Dude, Where’s My Hydrogen-Powered Car?

“Hydrogen could play a role in EV-charging infrastructure, especially in remote or delicate areas where wise policy would avoid generators, power lines and substations.” Good point. But I would go further and say that charging millions of battery cars (as we have envisioned) is not feasible even in our cities -- under our current electric grid architecture. This is so no matter how good or cheap battery cars might get -- or how quickly they can recharge. In the end, all battery cars need to tap into the electric grid. To make this possible, we can either redo our grid or supplement it throughout with power generators. The power generators can run on fuel oil or on natural gas. Or they can run on hydrogen. If they run on fuel oil or natural gas, the benefit of having battery cars is defeated. If the power generators run on hydrogen, they will need to be refueled -- which means we must put a hydrogen infrastructure in place to do so. But if we are going to have a hydrogen infrastructure to refuel hydrogen generators to charge battery cars, why not use the same infrastructure to refuel hydrogen cars and trucks to use the hydrogen directly?

Did you know that there’s over $8 billion of funding for building out regional clean hydrogen hubs?

Also, the vast majority of hydrogen will likely come from fossil fuel production.

It looks like the reason this is being done is to localize fossil fuel consumption and prevent it from being burned near population centers.

Hydrogen is very expensive and takes a ton of energy to produce. Seems like investments are going elsewhere given the relative lack of efficiency gains on this front.