During the time I've been running this channel
I've made quite a few videos looking at the various aspects of hydrogen as a fuel source,
from hydrogen fuel cells to aviation fuel, hydrogen storage in ammonia, hydrogen for heating
homes and even the suggestion of hydrogen for gas cookers. Although even I might draw the line at
that one. Cooking on gas is one thing - cooking on hydrogen? Meh, not so much. Since the early part
of 2020 though the print and online media have got themselves into a bit of a kerfuffle about whether
hydrogen can really contribute to a genuinely sustainable future or whether it's just a massive
ruse by the fossil fuel industry to allow them to continue extracting methane gas. And that's
because there are two main ways to make hydrogen. You can either get it from water via electrolysis
like I did in my own back garden in 2019, and like industrial scale electrolyser plants are beginning
to do in many parts of the world creating what's known as green hydrogen, or you can bombard
methane gas with high pressure steam to separate the CH4 molecule out into its constituent parts
creating what's known as grey hydrogen. Plus the not insignificant by product of carbon dioxide.
And then there's a variation called blue hydrogen where some sort of CO2 capture is attempted. The
overall process is called steam methane reforming and right now at the start of 2021 about 95
percent of all the world's hydrogen is made that way, all neatly controlled by the fossil fuel
corporations. And just to put the icing on the double-tiered sponge cake of irony, the process
requires more energy input from the fossil fuels than it gets out in the hydrogen at the
end. You really couldn't make it up! So the strong suggestion by many campaigners and
journalists is that unless there's a shift towards green hydrogen in the next few years that is so
dramatic it borders on revolutionary, hydrogen will just become another back door for methane
gas producers to continue playing their trade. But that revolution has already started in some
parts of the world. Most notably in Australia and now a new Australian start up company has launched
a fridge sized green hydrogen home energy storage system that could prove to be a serious competitor
for the industry-leading Tesla Powerwall. Hello and welcome to just have a think. I'm sure
you've seen all the hype around hydrogen in the press over recent months. Some commentators are
going as far as to suggest it's the fossil fuel industry's last big scam - its final last
ditch attempt to remain commercially viable in the 21st century now the concept of natural gas
as a transition fuel is being rapidly outpaced by increasingly inexpensive wind and solar
coupled with grid scale battery energy storage. And it's certainly fair to say that some
policymakers around the world have shown an alarming level of ignorance and naivety in their
gushing enthusiasm for extracting hydrogen from natural gas, having been seduced and convinced
by the highly talented PR people at fossil fuel HQ... "what assessment has my right honourable
friend made of the potential opportunities presented for the manufacture of blue hydrogen
at Beckton, creating low-cost carbon jobs for the East of England?" " Uh, I also know that the
oil and gas authority is currently conducting an in-depth feasibility study into blue hydrogen at
the Beckton gas terminal and I very much welcome this work". When it comes to the question of our
sustainable energy future there are few countries in the world where the debate rages more fiercely
than Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said last year that "There is no credible energy
transition plan for an economy like Australia in particular that does not involve the greater
use of gas as an important transition fuel." A claim which was fairly comprehensively debunked
in this article by Simon Holmes a Court, citing studies by all these academic organizations, all
of which conclude that the unexpectedly rapid rise of wind and solar coupled with battery storage,
plus the resurgence of pumped hydro, means that Australia can in fact radically reduce gas and
coal use in the coming years and still keep the lights on with electricity at low prices. A big
part of that green transition will be millions of solar panels on the roofs of homes offices
factories and public buildings, most of which will be hooked up to some sort of energy storage system
to ensure a power supply right around the clock. That's where this new home hydrogen battery
system comes in. The company that created it is called Lavo, and they launched both the
business and the products back in October 2020. Hydrogen is very good at storing energy in fact
it's got the highest energy density per kilogram of any non-nuclear fuel, but its volume is
enormous at normal temperature and pressure so it generally has to be cryogenically cooled to
minus 250 degrees Celsius, or highly pressurized to get it into its denser liquid form. Both
these processes require a lot of energy and could be hazardous or even explosive if handled
incorrectly. Not a great set of criteria for use in a domestic setting. But Lavo's system differs
