Sourcing Hydrogen Equipment Part 1 — Electrolysers
In preparation for demonstrating model based solar hydrogen domestic and community system design, accessible by anyone, a little of the good and the bad, it all adds up to good.
I’ve referred often to hydrogen equipment of all kinds being available on Alibaba.
Now it’s time for me to show some system modeling based on actual equipment, I can’t help noticing the sourcing of these is a technical minefield.
If we are not truly well grounded with a reasonably good working experience of hydrogen, there is massive possibility of making the wrong purchase.
Alibaba is undoubtedly the source where we are most likely to find just the equipment we need.
We have to admit China is the manufacturing superpower of the world, and they are very obviously more advanced than any other country in the world in the technology of hydrogen, evidenced just by the sheer volume and spectrum of equipment available.
Personally I prefer a European supplier, Enapter, for electrolysers. Specifically, they look to have this pretty well thrashed out, and their information on hydrogen looks good, though I did find a wobbler, even there, which I hope might be some time put right with a clarification, fair is fair, I will call out European and US suppliers just like I will Chinese, so let’s start with the wobbler I found in Enapter’s information:
The Energy content of hydrogen is correctly identified as 33.33 kWhrs per kg here:
We can verify this from other sources, this is general information about hydrogen.
On the next page, enapter gives an explanation of how long it takes to fill a 500L tank using one of their units:
The conclusion they come to, after mentioning that a 500L tank will hold around 5kg of hydrogen at 700 barg, is it will take around 35 hours “Until the tank is full”. They do mention the tank running at 35 barg, whereas the tank holding 5kg of hydrogen was identified as 700 barg.
The problem starts when we cross check what we might think we got without knowing what difference the pressure makes, a tank containing 5kg hydrogen, in 35 hours. If we use the known energy content of the hydrogen to calculate the energy content of 5kg of hydrogen, we get the impression the “tank full” means 5*33.33 = 166.65 kWhrs of energy in it.
Then we look at the electrical spec of the electrolyser and notice it is 2.5KW, and we multiply that out by 35 hours and find only 87.5 KWhrs there.
This implies we got an “energy profit” of nearly 80 kWhrs.
Investors might not see that as a big deal.
But Engineers, and ChatGPT, we know it’s physically impossible.
We can’t get more energy out than we put in. If there ever is more energy out than in, we should question where the extra energy came from, and the energy price that had to be paid by whichever source it came from — this is the main point of my latest writings on the energy problem, the reason we see perpetual planetary heating, is because of financial profit, since money and capital is energy, always. But I digress.
Returning to the Enapter wobbler; to produce 5kg of hydrogen at 35 barg, it would take 5*24 hrs, as the spec gives around 1kg per 24 hrs at the electrolyser in optimal conditions.
Putting that 5kg into the tank at 700 barg would require an additional compressor, the power of which has to be added to the 2.5kW of the electrolyser itself, thus pushing down the efficiency of the hydrogen conversion even further than we might calculate as:
Hydrogen power produced/Electrical power consumed = (33.33*5 kWhrs)/(5*24*2.5 kWhrs) = 55%
This is the actual efficiency of the Electrolyser, in converting electricity to hydrogen in ideal conditions. It does not include the additional drier which is now supplied separately by Enapter, to dry out the output hydrogen to higher purity. Both drier and compressor power consumption need to be taken into account in the throughput system efficiency of the hydrogen conversion chain in a practical installation.
Investors might see this as a very big deal.
But enlightened Engineers, and ChatGPT, know it is not only desirable but 100% required, that we accept whatever efficiency we can find in the solar hydrogen conversion chain, because whatever energy can be put towards this creation of hydrogen, is energy taken away from the heating effect on Earth.
We can’t say that about extracted energy, even at 100% efficiency (Physically impossible!), for every Joule gained from extracted energy, there is orders of magnitude more energy lost to heat outside the things calculated in the system efficiency, that we do not take into account. It is failure to take those losses into account that is now resulting in our planet on the brink of total destruction, and our money worth next to nothing (The energy is disappearing from it — inflation) without us really knowing why, until only recently. The energy in profit has to come from the unaccounted for energy from the planet.
Nothing, for a single Joule or kWhr of the trillions it supplies per second to us is ever charged for by the sun, it gives it all for free, and our failure to use those to date, by monetising them instead of monetising the energy we conned from the planet by profit, is the reason we have hitherto unstoppable temperature rise.
Am I digressing again? I am not so sure now, it’s all the same system, isn’t it?
Anyhow, we should see Enapter still is a good source of Electrolysers, they are just using “Old school” less than transparent sales pitch, to sell, especially to investors, like they have to, to compete in the old school system of profit driven extracted energy, that we are still putting up with.
Investors might scream with horror at the prospect of energy storage efficiencies as low as around 50%, but they are not understanding the bigger picture, that this 50% of energy stored is a massive triumph over planetary heating, the thing we need to reverse, with no delay, since now flashpoint is being reached, and money, their money included, is almost worthless already.
Further, energy stored in this form, after it is incentivised, by appropriate monetisation (See “Kardashev Money”), will become ubiquitous, the nature of it is that in order to guarantee 24/7 availability of all domestic and community installations, we have to overproduce, there is no way of knowing up front how much is needed, we have to scale it up until all needs are met, including keeping all aerospace in the sky.
Batteries can never do that.
So in conclusion my choice of Electrolyser for System Model based design purposes is Enapter. But if you know the spec of other electrolysers you prefer, you can always drop them in.
Here is the reference page I would direct anyone to, wishing to know more about Enapter Electrolysers:
The last of this series will be an adaptable end-to-end system model for a domestic and community solar hydrogen system done using DMN (Decision and Modelling Notation) based modeling strategy, based on an example, the one I will use to demonstrate the technique, and how anyone can use it to knock up a model based solar hydrogen community system, since DMN is something now widely available for free, no-one is excluded, no need to buy the expensive tools I’ve paid for over the years as a Chartered Model Based Systems Engineer (MBSE) consultant to achieve this, its all for free now, in preparation for the all-for-free world coming next.
If you are keen to use this technique, I would advise getting into, and playing around with DMN, to get a feel for it in preparation for seeing how to use it for solar hydrogen system modeling.
In the next part, part two of this series, I will cover fuel cell choice, which I think has to come from Alibaba.
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All readers should note this is not advice endorsing any particular product, all should consult other specialists and system specifications, to make their own judgements, the system model I present here will be fit for the purposes I would use it for, but it might not be the same for your own requirements. I am more than happy to act in a paid capacity, to take time out from my usual activities to assist anyone wishing help, but without that help, I can’t guarantee this model working for you.
Update history: Link to part 2 added 25/11/2023
