'These are the four reasons why H2 should be considered important for heating buildings': Hydrogen Europe
New ‘brochure’ raises power-grid expansion concerns, but ignores the infrastructure upgrades and huge surge of renewables required for H2 heating
Of all the potential uses of clean hydrogen, the heating of buildings is by far the most controversial.
Hydrogen: hype, hope and the hard truths around its role in the energy transition
Most campaigners for hydrogen heating — mainly gas distributors and boiler makers — have resorted to spreading lies about heat pumps, such as that they don’t work in old buildings or can't be used in apartment buildings, to try to make their case.
There are four reasons, according to Hydrogen Europe:
1) Hydrogen can alleviate the electricity grid expansion requirements;
2) Hydrogen facilitates the storage of renewable energy to account for seasonality, securing supply for the entire heating sector;
3) Hydrogen allows the transportation of renewable energy from generation to consumption centres to account for geographical unbalances; and
4) Hydrogen enables imports of cheaper renewable energy from countries with large renewable resources, lowering costs and boosting system efficiency.
1) Grid expansion
“For a heat pump to cover large or entire building heating needs, grid reinforcements must happen much faster at distribution and transmission levels. Especially during cold waves, when electric heat pumps are less efficient, electricity demand will peak, likely constraining the distribution grids,” says the brochure.
It adds: “In the EU-27, if 91 million additional heat pumps are installed by 2050, the grid would have to handle a peak load of 292GW only from heat pumps. This represents about 65% of the total average peak load of the EU-27 in 2018.”
A counter-argument is that power grids need to be upgraded anyway to meet the increasing demand for electric vehicles, so the extra electricity demand for heating can be met at the same time. But of course, European power networks are not being upgraded fast enough to meet the coming demand and the costs of doing so would be high.
2) Seasonality
Hydrogen has long been touted as an essential energy storage medium, able to store excess solar power in summer for use in winter when the amount of sunshine inevitably declines and energy demand rises to heat cold homes.
Storing energy in the form of hydrogen “can store renewable energy and avoid further adding to the already existing imbalance between electricity consumption in winter and summer”, the brochure says.
Hydrogen Europe compares heat demand in France in 2021 with renewable electricity output, pointing out that the amount of available green power remained relatively stable throughout the year, but natural gas consumption obviously increased considerably in winter.
“A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will not work,” the brochure states. “Countries have different climates and different heating challenges. Hydrogen works well in very cold climate and poorly insulated buildings. It can be easily adopted by adapting existing gas infrastructure. At distribution level, pipelines do not need to be retrofitted, with investments only needed for adapting boilers and other appliances.”
Plenty of people would disagree with these assumptions.
Gas compressors and pumps would also need to be replaced, while three times more energy would be required to pump pure hydrogen around the network compared to gas, due to the lower volumetric energy density.
Gas cookers and ovens would also have to be replaced if the natural-gas system moves over to 100% hydrogen, and these should ideally be electric as open hydrogen flames release high amounts of nitrous oxide, a very powerful greenhouse gas (something that can be captured and removed in the enclosed space of a hydrogen boiler in a similar way to catalytic converters in cars).
It also appears to be a nod to the factually incorrect trope that heat pumps do not work in poorly insulated buildings.
3) Energy transportation to consumption centres
“Unfortunately, not all regions in Europe can easily access cost competitive renewable electricity,” the brochure explains.
“Germany is struggling to transport excess onshore wind [power] from the north to the south. Landlock[ed] countries, such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia have limited renewable resources and limited access to the large resources in the north seas. A large degree of electrification of the heating sector would only exacerbate this problem.
“In 2019, wind onshore electricity generation in the North was significantly higher than in the South of Germany, and about 5,100 GWh had to be curtailed.”
This is slightly disingenuous, as Germany is planning to build three new North-South high-voltage power lines to alleviate this problem.
A hydrogen transmission line would, however, almost certainly be cheaper and easier to build than a new high-voltage power line.
4) Hydrogen enables cheaper renewable energy to be imported
The brochure says that wind and solar resources are higher in the Middle East than Europe, and can therefore produce cheaper green power. This can then be imported in the form of hydrogen, thus “lowering costs and boosting system efficiency”.
“Hydrogen can ease the race to modernise buildings, alleviating the craftsman sector bottlenecks, reducing the burden on individuals to bear the costs of full [domestic heating system] renovations, and accelerating decarbonisation,” the brochure concludes.
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