Harvesting The Future Today
The technology to produce hydrogen and Ammonia with renewable electricity is in progress, and although to scale and be competitiveness today is one the mayor challenges today, is certain that green hydrogen will have a key role in a decarbonized economy now an in the near future. Even ammonia could be used as an energy vector for the development of remote agricultural areas Laking infrastructure. providing energy and fertilizers as well as electricity and fuel ether uses, directly used at its destination point or converted back to hydrogen.
Fertiberia Plant
Steam Ref. natural Gas
Steam Ref. Of Biogas
Steam Ref Of Ethanol
Electrolysis Eolic
Elecrolysis Fothovoltaic
Electrolysis Hidrolelectic
The data compiled in Table 4.8 reveal that conventional electricity generation is typically based on much larger units than renewable generation. Several wind turbines or solar panels may be grouped into utility-scale generation parks with nameplate capacities in the tens or hundreds of MW. Especially offshore wind farms reach connection capacities of more than 1000 MW (e.g. Hornsea, UK). Yet also more small-scale applications and hence more distributed systems exist.
Among the conventional units, the gas-fired CCGT plants reach the highest efficiency – and a fortiori the lowest CO2 emissions per unit of electricity produced. At the same time, open-cycle gas turbines (OCGT) are the most flexible thermal generation units.
Dispatchability is an advantage of conventional generation units, although large-scale hydroreservoirs and biomass plants are also fully dispatchable (see Sect. 4.2.1 (hy- dropower) and 4.2.4 (biomass)). In terms of ramping, renewable-based generation is advantageous compared to thermal power plants, as it may usually downregulate (and upregulate, if the natural resource is available) within less than a minute. In terms of technical availability, photovoltaic plants may reach almost 100%, although ageing may reduce the actual electricity generation, and wind attains approximately 95–98%. Yet, in terms of system reliability (cf. Sect. 5.1.4.1), the availability of the corresponding natural resource has also to be considered. For most thermal power stations, including coal, (combined cycle) gas and nuclear power plants, the availability factor ranges between 70 and 90%. Open-cycle gas turbines have even higher availability factors, ranging from 80 to 99%; yet this comes with a relatively rare dispatch.
