Comment on China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 16 hours agoNot necessarily. It’s not about the boom factor alone - hydrogen is a small atom, and so under pressure, most commonly used materials are permeable to it. It leaks through every material. It really takes something as solid as steel pipes for hydrogen atoms to not work their way through and escape. So while hydrogen would be cheaper to produce at scale, it’s also constantly leaking out of any container.
For wind turbines, static electricity and storms would be huge risks as well, so the application of a floating wind turbine would not be ideal.
If you’re producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.
It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.
Helium does a pretty good job of that too.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Even with steel pipes you get problems with hydrogen embrittlement because hydrogen diffuses into the steel and can cause it to crack.