Hydrogen-Can-Be-The-Future-Of-Energy-Storage

Today we are going to discuss the future of energy storage. It’s some exciting news for you regarding hydrogen storage and what might be coming to the market very shortly to get off-grid with solar and batteries. You need to generate energy when the suns out and store it for when it is not right. Now, people can do this with lithium-ion batteries.

The Tesla power wall 2 is a perfect example. Still, an Australian company named lavo has built a unique cabinet that can sit on the side of your house just like a tesla power wall, but stores your excess solar energy as hydrogen. The lavo green energy storage measures 66 by 49 by roughly 16 inches and weighs.

Battery Revolution – The Future of Energy Storage

I hope you’re ready for this a hefty 714 pounds, making it very unlikely to be pocketed by a thief if it’s installed on the side of your house. Now you connect to it, or we would connect to it via a hybrid solar, inverter. Much like the q cells, q, home hybrid g1 or solar edges, 76 energy hub now, sidebar I’m not saying either of these products works with this particular hydrogen storage system. I’m just giving you a comparison to the type of inverter it would use.

Once you have the unit connected to the hybrid solar inverter, it also needs to be connected to water, spigot, and that’s it. The system will use excess solar energy to electrolyze the water. Releasing oxygen and storing the hydrogen in a patented metal hydride or a sponge at a pressure of 30 bar now, if you’re, not an engineer, 30 bar is 435 psi. The system can store roughly 40 kilowatt-hours worth of energy that’s a lot its three times.

As much as tesla’s current power wall 2 and enough to run an average home for two days without solar energy, now the system isn’t a hundred percent without lithium-ion battery. In fact, the unit has one small, five-kilowatt-hour buffer battery for an instantaneous response. For large loads, its pretty ingenious, there, of course, wi-fi connectivity and a phone app for monitoring and controlling the device at this time. The unit is not available within the United States and is being sold in Australia.

 

The company does expect to release the product internationally, so at least here in the United States by q4 of 2022 has provided some preliminary pricing on the unit. I’m pretty excited to share with you because they expect to ship each product at 26 900 us dollars, Which is significantly more than a single power wall too. Trust me; I understand that. But if you look at the storage capacity, it’s actually beautiful for that price per kilowatt-hour, because you would literally need three power walls to have the same amount of storage capacity.

But that’s not all lavo hopes by the time they release it in q4 of 2022 that the price will be closer to 22 000 us dollars which, if they can achieve this price point it’ll be tough for homeowners, not to at least consider it.

If they’re looking for battery backup or battery storage, now pulling the cover off reveals a surprise because they actually gave us photos or shared photos of the unit’s inside. So the 40-kilowatt hours worth of hydrogen is kept in these four small red containers. On the left, yeah, you see those things over there on that image, and the rest of this big cabinet is taken up with the battery electrolyzer and fuel cell stack, so that’s everything you need right in this cabinet, an obvious question.

We should all be asking ourselves: how is it better than today’s home batteries? Well, lavo says the key components should last much longer than lithium-ion battery systems up to 30 years, instead of maybe 12 to 15 from your standard lithium setup.

No Toxic Chemicals

There are also no toxic chemicals to dispose of after the unit expires. The company says that even though its a bit of a beast, a single level system is more compact than the equivalent amount of battery storage systems yeah. For those of you with an LG chem system paired up with a solar edge, you would understand how big those batteries are and how much space they take up. All the additional components needed same with the tesla power wall and many other battery solutions.

I think its safe to say that we all can agree. This is better than lithium-ion batteries, but nothing is perfect, so we have to ask: how is it worse? Well, the safety aspect is certainly open to debate. I also hope company Lesco could also provide us with some this type of storage for electricity.

Labour Risks

Many people argue about hydrogen on this labour: if a leak occurred, it would rise and disperse so quickly that there’s little chance of a fire or explosion, and that hydrogen is inherently no more dangerous than other conventional fuels such as gasoline or natural gas. But then hydrogen battery store is efficient and release energy with minimal losses for every kilowatt-hour.

You produce from your solar array that gets put into your battery you’re pretty much getting about 90 of it back so consider this your round trip efficiency, solar to battery back to energy, but the process of generating hydrogen by electrolytes using a proton exchange membrane is Only about 80 percent efficient, so you’re losing 20 straight away, so that was converting the solar energy into hydrogen and, at the other end, you’ll lose somewhere around half of what you’ve got stored in the process of converting the hydrogen back into energy through the fuel cell.

Hence, you’re, looking at around a 50 round trip efficiency, which isn’t new knowledge for hydrogen. This has been one of the biggest disadvantages to these systems because it takes more energy to fill up and you get about half of it.

Efficiency

Back a 40 kilowatt-hour, hydrogen energy storage system starts looking more like a 20-kilowatt-hour storage system. However, lavo says this systems round trip, efficiency is well above 50 percent, so taking them at their word yeah. This is in its early days, and hydrogen is the hottest topic on the energy sector right now or in the energy sector. It’s not unrealistic to think home storage units might start making sense at some point down the road, but lava will likely find this robust unit. Tough to sell next to a tesla, powerwall or other battery systems.

For that matter, I have to give them credit where credit is due because the lavo hydrogen energy storage system design looks terrific compared to many of the other products out there. Well, that’s it. Hope Companies like Lesco Bill can also release something similar for us as we all know the situation WAPDA Pakistan. Hopes for the best.