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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is.

The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter.

Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's not like batteries work, they are fine for short term storage, but even then, they aren't displacing, say, pumped hydro. And yet hydrogen bad, batteries good. And don't even get me started on nuclear.

It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points.

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I am not a fan of hydrogen, because I once worked with a former NASA robotics engineer. We were looking for a way to power terrestrial robots, and we asked him about hydrogen.

He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems:

- Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere.

- Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—unless you compress it to a couple of hundred atmospheres pressure.

Nobody wants to store potentially explosive fuel at 200+ atmospheres. I'm not aware of current hydrogen technology at all, but that's a fundamental physics challenge that needs to be addressed somehow. And it needs to be addressed in a cost-effective way at each step of the distribution chain.

The problem with high density energy storage is that you're putting a huge amount of energy in a tiny space. Gasoline is flamable, lithium-ion batteries are notorious for ugly fires, and even flywheels can fail catastrophically. A good power storage system needs to manage this risk somehow.

(There was some really interesting work being done with carbon-fiber flywheels and maglev bearings in a vacuum about 20 years ago. Apparently that had decent power density, and it could charge off electric charging infrastructure. But car insurance companies weren't convinced it was safe. Which would also be a problem for hydrogen.)

The internet says storing hydrogen in metal hydrides is safe and offers similar kwh/kg as lithium ion batteries.

It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production.

Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement and I have no idea if it lives up to the hype. If it does it would be quite the game changer.

Yes, bonding the hydrogen with something could really change the tradeoffs dramatically.

For example, the main ingredient in gasoline is C8H18. It has good energy density at atmospheric pressure, and the fire risks are manageable. We already use carbon/hydrogen systems today!

I think one of the candidates for metal hydride fuel cells is MgH2? It apparently also has decent energy density. Of course, magnesium poses some risks of its own. And I personally have no idea what a complete supply chain and refueling system would look like, or what it would cost.

Still, I fully expect that any portable energy storage is going to come with tradeoffs: cost, pollution, rare materials, and always the risk of catastrophic discharge (via fire, explosion, or messy kinetic failures). We should pursue multiple alternatives and invest in basic science, because portable energy is incredibly useful.

I would also guess bonding and then using that adds two conversions worth of losses to the equation and are not free.

I totally get the risk. As a consumer I feel similar fear about EV car batteries. Even if you can find the escape hatch in a pinch (some EV doors aren't normally manually opened), your house could still burn down or there could be other life changing property damage. It's a small risk but still feels like a real risk.

This problem is mostly solved by LFP batteries, which have a much lower risk of fire. So much so that you're more likely to have a petrol car spontaneously combust.

> (some EV doors aren't normally manually opened)

That screams regulation waiting to happen. like, have a lever or something on there. there is no more obvious or easily accessible place to flee a vehicle than the door.

also, which "some". is this just another tesla quirk?

Yes, Teslas have buttons to open the doors, but there are also mechanical releases as a backup [1].

The backups unlock the doors "no questions asked", so to speak, which includes possibly damaging the windows (because they don't get lowered out of their seals). For the front doors they are so intuitively placed that pretty much all of my first-time passengers have already used them before I can tell them to press the button instead.

Models other than 3 also have mechanical releases for the rear doors, apparently, but using those involves removing floor mats (according to the owner's manuals, no personal experience).

[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-7A32EC0...

There are ways to work around those limitations, basically removing the "very small and very reactive" part of hydrogen. You can bind it with Nitrogen to gen ammonia - which is till very dangerous, but much easier to contain or work with.

The problem with H2, ammonia, biofuels and other synthetic fuels is not that they have some limitations, it's that they are not accepted by the green energy dogma. Some green energy activists would like to see the gas stations go away, for example, and that is not going to happen if you keep needing to go somewhere to re-fuel, with any fuel.

The problem isn't "dogma," it's inefficiency. Throwing energy away is counterproductive, and Energy-to-Hydrogen-to-Energy throws away lots of it.

If there were no alternative long-term storage plans this might be acceptable, but that's simply not the case.

If you're using hydrogen to smelt steel or make ammonia fertilizer, then there's no energy loss (beyond what's needed to decarbonize petrochemicals anyway). The article aptly refers to these as "no regrets" uses.

