The "hydrogen economy" idea rests on the assumption that hydrogen will be competitive with other technologies. To date, most hydrogen is produced through steam reforming of natural gas, which bears the question of the "grey price" (carbon emissions) of the technology, and which industries may benefit first from the hydrogen hype. Beyond the possibility of accidents, this results in added safety and storage costs.Ġ.03% of hydrogen is actually "green". When stored at high pressures, it exhibits high energy density as a fuel and can be stored for large amounts of time.Ĭoncerns about the flammability of hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced in a carbon-neutral way from renewable sources through electrolysis or other methods. Hydrogen can be used in many applications: ammonia production for agriculture, direct iron ore reduction for the steel industry, mobility applications, seasonal grid-scale storage, etc. Also, the ratio comment/score is much higher than for most other technologies, which would indicate a more intense debate surrounding hydrogen. So, hydrogen seems to be capturing most of the headlines as the next go-to grid-scale storage technology (mobility applications were excluded from the search).īut not always in a good way: in "Hydrogen (against)" I counted articles openly criticizing hydrogen storage. By looking for specific keywords, it is possible to sum the score and number of comments for a given technology. In short, it acts as a weighed news aggregators which gives a score and a number of comments to energy-related news articles. To do so, I have scraped data from r/Energy, an energy-related forum on Reddit gathering more than 100k users. Second, even when some data is available, the absence of testing standards makes it hard to draw conclusions on the viability of different technologies in different contexts.Īnd finally, technological lock-in effects may result in technology A being chosen over technology B because of higher investments committed, even if technology B was the optimal choice to start with, from a technical point of view.įor these reasons, I have chosen not to provide you with yet another techno-economical analysis, but rather a quantification of the public perception of next-generation technologies for grid-scale storage. Comparing innovative technologies is difficult.įirst, they are usually studied at a relatively small scale, which makes it hard to find real-life operation data.