Spoiler alert, this is the fate of all Hydrogen strategies not based on massive investment into nuclear.
But since when did physics ever stop anybody from believing in fairy tales?
But since when did physics ever stop anybody from believing in fairy tales?
Northern Europe and Canada have very seasonally-dependant energy demand that inversely correlates with solar availability. Japan has hot humid summers that require the use of air conditioners, so energy demand doesn’t vary nearly as much over the year. In most of the country you also don’t get cold enough to worry about heat pumps becoming inefficient, either.
Given that, nuclear, short term storage, a bit of hydro would do the job just fine, without the round-trip losses of hydrogen.
You still might well want hydrogen for other purposes (fertiliser, steel making, clean shipping, possibly long range trucks etc).
I seem to recall Mazda doing a thing around their RX-8 with dual-fueling, but that went nowhere a decade and a half ago.
But hey, why go for a significantly cheaper from a cap-ex perspective option where retrofititng existing vehicles to hydrogen (which can be done), and developing that tech, instead dumping more cash into rare earth development and going about hydrogen power in the most asinine way possible, because somebody is gonna get (more) rich off of doing this.
As for lithium, I’m old enough to remember when many were convinced Peak Oil was going to be a Big Problem.
For interest; Predicting the timing of peak oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_...
That's why I point out the physics bit. This isn't about the cost, this is about being able to generate energy, not just try to build what is in essense a perpetual motion machine.
New onshore wind is about 6 months.
The nuclear plant is a few months to a couple of years, but each load of fuel is up to 3 months in every six years depending on where it comes from and how it is enriched.
All are firmly in the category of "you're lying and spreading fossil fuel propaganda".
It sounds hilariously optimistic to me that ROEI for nuclear would be days/weeks. The amount of infrastructure required to support a nuclear plant is huge.
Regardless, so long as ROEI is reasonably positive, then cost is all that really matters (and regardless cost should include the effects of ROEI anyway)
The biggest part they don't usually include is a couple thousand people driving to and from and working for 20 years, but even that is tiny.
The mines (especially in a mass expansion scenario) are a little worse. Each fuel load takes up to a few months to pay off from a low yield open pit mine. The industry always uses Ranger or Cigar Lake for comparison which are anomalously high yield.