Gas stations (ie ground vehicles) are fighting a losing battle. BEVs will eat the sector. They're simply so much less expensive [than hydrogen]: for the vehicles themselves, for the infrastructure, and then of course for the wasteful energy use in operation.

> Throwing energy away is counterproductive, and Energy-to-Hydrogen-to-Energy throws away lots of it.

The current process needs 55kWh of electricity to produce 15kWh of electricity on the other end. Not very efficient at all.

Look at how much energy is on the other end of the oil flow: 20% efficiency and still the ICE car is king, without subsidies, EVs would go nowhere. The hydrogen back and forth is still better than that.

Talking about efficiency is a losing battle, people don't care about that, they care about total cost, safety and convenience.

> Talking about efficiency is a losing battle, people don't care about that, they care about total cost, safety and convenience.

Without subsidies it is ICE that would go away overnight on two of those three factors and then the third shortly after the market catches up to the overnight shift. EVs already have lower total cost and higher safety (than carrying around a tank of explosives and actively igniting those explosives during travel). ICE looks more convenient with current refueling infrastructure, but if ICE subsidies disappeared and demand plummeted we'd see how fast ICE range anxiety returns when companies quickly en masse decide to not sell such a low margin loss leader. (I do mean "returns", we know from history that ICE vehicles were the original range anxiety and EVs were the reliably ranged household cars until enough gas stations existed. AAA was in part founded because of ICE range anxiety.)

(H2 cannot compete with EVs on any of these three. Total cost is higher. H2 tanks can dangerously explode, even if fuel cells are not themselves at least using a burning process like ICE. H2 refuelling seems convenient if you discount the fact that there's no general, ubiquitous H2 refuelling infrastructure and likely never will be, especially with how badly H2 leaks in all attempts at long distance shipping and long term storage.)

ICE vehicles conquered the world with abysmal efficiencies, they were around 10-15% when they already ruled the roads and the world. That is after we drill for oil, ship it, refine it, distribute it. Even today, manufacturers boast about engines with 40% efficiency in ideal conditions, which still translates to a meager 20-30% in real world driving.

Looking at efficiency alone is not enough.

> They're simply so much less expensive

Not yet they aren't. The upfront cost of an EV still makes it more expensive than an ICE vehicle. Also, they batteries are guaranteed to degrade, so the used market has very bad prices for EVs. At some point, they will probably be less expensive for most automobiles, but hydrogen can still play a part in trucking, trains, planes, boats and specialty operations.

Only about 64% of oil is used for transportation [1] and out of that, only about 50% for automobiles and light trucks [2] (even though for light trucks, motorcycles and other applications, EVs are not going to win probably). So BEVs could replace about 30% of all oil usage. The rest of 70% is up for grabs, so why not pursue hydrogen investment as a possible alternative?

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...

> more expensive than an ICE

The (relevant) comparison was H2 versus BEVs — ie comparing decarbonized solutions apples-to-apples. I have edited to make that more clear.

> why not pursue hydrogen investment as a possible alternative?

Because hydrogen, for all its marketing, doesn't solve the problems people have with BEVs. Better BEVs do.

I see a variety of BEV motorcycles and light trucks available. The same can't be said for hydrogen.

> Because hydrogen, for all its marketing, doesn't actually solve the problems people have with BEVs. Better BEVs do.

I guess it depends on the definition of "people". If you mean private automobile owners, then I agree that batteries will eat hydrogen's lunch. For everything else(70% of oil use), it's an open question. In the future, you might even see a migration of H2 technology from large applications to small automobiles, like we've seen with diesel engines.

> I guess it depends on the definition of "people". If you mean private automobile owners

I'm just following your lead. You were the one who brought up "gas stations."

>For everything else(70% of oil use), it's an open question

Not really. Road use is ~50% .[1] It's all going BEV, like it or not.

Agriculture is another 10%. Ditto.

The technology improvement curves speak for themselves. ICE and H2 have both plateaued near their theoretical limits.

I intentionally said "ground vehicles," not private cars.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...

