I drive past the now dormant Taconite Harbor Energy Center four times a week on my way to my “other job” as a teacher in Silver Bay. Built in 1958 as a 250 MW coal fired power station, Tac Harbor has been idled since 2016. Before Minnesota Power idled the three-unit plant it released an estimated 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Last summer Minnesota Power extended a final decision on the fate of the plant into 2022.
As a green energy economy advocate, I’m interested in creative thinking regarding how to repurpose places like Tac Harbor with its existing ties into the electric grid and its access to Lake Superior while at the same time looking for ways to employ local folks in good paying jobs.
A number of analysts believe that hydrogen will play an important role in a green energy economy. Hydrogen can be produced two ways. The most common method used today is through steam reformation, which releases hydrogen from petroleum or natural gas, but also releases far too much carbon into the atmosphere in the process. The other is electrolysis. You might remember a science teacher breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen in a high school science class. The inputs are simple: fresh water and electricity. The outputs are zero carbon hydrogen and pure oxygen. Recent breakthroughs in cathode and anode alloys have made the process incredibly efficient. Conversely, hydrogen run through fuel cells, like the ones first used in the Apollo program more than 50 years ago, produces electricity with only clean, fresh water as a byproduct.
The beauty of hydrogen is that it can be used as an energy storage medium. One of the problems we’ve got right now with wind and solar is that more electricity is generated on sunny and windy days in the Midwest than we can use. When it’s darker like in the winter or when the wind doesn’t blow, power companies rely on fossil fuel fired “peaker” plants to make up for the lack of wind or sunlight. Hydrogen stored during times of peak renewable electricity production and used to generate power when it’s needed can reduce the need for fossil fuel based peaking.
This sort of scheme is being considered across Europe, in Ohio, Utah, in the US island territory of Guam, and elsewhere. In several of these locations hydrogen storage is being considered alongside large solar fields, but access to fresh water adds cost.
Which leads me back to Tac Harbor. We push electrons around the grid to where they’re needed already, and we can send electrons from anywhere to wherever they can be stored as well. Why not use the access Tac Harbor has to abundant clean water, take advantage of our mild summers to reduce cryo-storage costs, and utilize the existing Tac Harbor infrastructure to convert the plant into the upper Midwest’s first green hydrogen storage and fuel cell power generation facility?
Daren Blanck, Tofte
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