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Hydrogen Plants
Storage Energy for the AC Grid
Wind turbines of the early 1980s operated at only one speed: the speed that would generate electricity to match the grid’s AC frequency of 60 Hz. This speed was controlled by automatically mechanically adjusting the pitch of the propellers. This meant that whether the wind blew at 10 km/hr or 100 km/hr, it generated the same electricity. “Why not,” I thought, “just have a DC generator, which would spin as fast as the wind would let it, then convert all available wind energy into hydrogen gas, storing the gas in times of high winds and burning the gas later to generate electricity when there is no wind.” In this way, the hydrogen would become the “stored electricity” in the AC grid, which really can’t store electricity.
Wind turbine technology evolved differently than what I had anticipated. Wind turbines now have all sorts of electronic and mechanical gizmos that harness much more of the energy from high speed winds while maintaining the AC Hz requirement of the electrical grid. But the fact that still remains is when the winds are not blowing, these advanced turbines are not generating much electricity.
Right now, the electrical grids use conventional electrical power (coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear) to pick up the slack when the winds are not blowing. But as more and more renewable energy resources come on stream…
