Power To Gas Technology Turns Excess Wind Energy Into Natural Gas

Beth Buczynski | 23 August, 2012 | Alt Energy, Clean Tech, Wind

Suffering from a glut of wind-generated electricity, Germany has turned to an international power company to prevent this extra energy from going to waste.

Too much clean energy is a hard concept for Americans to fathom, but with over 21,000 wind turbines (as of 2011) Germans are scrambling to use or preserve electricity that won’t fit into the overflowing electricity grid. To solve this problem, E.ON, the world’s largest investor-owned power and gas company, will build a pilot power plant designed to store energy generated by the wind in the gas grid instead.

Known as power to gas technology, this unique energy storage method turns surplus wind energy into hydrogen (and even methane) through a process of electrolyzation. By separating water into its separate components of hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen produced can be stored in the existing natural gas grid for later use. The existing gas network can only handle limited amounts of hydrogen, but further processing ultimately results in the production of synthetic gas, i.e. methane, which can be fed into the grid whenever necessary.

“If Germany expands the use of renewable energy sources in the coming years as planned, the power supply on very windy or sunny days will exceed demand more and more often, and to a growing extent,” said E.ON AG Board member Klaus-Dieter Maubach. ”This will increasingly bring the power grid to the limits of its capacity. E.ON is therefore investing in the development of technologies to store large energy volumes. In this respect, power-to-gas is a promising solution for the future energy supply system.”

There’s just one pesky problem with this seemingly brilliant storage solution: it ignores the whole “clean” part of the clean tech equation. Wind energy is superior not only because it’s domestically produced, but because it creates electricity without the burning of filthy fossil fuels. Is E.ON is taking a clean source of energy and turning it back into something that’s killing the planet? Is this better than letting the energy go to waste? Would the money to build this power-to-gas plant be put to better use simply upgrading the energy grid to handle more wind-generated energy? Or perhaps the development of batteries for large-scale energy storage? You be the judge.

Photo Credit: Beige Alert/Flickr

deedl

This is the stupidest thing i ever read. When you use electricity to produce methane, the carbon bound in methane has to come somewhere, so you need water and CO2
2 H2O + CO2 –> CH4 + 2 O2
So the CO2 that goes into the process is gone. When you burn the methane
CH4 + 2 O2 –> CO2 + 2 H2O
the CO2 is released again. But this is exatly the amount of CO2 that was bound before. So producing windgas is CO2-neutral. Its like Plants, when you burn a tree, you release CO2, but its the amount of CO2 the tree consumed during its life for growing.
Conventional natural gas is methane buried underground, so when you burn that, you create additional CO2, that is not CO2-neutral and therefore causes climate change.
Thats all basic school knowledge and should be known by any journalist. Should the money spent for power-to-gas-technology better go into the scientific education of journalists writing about science stuff? You be the judge.
Breakingwind

Beth Buczynski, please don’t write such rubbish, you’ve come
across as an ill-informed tree hugging zealot, do some basic research before
putting yourself in the public domain. Even wikipedia will give you some idea
of the real world.

Some corrections-

In saying “Would the money to build this power-to-gas plant
be put to better use simply upgrading the energy grid to handle more wind
energy?” you show a complete misunderstanding of the grid & how it works. The
grid is a high speed transport system for electricity NOT a storage facility.

Mains electricity cannot be stored therefore demand &
supply must be balanced.
So the answer is NO.

Deedl has already covered
the carbon aspect.

E.on is a German power
company, although it is a global player.

Methane is not a synthetic gas (but can be synthesized by
the Sabatier process), we all produce it
when eating, more people = more methane = more problems.

Methane damages the
ozone layer & is 72 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

This is how a real journalist wrote about the system in 2011
- http://www.brighthub.com/environment/renewable-energy/articles/78303.aspx

You mention “Wind energy is superior” superior to what ?? it is intermittent
& unreliable, has a load factor of ony 26% (what are you going to do for the other 74%), it requires an 80% backup by your “filthy fossil fuels” but having
to run inefficiently to follow the wind fluctuations thus producing excess CO2 so
there is no net reduction of CO2

The construction of these units is a filthy carbon intense business,
but as it is mainly done in China
& India we don’t
see that bit.
See –

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html#ixzz23kmAcHtx
for just a bit of it.

Windmills are a bad way to make electricity but a good way
of making cash for the few via obscene subsidies.
adrian mctiernan

Is it me being a bit thick-headed, or does anyone else think that maybe the Germans could actually SELL the surplus power produced, by linking to the grid for other countries? – it might be something like when you have solar electric panels, and when you are not using all the power, it is diverted to the national grid via a meter, and you get paid for what you have put into the grid. I live in England, and a power company are building a wind farm about half a mile out to sea from our seafront in the town I live in. I am cheered to think that it is possible to actually meet power needs, or even exceed them, without having to keep producing more CO2. I see that producing windgas is CO2-neutral according to Deedl, so that is an improvement on using fossil fuel to generate electricity in the power station, so I think that is an improvement, isn’t it? I also feel that sneering at someone with less technical knowledge than we have is not helpful, but rather unpleasant, surely. You don’t tell us what a ‘load factor’ is, again, you need to explain, as I for one would like to follow your comments, but am blocked by what I don’t know. Perhaps a more detailed comment would be better. Nice writing however – some suspicion of university study is exhibited here. Thanks