Even for non-ground vehicles my understanding is that the future of H2 is very murky: small aircraft have proven some efficiencies with battery electric that H2 cannot match, other than possibly as a generator to top up a large battery and if the large batteries themselves hit certain densities (which seems increasingly likely as BEV car production picks up and economies of scale start to take effect) it won't be worth the weight for an H2 generator and liquid H2 tanks. I've heard at least one scientist flat out state that carrying liquid H2 is about the dumbest efficiency possibility for air travel because if you are going to carry all that H2 anyway at least carry it as a gas and get free ballast from it. The only efficient H2 air travel is exactly the one we've known about for centuries: dirigibles. But we know that's a PR minefield in current popular culture to even suggest. (Which yes, we probably should have more dirigibles for other efficient air travel options.)

If battery densities end up meeting the needs of airplanes they meet the needs of ships easily enough. Plus, there's interesting new research on wind power for ships, which I find is a lovely irony to see ships return to wind power after all these years (though it may look quite different than the classic age of sail with primary propulsion still being electric turboprops).

Neither solution is really decarbonized. It is also wrong to say only carbon leaves an ecological imprint. Recycling of batteries will be a huge logistical challenge or leave a high ecological impact itself.

Still, either a vehicle is more or less drives continuously or batteries will be the better alternative. But that is only for that sector.

Fossil fuel transport is fundamentally carbonized. BEVs are currently about 50% better, but at least it's feasible to achieve full decarbonization.

Recycling of batteries is very efficient at >95%[1], and will only get better with time.

As for addressing only one sector, welcome to the world of high-complexity problems. Climate change is a "1000 cuts" type, not a "magic bullet" type.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/14/jb-straubels-redwood-mater...

>Fossil fuel transport is fundamentally carbonized.

Exactly, and I wish I understood why people thought this was a smart point.

EVs are a link in the chain that in and of themselves have no fundamental energy dependence on fossil fuels. They have an incidental reliance on fossil fuels to the extent that electricity is generated from fossil fuels. But they're a piece of the infrastructure puzzle that in and of themselves is fully solved and compatible with decarbonized infrastructure. I would like to think that one goal in advancing public understanding of EVS should be educating people to the point that this particular talking point never gets used ever again.

>Looking at efficiency alone is not enough.

In general I would say I actually agree with this. It can be perfectly feasible to use an energy source that's terribly inefficient in some intuitive sense, but as long as it's economical to do so, poses no environmental harm, and you're getting significantly more energy out than you're putting in, you can be as inefficient as you want.

Now that said, I don't think that this kind of general truism is terribly responsive in this particular case, because it's nevertheless going to be true that inefficiency, and whatever sense you construe it, can indeed be a deal breaker and I think that's what GP is intending to communicate with respect to h2, biofuels, etc.

>ICE vehicles conquered the world with abysmal efficiencies, they were around 10-15% when they already ruled the roads and the world.

Fossil fuel comes out of the ground with the energy already in it, hydrogen doesn't exist in a free form and the energy must be put into it coming from somewhere else.

Most hydrogen now comes from natural gas at maybe 75-80% efficiency through reforming, then it must be compressed, then it must be burned at similar efficiencies to fossil fuel or used in a fuel cell with slightly better efficiency than ICE.

It's way worse in efficiency than fossil fuels, you could just use the natural gas directly in a combustion engine and be way ahead. Solar/wind/nuclear to electrolysis is even worse, just charge a battery.

Hydrogen is a energy storage mechanism like a battery not a source of energy like fossil fuel.

Look at well to wheel efficiency BEV are far ahead of hydrogen.

Ulf Bossel got it right ~16 years ago. No significant change since then, other than steady improvement in BEVs.

https://phys.org/news/2006-12-hydrogen-economy-doesnt.amp

Battery technology has utterly stagnated. There has been basically no changes in energy density in over a decade. All "progress" has been in the form of reduced cost, but even that has ended.

PS: Please don't post some Bloomberg article about this. They are wrong and did not correctly reference the state of battery technology back in 2010.

Isn't the whole point of cheap and plentiful renewable energy that inefficiencies in processes like this are irrelevant?

Why would long-term storage matter if wind and solar can produce so much energy that we cannot feasibly consume it all? What other long-term energy storage plans are there right now?

I would not write off fuel stations just yet. There may well be a future where some renewable fuel powers vehicles.