from those two methods. Designed to be hooked up to a conventional water main and a rooftop
solar PV system the LAVO unit first runs the water through a purifier and then uses the solar
power to run an electrolyser to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen, just like the large
grid scale electrolysers I mentioned earlier. The oxygen is released back into the atmosphere
but instead of freezing or pressurizing the hydrogen the folks at LAVO have developed a system
that can store it completely safely as a solid. They achieve that little bit of magic by
combining the hydrogen with a metal which is capable of absorbing it into its structure, a
bit like a sponge absorbs water. LAVO are keeping the specific composition of that metal fairly
close to their chest as part of their patented system, but the resultant combination is a stable
metal hydride. The pressure required to force the hydrogen into the metal lattice is no more than
the force applied by the electrolyser itself. As soon as that pressure is removed the
hydrogen starts leaking back out of the metal and it can then be diverted into a fuel cell to
produce electrical energy. The hydrogen hydride is stored in four removable modules, each of
which contains the equivalent of 5000 litres of hydrogen gas and holds enough energy to run a
small home for a full day. The overall capacity of the system is 40 kilowatt hours and LAVO reckon
it's good for 20 000 cycles, which compares very favourably to something like the Tesla Powerwall,
which is warranted for about 3 000 cycles. The round-trip efficiency of the LAVO system,
which is essentially the energy produced via solar or wind versus the energy released out of the fuel
cell, is about 50 percent. That is significantly lower than the 95% conversion rate for lithium-ion
batteries, and unsurprisingly in this very early stage of commercial production the cost is
comparatively high too at about 30 000 Australian dollars compared to just over 13 000 for the Tesla
Powerwall. But if you crunch the numbers, even at 50% efficiency, you're potentially getting far
more bang for your buck during the entire lifetime of the LAVO system. Despite ScoMo's insistence
on cosying up to the Australian coal industry, there are increasingly favourable regulations
at state and federal level in that country, including the national hydrogen strategy, and
companies like LAVO look to be quite well placed to take advantage of the current environment
to bring these sorts of technologies to market. As well as installations in domestic homes,
LAVO will be going after commercial units and energy hungry centres like telecommunication
towers. They also plan to disrupt the dominance of off-grid backup diesel generators. The
company reckons there's a potential AU$2 billion market just in Australia and as much as AU$40
billion worldwide. Whether or not the LAVO system is the right one for you will depend on your
geographic location, your domestic energy use, and whether you're on grid or off-grid. And
your budget of course. In some cases lithium-ion batteries may be a preferable option. And there
are others too, like this redox flow battery from Australian company Redflow. But the really
encouraging thing from the consumer point of view is that there is now some genuine competition
in the residential energy storage market that will inevitably drive innovation and
efficiency in the design and manufacturing process which ultimately translates into keener prices
for you and me. And that will hopefully achieve the ultimate aim of encouraging more and more
people to dive into the green energy revolution. If you've got views or direct experience
of the new green hydrogen industry then jump down to the comments section
below and leave your thoughts there. That's it for this week though. We're taking a
week off for the Easter break now, so there'll be no Just Have a Think video on Easter Sunday. But
the fifth of the Just Have Another Think videos will be published this Wednesday, and
normal service will of course be resumed on Sunday the 11th of April. Before I go I
must just give a quick shout out to the folks who've joined our Patreon page since last time
with pledges of $10 or more a month. They are Samuel Douglass, Alessandra Pizzo, Mark Durbin,
Dion Macintyre, Larry Tomlin, Chris Lancaster, Andrew Green, Damien Seery, Zachary Semke,
Dave Malich, Henning Hollatz, Rick Rys, Karl Callwood, Dennis Dennis, Josh de Roos,
Karamjeet Pandher, Keith Dunn, and Ben Burmeister. and of course a big thank you to everyone else
who's joined since last time too. You can get involved in all that and get the opportunity
to exchange ideas and information plus watch exclusive monthly news updates from me, and have
your say on future programs in monthly content polls by visiting www.patreon.com/justhaveathink,
and you can hugely support the channel absolutely for free by subscribing and hitting that like
button and notification bell. It's dead easy to do all that, you just need to click down there or
on that icon there. As always, thanks very much for watching, have a great couple of weeks and
remember to just have a think. See you next time.
