Comment by WJW
9 hours ago
My brother! This too is literally addressed in the article already!
"In order to somehow absorb the fluctuations in wind availability, you need to have a significant storage of hydrogen to be able to absorb these fluctuations, which is very costly. On the other hand, if you allow the plant to operate dynamically, you minimize the demand for storing hydrogen or storing power and hence, you can have a much tighter design, a much, much more economical design."
This plant is NOT meant to be operating 24/7. It does indeed reduce production when there's less wind, and has been designed to be efficient even at less than 100% capacity. If you look at the project page the University of Minnesota is pretty clear that the goal of the project is to make ammonia without needing any fossil fuel inputs, as Minnesota doesn't have any fossil fuel deposits but plenty of wind power potential.
You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects. In a world where renewables are becoming cheaper than coal it may not be true for production facilities either, and that is without the added risks of supply chain disruptions for fossil fuels. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a region where natural gas is plentiful.
> You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects.
Buddy, they literally built a factory that does not work without one of the dirtiest technologies we can build (batteries), which are still incredibly primitive in general, and which like… 9 industries are banking on a magical breakthrough in the next ten years. It’s definitely for funsies.
It’s almost exclusively true for research projects. 99.9% of them, including this, are purely for funsies. Nobody is gonna build a million of these. Nobody is going to rely on these. Maybe some nation will build a couple as a fun project, but if you’re trying to reduce your reliance on other nations (why?? The whole point of the global economy is not to produce everything at home, it’s to trade what you’ve got for what you need, and we already have more than enough supplies to grow enough food for all with plenty of surplus) for a very specific fertilizer input, a factory with variable inputs and outputs that you don’t actively control is a fun project at best and worthless at worst.
Of all the green energies, wind is by far the most baffling to try and expand. Solar at least predictably gets a Sun for half of every day, clouds notwithstanding, and people don’t generally farm at night.