Cost would be an obvious factor. An inefficient electricity derivative fuel is always going to be more expensive than charging a battery directly from all that cheap/plentiful renewable electricity eliminating the "middle fuel". Especially when vehicle usage curves have a beautiful inverse to electricity demand curves and vehicles are generally parked for hours when electricity rates are at their very cheapest.

>Isn't the whole point of cheap and plentiful renewable energy that inefficiencies in processes like this are irrelevant?

No.

You're thinking of "too cheap to meter," which never came to pass, and (as it turns out) was just a marketing line.

>What other long-term energy storage plans are there right now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429623

There was a great article a few days ago about "factories as batteries" (pointing out that aluminum smelting is uneconomic but hydrogen works) but sadly I can't find it.

> Throwing energy away is counterproductive, and Energy-to-Hydrogen-to-Energy throws away lots of it.

Energy to plants to biofuels throws away nearly all the energy. More than all of it, by some accountings.

What are the alternatives for those use cases in which batteries are infeasible?

Pumped hydro (water) is about 81% efficient and easy enough to build with centuries of experience at this point.

There's also battery systems outside of Lithium Ion formulations which have other use cases. Thermal batteries are an interesting alternative in some use cases, particularly where fast access to heat in addition to electricy is handy (such as in collaboration with building HVAC and water heaters).

But also in general as we keep finding new density scales in the Lithium Ion formulations (and as we have hope to potentially discover even more formulations beside that) the number of use cases where batteries are infeasible keeps shrinking.

You'll never hear me defend biofuels.

The alternatives are mostly

* better batteries

* heat pumps to replace oil burners

* methane or ammonia for the remaining uses (eg trans-oceanic); globally shipping and aviation together account for only 8% of petroleum use

With a universal carbon tax everything would automatically self-organize into the most efficient solution, but of course we can't do that.

Off-road land use probably accounts for another few percent. It's hard to imagine heavy forestry, farming, and earthmoving equipment being powered by batteries.

Why not?

It seems like the real problem is a lack of imagination.

Are there some challenges? Of course. Are they insoluble? I can't see why they would be.

How about binding with Carbon and getting methane (CH4)?

that's exactly what I meant by "other synthetic fuels", but I was refraining from using the explicit words, because of the stigma, and I didn't want to derail the discussion.

At that point, why not just separate the hydrogen from all the methane we seemingly produce?

I thought the article was fairly to the point:

> There is a “common understanding worldwide that hydrogen should be limited to applications where it would be difficult to achieve decarbonisation with other methods”, says the report by the Tokyo-based non-profit think-tank Renewable Energy Institute (REI), but Japan has instead laid out a vision of a “hydrogen society where hydrogen is used in every sector”, while promoting and subsidising the use of highly polluting grey H2.

The "save the planet" bunch are unsurprisingly not fans of plans that don't "save the planet".

edit to add: batteries are now at the point where a new pumped hydro scheme from scratch (i.e. no pre-existing dam) would be challenged to be a viable business case versus spending the same amount on renewables and batteries, even if you have a suitable geographic site for the water.

Pretty much nothing in the renewable sector is a "viable business case" without some sort of government interference. You're speculating that batteries will be better buffers than hydrogen, but in truth nobody can predict the technological trajectories and neither presents a solution in the foreseeable future. If there really is an upcoming climate catastrophe, it would be stupid not to hedge your bets, which includes supporting hydrogen, nuclear, synthetic fuels and many other avenues. The fact that mainstream climate activists reject so many potential alternatives out-of-hand tells me that they don't truly believe in the catastrophe. They believe in fighting the monopoly man.

> Pretty much nothing in the renewable sector is a "viable business case" without some sort of government interference.

While not 100% a flat faced lie, this is intentionally misleading.

All energy production is heavily subsidised by the state, but of all methods of producing electricity as of Jan 23 2022, renewables are the cheapest.

Issues with storage, human rights, environmental impact, are a mixture of lies and red herring. How many human / environmental tragedies resulted from fossil fuel extraction?

People against battery storage don't actually care about that but they know that you do. "The card says moops"

You're arguing against a strawman. No one is seriously against battery storage. But if you take a serious look at the raw materials and supply chain issues it seems unlikely that we will be able to build enough grid-scale storage in the next couple decades to maintain reliable power for heavy industry. Some other solutions will be needed. That probably means building other storage systems plus continuing to operate many fossil-fuel power plants (at least on an intermittent basis).

