculated is the tip of the iceberg. For a back of the napkin quick cost analysis, see the following because the cost will be close to $1 trillion to power the Dispatchable Emission Free Resources (DFER’s). Better than Lithium-Ion batteries but still over four times NY State’s annual budget.
To make the hydrogen for a 30% H2 mixture, 30% hydrogen/70% natural gas assuming an 80% electrolysis efficiency, an 80% generator capacity factor and 60% generator efficiency.:
1 GW x 365 x 24 x 0.8 = 7000 GWh x 30% (H2) = 2100 GWh of net energy and 3500 GWh of Gross Renewable Energy before generator losses annually and that is only for a 30% H2 mix and doesn’t take into account the pipeline losses that are inevitable, so the 3500 GWh is low. Hydrogen is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, gases to transport because the molecule is so tiny and it will leak from everywhere.
Using solar in NY State, a 50 KW array will generate about 50 MWh annually over the 25 year life of the array on average.
So to generate the hydrogen to run a 1 GW combined cycle plant with a 30% hydrogen mix would require a 3.5 Gigawatt solar array. At $1.25/watt (not counting land prices), that’s $4.4 billion for the array plus a ton of money for the electrolyzer to generate that much hydrogen. In 2022, a DOE study found that Electrolyzers cost $2000/KW installed (see the attached pdf), so for for 3.5 GW it would be $7 billion for the electrolyzers, so about $11.5 billion total for 30% Hydrogen.
If you want to go to 100% H2, it will be about $11.5 billion x 3.3 =$38 billion per Gigawatt plus 6 billion for the storage(Your $120 billion/18) plus the piping or about $46 billion per Gigawatt. It will also require 11.6 GW of solar arrays. For 18 Gigawatts of DEFR generation, that’s about $830 billion minimum, assuming that you can find a place to site 210 Gigawatts of solar arrays and you could find the labor to install that much.
At 4.5 acres per megawatt for solar, that will require 945,000 acres. At 640 acres per square mile, that will be almost 1500 square miles or 14% of NY State’s 11,000 square miles of farmland just to support the DEFR’s, best case scenario with few H2 losses figured in. The rest of the plan calls for about 500 square miles of farmland to be taken for other solar, so the entire plan will require about 20% of the farmland in the state and will likely cost about $1 trillion including transmission costs and land costs for the arrays, not including transmission cost for the generating plants because that cost will be there regardless of the solution.
18 Gigawatts of nuclear would cost about $255 billion at Vogtle prices and would generate about 10% more energy while 18 Gigawatts of natural gas Combined cycle plants would cost about 40 billion.
Regarding Wind, Offshore wind is extremely expensive which will limit its use and I was sitting next to a woman at lunch at the conference that specializes in Wind Generation and she said that all of the good sites for onshore wind in NY State have been taken so there will be a limited amount of additional onshore wind in the future.
That $1 trillion is just for the DFER’s and the associated generation and storage and does not include what will be at least $1 trillion for other parts of the plan.
In terms of land, material, labor, and money this entire plan is poorly conceived.
Rich Ellenbogen
9/11/24
Buried in a NYISO draft capacity report is this little gem: “Figure 3 of the Consultant’s report shows the estimated capital costs for onsite hydrogen storage and compression to exceed $2 billion.”
That is just the cost to store hydrogen to use in a turbine or for that matter a fuel cell. It does not include the costs to make it or transport it, just the storage. And that is one site. The Integration analysis calls for at least 17,868 MW of DEFR. If the storage is enough for a 300 MW turbine you only need 60 storage systems. 120 billion just to store the hydrogen.
Roger Caiazza
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York
NYpragmaticenvironmentalist@gmail.com
9/11/24