As we have expressed in this column, Japan has important reasons to bet on the development of hydrogen as fuel to achieve energy security and decarbonize the economy. In that logic, the Toyota group and the energy company Eneos Corporation seek to develop a prototype city to explore the use and application of hydrogen.

Woven City is an initiative developed by the Toyota group and is located in the city of Susono, in the prefecture of Shizuoka, Japan; it is defined as an urban incubator to carry out tests and demonstrations of different technologies in the construction of the foundations of the cities of the future.

This implies that inside it, interconnectivity technologies and digitalization of services will be tested to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants, the companies and recreational centers around it. In terms of energy, inside Woven City hydrogen will be tested as a source of energy.

What implications does Woven City using hydrogen instead of other energy sources have?

It would mean that in the city they would not use energy from fossil sources. Therefore, if you want to cook, you would use an induction stove with electricity and not LP gas or natural gas.

The electric energy generated in the city comes from hydrogen and serves as lighting, power source and heating source and to drive light vehicles.

In that sense, hydrogen is presented as the source of energy that could make Woven City sustainable and, therefore, applications of hydrogen are investigated from its production, distribution, application and integration with other developments such as digitalization and intelligent temperature control, to give some examples.

Woven City Intends to Generate Alliances for the Future

Woven City is a project that seeks to generate alliances for the various applications that are developed inside it, and in energy matters Toyota’s ally is the company Eneos Corporation. The company will be responsible for the development of the service stations that would fill the tanks of hydrogen automobiles, which gives continuity to the business model of service stations, unlike automobiles that require electric connection and whose main source of recharge are homes, offices, shopping centers and parking lots.

The stations would use a hydrogen generation model based on electrolysis with renewable energy sources, mainly solar —that is, green hydrogen— and, therefore, it constitutes an effort to advance in decarbonization in cities.

One of the most interesting points of the project is, undoubtedly, that the leader of this development is Toyota Motor and it is built in one of the company’s facilities near one of the automobile production plants. This implies that the company is getting ahead of the next generation of vehicles, although the bet is not in plug-in electric vehicles but in vehicles that use hydrogen.

With this we can observe that Toyota is preparing for the future and with a view to maintaining its business model and adapting to the new social demands, mainly carbon neutrality, and it extends it to integrate it into a much broader project such as smart cities. We hope to see more news about this development in the near future.

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This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: July 6, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/woven-city-ciudad-hidrogeno-japon-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240623043726/https://businessinsider.mx/woven-city-ciudad-hidrogeno-japon-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [Archived]

We live in times of confrontation and it would seem that suggesting something different from what we know is a capital sin that is punished with a penalty of silence; dreaming is prohibited —which is undoubtedly the beginning for innovating and transforming—. If you mention something about renewable energies, green hydrogen, energy transition, the knight-errants of the internet will seek to correct the audacity of going against what is known.

I imagine it would be as if the Florentine community of the 16th century had gathered outside Leonardo DaVinci’s room to demand that he stop designing instruments for flying, with arguments such as that man was destined to be on the ground, because if God had wanted it, he would have given us wings. Nothing different from the old inquisition that condemned men of science to death at the stake.

Let us go to the beginning of the 20th century, to the year 1908. Imagine the master blacksmiths saying: “there is still a long way to go before a Model T replaces the horse,” “there are not enough gasoline stations,” “How are you going to fill a tank on a long trip between cities?”, “The automobile will never replace the railroad.”

A leap further ahead in time would take us to RIM, the company that manufactured the Blackberry and that underestimated the potential of the market that Apple opened with iPhone. The company did not believe that people wanted a phone without a keyboard or a series of apps beyond email, messaging or the web browser. Even with the launch of the iPad that would open the tablet market, RIM executives would point out that they did not serve any specific market.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it does not advance as companies or governments would wish, but rather that it has its own inertia. We could talk about thousands of examples: whalers resisting the growing kerosene market at the end of the 19th century, or the producers of kerosene lamps themselves resisting the first incandescent bulbs lit by electricity.