> All energy production is heavily subsidised by the state, but of all methods of producing electricity as of Jan 23 2022, renewables are the cheapest.

That's not an honest assessment, because the major renewables are either geographically limited, or their production fluctuates heavily. To compare them against fossil or nuclear, we'd need to factor in the cost of the buffers, which completely changes the equation. If buffers + renewables were still cheaper, everybody would already be doing that and nothing else. People whose beliefs are challenged in this way tend to resort to conspiracy theories surrounding the fossil fuel lobby (disregarding the fact that renewables have a big lobby too).

> How many human / environmental tragedies resulted from fossil fuel extraction?

My point is purely economical.

> People against battery storage don't actually care about that but they know that you do.

I'm not against battery storage, but simple back of the envelope calculations show that production capacity is orders of magnitude away from solving just part of the problem (stabilizing the grid). Moreover, batteries do not last forever. It may well be the case that a combination of natural gas and renewables is the most effective option even from an CO2 perspective, especially if we have a way to turn surplus energy into negative CO2. Hydrogen happens to fit into that scheme, because natural gas plants can easily be converted to hydrogen plants. Then again, maybe there's a breakthrough in battery technology instead. You can't predict these things, it's therefore unwise to dismiss alternatives that don't check all the boxes of solarpunk fiction.

The "vision of a hydrogen society where hydrogen is used in every sector" is probably motivated by a desire to become technological leaders in this field. Japan has fallen behind in battery technology, and Toyota was an early leader with its hybrid vehicles, but when it comes to fully electric cars, Japanese car makers are also falling behind. So I suspect they are trying to find a niche where they can develop technologies that they can maybe export later. From that point of view, where the hydrogen is coming from is not that important. And: a battery electric car is also not really helping to "save the planet" if the electricity used to charge it is coming from a coal plant...

This was a plan from 2017, before (and possibly part of the reason) they missed the chance to lead on battery vehicles. So it just needs updated, as the article suggests:

> The report outlines three key areas where the government’s strategy is severely flawed:

1) The selection of low-priority applications;

2) Prioritisation of fossil-fuel-based grey and blue hydrogen; and

3) The lack of focus on domestic green hydrogen production, leaving Japan lagging behind other nations.

> Japan has fallen behind in battery technology

If you could say a little more about this, I'd appreciate it. Sanyo (Panasonic) and Murata Manufacturing (Sony) still produce top quality Li-ion cells, among the best there are, and the best NiMH cells in the world are still made only by FDK Corporation.

The attraction to hydrogen by the automotive companies of Japan is that it would preserve their balance sheets. An ICE car produces various revenue streams for auto makers. First, the sale price, then the oil changes, and plenty of ongoing maintenance. While a straight up EV would shrink an automaker's balance sheet tremendously. The motor has one moving part that is very resilient. The motor doesn't require a transmission. Regenerative brakes means a long time between needing new brakes. And then of course, other industries that support ICE transportation. Oil refineries, gas stations and all of that.

Conveniently, a hydrogen fuel cell in a car replicates almost of that. The fuel cell is a hot, complex finicky source of power that needs maintenance and sophisticated manufacturing to create. Storing the hydrogen itself is very tricky as it tends to eat metals. It still needs normal brakes.

You can see why the CEO's of Japanese car makers could allow themselves to be deluded about how much better fuel cell technology is than EV tech. EV tech is just a battery, an electric motor and regenerating braking. This is technology from a hundred years ago and needs very little regular maintenance other than tires, a wall socket and wiper fluid.

BMW is considering charging for heated seats in a subscription model.

"No maintainence" EV cars are just platforms for subscriptions.

Hydrogen vs battery isn't about farming dollars and cents, that can be done other ways.

Have they considered ad-supported seat heating? Along with crypto mining?

But pumped hydro schemes are targeted at frequent charge / release cycles (like once a day). I think what the post you answered to you pointed out is that Hydrogen could be used as long-term storage (storing overproduction from summer to be consumed in winter). This is where batteries are maybe not the best way forward.

I have not looked too deeply into Hydrogen myself, but even this [0] fairly critical post classes longterm storage as a B (scale A: very good, G: absurd). Even though there is other alternatives that are mentioned.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...

