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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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Like, the solution has become very clear and apparent.
Solar panels and batteries on all homes. Wind energy wherever possible with gridscale backup. Electric vehicles for anything with an axle-weight below 10k. Hydrogen (if we must) for everything above 10k, until we have batteries with weight to performance ratios that can support trucking with electric.
Climate change and carbon reductions are only a technical issue if you insist that every one be working all of the time to justify their existence. Appreciating that most of almost everyones work is just 'busy' work in the exercise of justifying our existence, we could easily solve this issue.
Not to mention how much pollution commuting to do the busy work causes!
Hydrogen is even dumber than ethanol.
The better solution is to minimize the number of vehicles that need to be long-range and self-powered in the first place by aggressively improving rail infrastructure (including electrifying it), and then run the bit that's left on biodiesel sourced from waste feedstocks.
I mean I only begrudgingly support hydrogen, because in theory, it can be produced by renewables and we do need something more energy dense for things that move heavy things.
The trouble is, hydrogen is really bad at being energy-dense, requiring either cryogenics or dangerously-high pressures to fit enough in an automotive-gas-tank-sized space.
Frankly, if you want to insist using hydrogen, the best thing to do with it would be to react it with CO2 to make synthetic gasoline and use it in the internal-combustion engines and gas stations we already have.
I think you store it in salt.
Not in a car, you don't. You're thinking of proposals to store large amounts of it at rest in former salt mines, but that doesn't help you actually use it in a vehicle.
Actually, big rigs being all ev is fine for last mile / in-city delivery.
You want any shipping to back heavily on rail for any distance, don't you?
Germany's electrified highway system looks very promising for longer distance truck transport too. It's basically the same system that overhead electrified rail uses. That way the battery only needs to be able to get the truck to and from that highway, the distance covered on the highway is charging time.