We need to pivot the goal for hydrogen …… there are fossil fuel uses now that batteries can’t serve and hydrogen might be a good substitute.
Instead of saying that even with feee electricity it’s too expensive to make green hydrogen for cars, let’s use that free electricity to make synthetic aviation fuel Or at least create hydrogen as a precursor
It’s not about free electricity though. It’s about efficiency
It’s not about cost
The facts are, with hydrogen, you waste at least 40% of the energy excluding transport due to inefficiencies and manufacture and fuel wastage . So you need to build a lot more solar panels. You also need clean water to do it
With electric, you waste less than 10%
We don’t have hydrogen planes yet, and it might not really be that feasible (there are a lot of considerations for planes. I’ve actually got a pilot licence).
With hydrogen, you need almost twice the solar panels to produce the same results
You also need to consider, battery technologies are still early days. If lithium at the moment supports 1000km of travel, later generation lithium air can support 12000km with the same space.
That’s why hydrogen has such limited applications too. Because even if you increase the density of lithium 2x, most applications where hydrogen benefits disappears
But in reality we’d probably shift from lithium anyway I’m guessing
Hydrogen still hugely better than gas though, and Trump is an idiot lol
Let’s start by agreeing Trump is an idiot and battery electric vehicle technology covers personal transportation. We need to move as completely as possible to renewable energy.
However
current BEV technology can’t replace aviation, shipping, cargo trains, construction and farming equipment, and we don’t really have a good solution yet. We’ll keep improving related technology and see how far it goes but we may need other choices.
renewable energy is intermittent and current grid storage technology does not scale. It’s great to stabilize the grid and allow peaked plants to come online but not to, for example, last through the night until solar is again available. We’ll keep improving related technology and see how far it goes, but we may need other choices
One possible choice to cover both storage and creation of renewable fuel for the cases where batteries do not scale, is hydrogen. We do need to overbuild renewables, because production is affected by the weather, plus we need to produce enough energy in part of a day to run everything for a full day. Production of hydrogen might let us productively convert that daylight (for solar) energy into nighttime energy, and might help other areas where batteries don’t scale. And it doesn’t have to be hydrogen directly: perhaps we need a liquid fuel that works at room temperature and green hydrogen can be a precursor to methane or some variation of synfuel. That can be stored or manipulated more regularly. A tank of green synfuel might be an effective storage for turning daylight energy into nighttime time energy. We already have an approved synthetic aviation fuel - using renewable energy to create that might be more efficient than the more difficult task of scaling batteries for aviation
While I completely agree on the limitations of green hydrogen as a primary fuel, I also see that there are many usages that neither renewable nor storage nor batteries can yet scale for. Hydrogen as a storage medium is no worse than those options
We need to pivot the goal for hydrogen …… there are fossil fuel uses now that batteries can’t serve and hydrogen might be a good substitute.
Instead of saying that even with feee electricity it’s too expensive to make green hydrogen for cars, let’s use that free electricity to make synthetic aviation fuel Or at least create hydrogen as a precursor
It’s not about free electricity though. It’s about efficiency
It’s not about cost
The facts are, with hydrogen, you waste at least 40% of the energy excluding transport due to inefficiencies and manufacture and fuel wastage . So you need to build a lot more solar panels. You also need clean water to do it
With electric, you waste less than 10%
We don’t have hydrogen planes yet, and it might not really be that feasible (there are a lot of considerations for planes. I’ve actually got a pilot licence).
With hydrogen, you need almost twice the solar panels to produce the same results
You also need to consider, battery technologies are still early days. If lithium at the moment supports 1000km of travel, later generation lithium air can support 12000km with the same space.
That’s why hydrogen has such limited applications too. Because even if you increase the density of lithium 2x, most applications where hydrogen benefits disappears
But in reality we’d probably shift from lithium anyway I’m guessing
Hydrogen still hugely better than gas though, and Trump is an idiot lol
Let’s start by agreeing Trump is an idiot and battery electric vehicle technology covers personal transportation. We need to move as completely as possible to renewable energy.
However
One possible choice to cover both storage and creation of renewable fuel for the cases where batteries do not scale, is hydrogen. We do need to overbuild renewables, because production is affected by the weather, plus we need to produce enough energy in part of a day to run everything for a full day. Production of hydrogen might let us productively convert that daylight (for solar) energy into nighttime energy, and might help other areas where batteries don’t scale. And it doesn’t have to be hydrogen directly: perhaps we need a liquid fuel that works at room temperature and green hydrogen can be a precursor to methane or some variation of synfuel. That can be stored or manipulated more regularly. A tank of green synfuel might be an effective storage for turning daylight energy into nighttime time energy. We already have an approved synthetic aviation fuel - using renewable energy to create that might be more efficient than the more difficult task of scaling batteries for aviation
While I completely agree on the limitations of green hydrogen as a primary fuel, I also see that there are many usages that neither renewable nor storage nor batteries can yet scale for. Hydrogen as a storage medium is no worse than those options