Summer storage for winter will not be a thing.

Tropical solar farms synthesizing ammonia for export to high latitudes will be.

I find there is a selective black and white perception of the world.

For example, renewables right now rely heavily on quick-to-dispatch gas plants - and that's fine as a stepping stone to a carbon-free future. Though the plan fo eliminating it is still vapourware - maybe better batteries, maybe larger grids, maybe something else.

But creating a hydrogen economy that somewhat relies on fossil fuels, with a clear pathway to eliminating the fossil fuel component? Anathema!

I have nothing at all against renewables and batteries, it sounds neat but remains incomplete here and now. But until it's clear it can replace all our uses of energy, I remain baffled by people who would like to shoot down any potential different path to that same goal.

Did you read past the headline? It's not anathema because of aesthetics, it's anathema because it doesn't work. There's nothing wrong with shooting down an idea that you have studied and found to be counterproductive.

It doesn't say anything like it, and your comment doesn't address mine either.

1. That particular approaches don't work is irrelevant. TFA focuses on a particular Japanese policy, which may or may not be misguided. The article is light on discussion, but let's take it at face value. Should we say wind+solar is stupid because Germany is currently in an energy mess? I don't think so.

2. I don't think it's dumb at all to experiment with various synthetic fuels via fossil fuels initially. With both hydrogen and battery storage, the real devil is in the details, in particular in seasonal storage. If we can make battery, or hydrogen, or ammonia economies work, then we know how to produce things, and thanks to cheap intermittent renewables we can do it. Frankly, efficiency hardly matters at this point. If, as predicted by renewables evangelists, energy will be almost free soon, storage efficiency matters not. All that will matter is long term storage cost, an open question for any approach.

3. Regardless, my comment is aimed mostly at other comments. "Duh everyone knows batteries are better", "hydrogen is a dead end".

The part of my comment you tacitly ignored is that burning fossil fuels is somehow ok en route to renewables+batteries without a viable concrete plans on how to decarbonize fully, but not for other synthetic fuels such as hydrogen.

There's one key problem, making hydrogen without creating more carbon in the atmosphere. If they solve that, then it's worth considering. If we have fusion providing endless electric energy (which could be used to split water), then we could just use it to fuel electric cars too. There's the classic problems of lack of energy density, and hydrogen fires not being visible. I think we can probably make hydrogen containment systems better, and figure out how to make fires visible. To me it all comes back to getting the fuel. When we can do that we can consider it.

https://www.powermag.com/fukushima-hydrogen-energy-research-...

> For the past two years, FH2R has consistently been ranked as one of the world’s largest projects of its kind. According to project participants, FH2R uses a 20-MW solar PV array built on a 180,000-square-meter site along with grid electricity to power a single-stack 10-MW-class electrolyzer. Its developers say it can produce, store, and supply up to 1,200 Nm 3 /hr of hydrogen at rated power operation.

This is a "its not completely there yet but this is where its trying to go."

You are correct. This discussion is about ideological purity. Meanwhile we are still are the experimental stage to determine what technologies will actually work in the real world. Instead of "letting a hundred flowers bloom", we are railing against those who dare to violate the "little green book".

It just makes the Green movement look like extremists.

It's not about purity, it's about removing carbon from the atmosphere. All the existing industrial scale hydrogen production gets hydrogen from carbon based fuels, using other energy. There doesn't appear to be an option at this time for producing carbon at any reasonable scale without using carbon fuel sources. If we get fusion power, really cheap power, instead of splitting water using that free energy we could just directly run electric cars. There is a cynical pushing of "green hydrogen" from the companies that want to preserve their internal combustion industrial infrastructure (notably Japan), and from carbon fuel producers but calling the result 'green hydrogen'. The issue is there is no clear pathway. When/if that happens, there's still the issue of the infrastructure to manage carrying around hydro to refuel or making it at the source. There's no there there.

I hope to give a little context on this. I have been fairly active in trying to immerse myself in the CO2 problem of the planet and what I have seen is that there are companies-interest groups that are lobbying for some technology solutions that require outsized investment. Hydrogen and Nuclear come to mind.

