Letter: DAVE Gordon questions the veracity of our proposals regarding the evidence presented in what he refers to as our “weak paper”, Hydrogen Scotland, one of two papers released at the launch of our new think tank HIAlba-IDEA and available on our web site HIAlba.org. Our other paper, Maximizing Scotland’s Well Being by Bravely Innovating, is a detailed overview of a series of 10 papers that we hope to produce going forward, one of which is the Hydrogen Scotland paper. Central to our proposals are the potentially game-changing technology for producing ammonia from renewable energy and extracting hydrogen from ammonia and the use of offshore wind power to achieve this. Although Mr. Gordon claims to “know how to assess evidence sources and knows his way around numbers”, we note that much of the focus in his letter is on renewable energy sources that we do not regard as game-changing for Scotland, such as solar power and wave power. With regard to his point about solar power, we note that Mr Gordon does not give a source for his alternative claim other than his own experience. It is important to note that our Hydrogen Scotland has as its first line “Preliminary report” and is published at this stage to provide readers with a better grasp of recent technological breakthroughs in the production of ammonia as discussed in our Outline paper. There will need to be a considerable amount of work done on that paper going forward to turn it into a Scottish version of the renewable hydrogen roadmap, produced in Australia, which will be necessary to take the application of the renewable hydrogen technology forward. Our proposal of 25 Highland locations with 500MW capacity each are not intended to provide renewable energy for the whole of the Scottish economy. Rather they are examples of how the Highland economy could potentially be transformed with the use of renewable hydrogen, obviating the need for constraint payments, and how our proposals could work on a larger scale. Indeed, our ambitions for renewable hydrogen are far greater than supplying the energy of Scotland alone, as our Greenprint notes.
Herald 5th April 2019 read more »
France’s EDF has launched a hydrogen production and distribution subsidiary to support decarbonisation of industry and mobility using low-carbon electricity from its nuclear and renewable energy fleet. The new company, Hynamics, will offer hydrogen to industrial customers through services to install, operate and maintain hydrogen production plants. It will also support hydrogen in transport applications, by supplying service stations that refuel fleets of electric vehicles “such as trains, buses, refuse collection vehicles, commercial vehicles, or even river transport systems.” Hynamics said it has identified 40 target projects in France, Belgium, Germany and the UK.
World Nuclear News 4th April 2019 read more »