this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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With excess power from renewables. Which is highly inefficient. But better than not producing power when you could.
That's the ideal case, but in practice much of it is directly derived from natural gas instead of electrolysis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
Which is sad, because it'll give a bad name for hydrogen, then we will stuck with oil and stuff, especially thanks to those "muh 70's muscle car" and "muh family truck" types.
That's what a transition is though, the new things need to be tested and built up but it's pointless making green hydrogen if there's nothing using it so we need both to be developed at the same time.
We're moving towards having good uses for excess power at peek generation which will make wind and solar much better investments, personally I prefer sequestered SAF but hydrogen has a great chance of helping stabilize the grid which will make transition much easier
What you're saying is true. I still want to point out that developing hydrogen infrastructure based on non-renewable hydrogen today, helps lay the groundwork for using primarily renewable hydrogen tomorrow, because we're developing storage, transportation, and fuel cell technology.
Also: Methane can be produced from renewables, so developing steam reforming technology today, using non-renewable methane, helps lay the groundwork for renewable-based hydrogen production tomorrow.
Finally: Steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, so hydrogen production from renewable methane + CCS is a potentially viable path to a carbon-negative future.
But hydrogen infrastructure isn't better long term than regular electric and battery infrastructure. You need quite unique circumstances like being highly dependent on high energy density while being located in a place where you're far from an electric grid. Like an island in a stormy place (without access to wave power, etc) or long haul trucks out in nowhere or electric airplanes. Almost anything else should use better options
Not clear on what you’re trying to say here. The energy generated from a fuel cell is electricity. The entire fuel cell assembly is essentially a battery, using hydrogen and oxygen as the electrochemical components.
But, I think you’re trying to argue that one is better than the other. To that all I can say is we all are just getting out of being locked into a singular infrastructure (combustion engines) for the last 90 so years, it’s probably best to invest concurrently in multiple alternative energies instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket. Hydrogen has some strengths where lithium ion does not and vis versa. I’d assume it would be best to diversify so if one fails we have multiple backups. Kinda like investing money, don’t put all your money behind one horse.
Storage and transfer are the complicated parts, remember that hydrogen leaks VERY easily (even right through most metals) and require very high pressure. It's never going to be the cheapest option unless you're weight constrained
This is the dream we follow while driving our gasoline cars.
There's no particular reason to store up power with hydrogen like that. We have tons of grid scale storage solutions. Heating up sand will work, or spinning up flywheels. Flow batteries are looking promising. We're not stuck on the limitations of lithium batteries for this purpose. There are so many other possibilities, and hydrogen production is not likely to come out on top.
If they were using excess renewables there'd be much more efficient ways to capture that energy. A simple one would be pumping some water up hill.