They are solutions which will soak up massive amounts of capital for years-decades before they will start paying off. They also know that if they don't market themselves as "the one true solution that solves all" they might not get the capital required to build out their vision. So they HAVE TO oversell it to cover all use cases where they could possibly be applicable and try to get money flowing into alternatives for themselves, otherwise they would not be feasible.

So this is at least one of the reasons for hydrogen problems. They try to create FUD about BEV so they can say hydrogen is better. Meanwhile fossil companies are like really happy about this:

- slows BEV adoption

- while alternatives are not there sell their own stuff

- hydrogen is also massive molecule shipping infra so they will bid for those projects

People who actually look into hydrogen will find lots of issues with the marketing:

- "green" hydrogen is nowhere to be seen in quantities

- real world round-trip efficiency comparable to ICE engines

- which leads to massive need to overbuild green electricity generation (== 2-4x bigger NIMBY/capital problems for nuclear/wind)

So the immediately deploy-able solutions of batteries and PV-solar that have no scale threshold are making their projects riskier.

In essence both nuclear and hydro require governmental funding to get started. So the same sales pitch is now also on political level. Lobbyists etc doing their dark FUD spewing things.

Bottom line of building out hydrogen from governmental monies means that the projects which absolutely have to use hydrogen to be green (steel and some other industrial processes, maybe flying too) will be cheaper because it has been subsidized by nations by having bought into other stuff which will not be used in scale because other market technologies are so much better for those use cases.

For example: I have a BEV and the range is good for me, home charging is 10-100x cheaper than hydrogen, I don't need to go to a hydrogen station etc.

> It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points.

This has always been a pain point for me. If you feel the world is facing an existential crisis (and I do), then it seems weird to go down the list of possible ways of avoiding utter catastrophe like you're at a sushi bar:

Solar: Ah, yeah.

Wind: Of course.

Nuclear power: Nope.

Geo Engineering: Hell, no.

I don't know how you can believe that we are facing millions, if not billions, of deaths and the possible collapse of civilization and then "tone police" the solutions.

It is not "tone policing". That is an accusation guaranteed to derail any discussion.

Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex.

Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term (i.e. strategic) underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.

It ain't the money cost, we have money coming out our ears.

It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals.

Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.

Point. We are in a race against global civilization collapse.

But the race is, at base, to displace atmospheric carbon release. So displacing more, faster is the measure of merit.

> Nuclear takes far too long;

And yet nuclear is the only tech that has proven to decarbonize a major industrial economy within just a few decades. But of course it takes to long.

When in reality it has not been proven that anybody has ever used solar and wind to de-carbonize a major economy. But somehow everybody knows that it is 'fast'.

Germany could have literally gone to 100% nuclear within the last 20 years and it would likely have cost them 250 billion $ or less. Reliable energy for 100 years. Almost no cost for the grid because you can just build nuclear plants next to coal plants.

> Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.

What is this obsession with short term thinking? When you build major long term infrastructure like trains tunnels, you simply don't do it in a year.

If France could do something in the 70/80s, finishing nuclear reactors multiple reactors every year. Germany could have done the same and they would be done by now.

... and would be in the position France is in now, with a fleet of obsolete contraptions that will cost further billions to decommission, and with nothing on the horizon to replace them.

France fleet is not obsolete. They can survive for another 40 year easy. Sadly the French 2nd generation pissed away all the great work the first generation did and neglected the fleet they had. They are treating the fleet lie the giving tree.

Ironically because the French were so blessed with so many reactors, they were one of the few nations that didn't use their reactors very well. The Germans were actually better at using their reactors.

The French since the 90s are just as anti-nuclear as everybody else and they have done everything to destroy the amazing fleet they have, and only now realize how incredibly fucking stupid that was. They even forced the utility to collect money from the nuclear fleet and invest in solar. And they forced the utility to sell of nuclear base load at bargain bin prices and then force them to buy that power back at high prices.

And its amazing how anti-nuclear people can look down on France when literally every day they produce green cheap energy for all their people. And they have been saving CO2 for 40+ years, and that is worth more then any CO2 we are saving now.

Almost every other country should envy the French position.

Yet, in just a few years all the French reactors will be mothballed because they cost several times as much to operate as buying off the grid.

Except that will not happen and no French govenrment will be so fucking stupid.

