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Wind Power Produced 140% Of Electricity Demand in Denmark
(cleantechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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Ammonia is used for fertiliser and could be used as fuel. About 1/3rd the energy density of petrol and much easier to store than hydrogen.
Probably wouldn't want to plan to run the grid extensively on it. But if you are just having it to cover rare occasions then it could work well.
Also gotta make a shitload of it for fertiliser production anyway. Cheap excess wind/solar power could make it economically practical.
But at that point why have hydrogen-based or ammonia-based energy infrastructure? Why not use the excess electricity to make fertilizer and use that to grow crops?
Are the factories that make hydrogen so much cheaper than the factories that make fertilizer that when you build enough factories to make use of all the excess electricity (meaning they're idle 80% of the time), the cost of having those factories make fertilizer instead of hydrogen is greater than the cost of building and maintaining the entire infrastructure for using hydrogen or ammonia as energy storage/fuel?
Its not fertiliser instead of hydrogen, hydrogen is a required ingredient for the haber-bosch process. Currently we get the hydrogen from fossil fuels because it is cheaper.
In reality that does not happen on its own. Once you figure in the use of land, water and energy to grow crops it's the by far most inefficient way.
Even without the additional costs in farming and just assuming all those plants happily grow on their own, plants are still losing... "Photosynthesis turns roughly 3 percent of incoming sunlight into organic compounds [...] "Artificial photosynthesis"—comprising a PV cell that provides the electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen—turns roughly 10 percent of incoming sunlight into usable hydrogen[...]"
isn't methanol better for fuel?
Is that as efficient to produce from excess energy? Especially energy that might be highly variable. Hydrogen production can be turned on/off instantaneously and only need a fairly small amount of buffer space for it if you are turning it into something else.
no, it requires a lot of heat. but on the other hand it binds hydrogen into a more stable form and can be made with captured carbon.
Ammonia requires hydrogen and nitrogen from the air. Both certainly are more stable than hydrogen on its own.
yeah ammonia is also a good idea. a lot harder to handle safely though, it tends to corrode things.