Heating homes with hydrogen is neither cheap nor environmentally friendly

chemistryworld.com

10 pointsrespinal4 comments

Does this address the various costs of replacing the existing heating systems which run on gas in some form? Is it possible to retrofit these to burn H2 - if so, it would be far less of an impact that ripping them all out to replace them with heat pumps. And, of course, you need environment-friendly refrigerant in said heat pumps.

> Is it possible to retrofit these to burn H2

Yes and no. Yes in theory. But hydrogen burns much hotter, has a higher flame speed (spark -> boom!, not woosh!), and burns in a much greater range of concentrations in air, so leaks are...dangerous. Hydrogen is also very good at leaking.

I wouldn't have it near my house.

Edit: insulate and triple-glaze. Then you have a much smaller problem to solve, for both heating and cooling.

> Yes and no.

They're trying out this exact thing in the Netherlands right now. Appears to be technically feasible.

So the article complains about people using hydrogen as a long-term energy storage solution and then at the end says people should use it as a long-sterm energy storage solution.

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