[HN Gopher] Europe's First Hydrogen Fuel Cell Sea-Going Ferry Is...
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Europe's First Hydrogen Fuel Cell Sea-Going Ferry Is Powered by
Renewable Energy
Author : mardiyah
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-10-28 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.autoevolution.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.autoevolution.com)
| alex_young wrote:
| "Thanks to the local process of obtaining hydrogen, using only
| excess wind power, this will be the first European ferry powered
| entirely by renewable energy. Both the production process for
| hydrogen and its use as fuel don't emit any toxic by-products."
|
| Intriguing, since hydrogen production is almost universally a
| byproduct of fossil fuel production. Not a ton of information
| here...
|
| I did a little digging, and indeed this project is using
| electrolysis powered by wind / tidal energy projects on a small
| Scottish archipelago named Orkney. They produce 130% of the power
| they consume, so they turn the remainder into H. Smart.
|
| Here's a really interesting article with lots of details:
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190327-the-tiny-islands...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Hydrogen seems like a really interesting potential solution to
| the renewable storage problem. I've done a bit of research in
| the past and seen that there are some early stage projects
| investigating this, but I'd be curious to hear from anyone who
| might know more.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I heard that hydrogen, in the form of Ammonia, is the Next Big
| Thing for shipping, which is nice because those container ships
| are pretty nasty.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-the-shipping-industry-is-betti...
| meepmorp wrote:
| > Orkney's excess renewable energy could be used to produce
| hydrogen, which would then be stored under pressure and used to
| power local transport, such as a ferry fleet.
|
| Maybe not actually powered by renewable energy but potentially
| so.
| zejn wrote:
| Orkney is known to have an abundance of community wind energy,
| which they are unable to export to Scotland due to cable
| capacity limitations.
|
| They're experimenting with H2 generation instead.
| azornathogron wrote:
| I wonder why they don't experiment with a bigger cable...
|
| Are grid interconnectors much more capital intensive or
| higher maintenance than Hydrogen generating plants? (Genuine
| question - I have no idea of the relative costs here)
| dahfizz wrote:
| Does anyone have any good numbers on the efficiency of hydrogen
| fuel cells vs batteries? Naively, I would expect that it would be
| lighter to "store" electricity by electrolysizing water and
| storing the hydrogen, then running the hydrogen through a fuel
| cell.
| zejn wrote:
| Transport & Environment have done some studies -
| https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-batter...
|
| Turns out battery charging and inverting has lower losses than
| electrolysis and compression.
| hannob wrote:
| It doesn't say anything about range, but it seems it's a pretty
| small ferry. There are already much larger ferries that are
| battery-electric (largest one is the Basto Electric in Norway,
| which can deliver 600 passengers and 200 cars), so I'm wondering
| a bit what the point is.
|
| Hydrogen is a less efficient way of using renewable energy than
| using electricity directly via batteries. The only reason to use
| it in shipping is that for larger ships and larger distances
| batteries are not feasible.
|
| DFDS is planning to convert a large ferry between copenhagen and
| Oslo to hydrogen:
| https://www.dfds.com/en/about/media/news/hydrogen-ferry-for-...
|
| That's the kind of project where hydrogen makes sense.
| teh_klev wrote:
| From my reading of the article I think the ferry is intended to
| service inter-island hops on Orkney where a 200 car ferry would
| be overkill.
|
| Also as the article reports, Orkney has an idiotically huge
| amount of renewable power available, far more than the islands
| can consume, and far more than the interconnect from Orkney to
| mainland Scotland can handle. So using it to create hydrogen
| seems like a fair use of that surplus power.
| formvoltron wrote:
| Less efficient, but when the energy is used, the weight is
| gone. And that turns out to be important for efficiency.
|
| What I'm curious about his how long will they last in that
| harsh salty environment?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Sure, aircraft work with this a lot (some can't even safely
| land with full fuel load) but I wonder how important this is
| for boats ?
|
| Also for boats you need to account for shifting center of
| mass as the fuel gets used up, which is not an issue with
| batteries.
| kfprt wrote:
| I don't understand this thinking at all. Hydrogen itself
| doesn't weigh much but the containment does. The actual
| change in mass due to hydrogen being used up should be <1%
| of the ship mass. This is entirely unlike aircraft.
| Forge36 wrote:
| What are the refule time comparisons?
| tallowen wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying - hydrogen propulsion will make
| the most difference for large fleets over long distances. Right
| now, in the pacific northwest BC Ferries and Washington State
| ferries are moving to electrify their fleets. The crossing
| distances of these boats are much larger (The most popular BC
| ferries route looking to be more than 20x longer). As I recall,
| the procurement process for these much larger boats that go
| much further distances didn't include all battery (because the
| weight/space would have been prohibitive) or hydrogen electric
| (because the technology is too immature).
|
| I don't think it's reasonable to be experimenting with new
| technologies on 200 car ferries so even if hydrogen is not the
| ideal use case for this crossing, I'm excited to see this
| technology build a track record so it becomes a more feasible
| option for the large scale where it does make sense.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I love this. It's democratising fuel production, which is
| important step towards redistribution of wealth around the world.
| Anyone who can tap into cheap renewable energy source can make a
| profit.
| mr2loco wrote:
| love this one. We are making great steps towards a cleaner future
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