Zero-Carbon ICE fuel

[dpeilow]

Which is another variant of the "it doesn't matter because it's renewable energy" argument. If all this renewable energy was so easy and free to get, we wouldn't have headlines like those on the Daily Telegraph every other week.

The target is 20% by 2020. It's going to be a struggle to get to 100%. We can't be so flippant as to throw it away on schemes that need 6x as much as the real solution.

[Robert.Boston]

"We need 3.9kg of CO2 to make one kilogram, or about 3.1kg to make one litre of gasoline... We need about 30 kilowatts of power to make one kilogram of gasoline. The main energy cost is the cost of making the hydrogen through electrolysis of water."

They say 30 kilowatts but this doesn't make sense so they probably mean kWh (which tallies with the first statement).

So do the maths and that's around 24 kWh per litre or 109 kWh per UK gallon. That's over £15 a gallon just on electricity at my domestic rates (obviously industrial would cost less but it doesn't bode well).

The wholesale value of 1 MWh of electricity is approximately £50. So, 24 kWh costs about £1.20 at wholesale rates. Industrial customers usually pay all, or nearly all, of their "wires" charges through fixed charges, so that figure is pretty close to their actual cost. (We residential customers pay for wires on a kWh basis. Silly.)

They can legitimately claim that they are putting more energy out than taking in because they are leaving out of the "inputs" side the wind energy.

[dpeilow]

Thanks - very useful. So at wholesale grid prices the £1.20 electricity cost alone is over double the pre-tax retail price of a litre of gasoline.

On the 9:1 thing, that's really a cheat because there is an energy opportunity cost of electricity those wind turbines are making.

[Robert.Boston]

Yes, and yes -- so even with bad accounting, this stuff is far too expensive.