Today we can see more and more drones in the streets or a memory card the size of a fingernail with a capacity of 1 TeraByte —which is equivalent to 1 million Megabytes—. There are more cameras than ever, with better definition than in recent years, and that, combined with more precise facial recognition, has generated very interesting moral debates and debates about the limits of the State.

Voice recognition, real-time translation, artificial intelligence and autonomous automobiles, to cite some examples, are advancing by leaps and bounds and there are still those who question whether the Earth is flat because they cannot see its roundness, without thinking, for example, that the first private space trips under the command of Space X have already begun.

In the world, solar energy breaks records in capacity and time, as do storage and green hydrogen. And also, why not?, conventional technologies such as combined-cycle turbines, nuclear fission or direct air CO2 capture, with which artificial diamonds are now even produced.

There are even challenges that we will see in the future that we still do not perceive in their complete dimension. The waste from batteries and solar panels, light pollution or the saturation of the immediate airspace could also require thinking about creative solutions in the long term.

This is circular energy and this is what this space is about: that no one tells you that it cannot be done, that you should conform; that it is impossible to think or even dream of a better world. That they do not tell you that it is too early to think about green hydrogen or decarbonization; that they do not tell you that it is not possible to have 100% renewable energy and storage; that they do not tell you that you cannot think or dream of a better world, because, quoting Heraclitus, the only constant is change.

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This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: June 22, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240229054340/https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez// [Archived]

South of Tokyo, at the base of Mount Fuji, Toyota is developing the project called Woven City, a Hydrogen City. It is a prototype of a smart city whose source of energy would be hydrogen and which began its construction this year in February. But, beyond how Woven City works, there are many things to highlight about this project.

The first aspect is that the bet that government and companies in Japan are making on hydrogen is evident. If we analyze the country’s energy profile and its history, this makes much more sense than it seems at first glance. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, Japan’s energy consumption is composed of 87% fossil fuels among oil, natural gas and coal, with an additional 3% of nuclear energy. The remaining 10% are renewable energies, which include hydroelectric plants.

Japan’s great dependence on fossil fuels is accompanied by its lack of these natural resources, of which it has historically been a net importer. In 2019 alone, the country was the fourth largest importer of crude oil in the world, the largest importer of liquefied natural gas and the third importer of coal only behind China and India.

Japan’s bet is a true act of energy security and not in terms of dependence on the supply chain, but it is also a way to improve the country’s trade balance, which is affected by the strong costs of energy products and their volatility.

Another fundamental element is that it is the way in which Japan would promote the energy transition. Given its strong dependence on fossil fuels, the country has had difficulties reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Solar and wind development has been limited for this reason; however, an aggressive plan to develop the energy transition using hydrogen could be much more feasible.

After the incident with the Nuclear Plant in Fukushima, Japan decided not to build new nuclear plants and to gradually close the existing ones. The same has happened recently when it announced that they would no longer build more coal plants. This implies that there could be greater investment in combined-cycle plants that use liquefied natural gas, which would be fundamental, in this first stage, for the development of gray or blue hydrogen, alongside green hydrogen.

A third aspect is that the bet addresses the issue of mobility. The greatest use of oil in the country is used for mobility, whether of private and collective automobiles, as well as for the transport of merchandise between cities. Although the train system is electrified and quite efficient, wheel transport continues to be important in the country.

Unlike other automakers, Japanese automakers, such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan, are betting on the standard of hydrogen vehicles more than on vehicles that use electricity from the grid. This implies that at least two other models are promoted besides the plug-in electric one: the fuel-cell model and the internal-combustion model with hydrogen. In such a way that we could say that the standard of the future of automobiles has not yet been decided.

Space is running out, but next week we will address more on this topic, expanding on Woven City, the smart city pilot that would use hydrogen as a source of energy.

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This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: June 10, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/hidrogeno-la-apuesta-japonesa-opinion-paul-sanchez-energia-circular/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240528033643/https://businessinsider.mx/hidrogeno-la-apuesta-japonesa-opinion-paul-sanchez-energia-circular/ [Archived]