From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

The Net Zero disaster lurches from one crisis to another:

The Energy Secretary has scrapped plans for a pilot “hydrogen town” after a wave of protests against earlier trials.

Claire Coutinho has shelved proposals to force thousands of homes and businesses to replace their natural gas supplies with hydrogen by 2030 to test the fuel’s viability.

Aberdeen, Scunthorpe, and two Welsh towns were among those being considered for wholesale conversion to hydrogen for heating.

It was meant to be a trial run to test the use of low-carbon hydrogen as a replacement for natural gas, which was being considered as part of the UK’s drive to reach net zero by 2050.

However, ministers have been forced into a rethink following a wave of protests in two smaller communities – Redcar in Yorkshire and Whitby, near Ellesmere Port – that had been earmarked as testbed “hydrogen villages”. Both proposed trials were ultimately abandoned.

Energy efficiency minister Lord Martin Callanan said on Thursday: “We have decided not to progress work on a hydrogen town pilot until after 2026 decisions on the role of hydrogen for heating.

“Heat pumps and heat networks will be the main route to cutting household emissions for the foreseeable future.”

The decision undermines the Government’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, which was launched by then-prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020, and its 2021 UK Hydrogen Strategy, published by then-energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng.

Those plans envisaged a neighbourhood-level hydrogen heating scheme by 2023, a village scale trial by 2025, with an entire town being converted to hydrogen by the late 2020s. None of this will now happen.

Several studies have criticised the plans, saying hydrogen will only have a small role to play in heating homes and other buildings in the future.

Last year, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) recommended the Government should not support the rollout of hydrogen heating.

It said the hydrogen would have to be made with natural gas – a process that generates emissions – and would cost more than heat pumps, the main alternative.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/09/hydrogen-town-cancelled-protests-forced-switch-natural-gas

I love this comment from Colin Belshaw:

Very sensible decision.

And this statement is sheer bloody nonsense: “Hydrogen’s value lies in having a high energy density, so it can power anything from homes to heavy vehicles,” because . . . it actually goes like this:

To produce 1 tonne of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water requires 52.5MWh of electricity (including compression) and, the burning of 1 tonne of hydrogen will generate 15MWh. Therefore . . . ENERGY INVESTED is 3.5x GREATER than ENERGY RETURNED, which is . . . really bloody brilliant.

And for this to have any twisted credibility in our idiotic virtue-signalling world, the electrical supply for the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen would obviously have to come from “green” wind and solar generating facilities.

But over the last 12 months, wind and solar combined generation provided 10.86GW, this from a wind and solar combined installed capacity of 45.7GW . . . which was 23.8% of installed capacity – the “load factor.”

So, if you want to deliver 1GW of electricity from wind and solar generating facilities, with a load factor of 23.8%, those facilities will have to have an installed capacity of 4.20GW – an “overbuild factor” of 4.20.

In summary:

To make hydrogen by electrolysis requires 3.5x the energy that will be gained from using that hydrogen, and to generate the electricity needed for that electrolysis, the installed capacity of wind and solar generating facilities will have to be 4.20x greater than the electricity actually needed.

You get the picture, I trust – to generate electrical energy through wind and solar, and using that energy to make hydrogen, would be an exercise in nothing less than . . . profligate stupidity.