Nuclear is providing cheap long term stable power supply and if they stop forcing their nuclear fleet to support solar and fossil (literally things the French government forced them to do) and do proper maintenance French will have cheap carbon free energy for the next 50+ years.

Funny how nuclear is so expensive and yet somehow people in France and places that nuclear reactors have mostly cheap power while Germany is spending absurd money prevent their population from feeling an even worse hurt from the policy they have inflicted on them.

In total the Germany population over the 50 years has paid way more for energy and getting way worse outcomes. That's a simple fact.

Just the cost for the measure Germany has to take now to buffer from this whole Russia fuckup would have been enough to pay for a whole fleet of nuclear reactors for Germany. Instead they are gone spend another 15+ years using coal and gas and then have to manage an incredibly unstable complex grid while having to replace all those wind plants they put up in the next 20-30 years.

And the French reactors will still be running and still provide stable carbon free power for a low price.

I love how it's simultaneously cheap, but selling a small portion of the energy for the price they claim it costs is a completely unfair burden that is "supporting solar and fossil".

"It can be cheap! All you need is free loans, a liability cap less than the cost of one reactor, money from the military, exemption from any democratic process as to where they go, underfunding decomissioning, cheaping out on materials, never doing maintenance, charging more than the claimed cost, operating at a massive loss, creating a debt you foist on the public, build up billions of unpaid maintenance costs, and then not selling it for cheap! Oh, and you still need to overprovision and build backup."

That circle you're running around with the goalposts in is getting very small. Multiple countries are installing more new renewable generation every year than new nuclear has ever gone online.

Also it didn't decarbonize france's economy. It partially decarbonized its electricity, this is well under half of the goal. Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro, and the list of countries with higher VRE percent than france's nuclear is growing longer by the month.

> It partially decarbonized its electricity, this is well under half of the goal.

Literally no country uses renwales to produce transport fuel.

France decarbonized electricity and has a very high rate of electricity heating in homes. So they are ahead there to and they did that on the back of the nuclear fleet.

> Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro

And even more country have achieved more with hydro and nuclear, such as Sweden or Switzerland.

> Literally no country uses renwales to produce transport fuel.

So didn't decarbonize its economy then. And sweden prodices about as much wind as nuclear.

> Nukes and geothermal simply cost more

They only cost more because of "environmentalists" fighting both new reactors, fuel element transport and waste storage tooth and nail in a way they don't fight coal ash ponds or heavy metal tailing lakes...

(The average lifecycle cost of nuclear power at scale in France - where plants were built before anti-nuclear hysteria - is about 7 cents per kWh, same-ish as the cost of solar or wind fleet, and with fewer intermittency problems. Solar might be cheaper in Hawaii and California, but most places are not blessed with 3,000 hours of sunshine a year.)

False. As has been explained in detail too many times to count.

Please do not try to resurrect old falsehoods.

They are more expensive only when compared to a marginal kWh put at time of solar/wind’s convenience into the grid that is stabilised by other means (mostly fossils). Look up how much electricity went up in Texas last time the generation dropped by iirc just ~20%; solar goes to zero every night, and wind regularly dies down across Western Europe for days or even weeks. In those circumstances and without fossils to fall back to, nuclear is infinitely cheaper than solar/wind.

We can’t plan our grids or judge the costs according to not just best, but even average scenarios. We have to plan once-in-decades anomalies, the long tail. Non-dispatchable energy sources get exponentially more expensive once you start doing that.

The "stable grid" argument is well past its sell-by date.

In the future we will need to build out storage. Before there is enough renewable generation to charge storage, building it would be foolish. After, we will need storage, and build it.

And, we will always need liquid fuel. As cost for renewables continues exponentially downward, ammonia synthesized at solar farms in the tropics will undercut NG. In the meantime, shortfalls will be filled by burning an ever-decreasing amount of NG.

We will need a hell of a lot of electric ammonia synthesis in coming decades.

I don't understand why do you think it's "past its sell-by date". The wealthiest country in the world had a statewide blackout when generation dropped really mildly compared to intra-day, intra-month, and intra-season variability of solar/wind, and you just dismiss it? On what basis?

If the storage will need to be built out, then your argument about costs is disingenuous in the world without fossils, because those costs are currently masked by fossil generation.

Texas, artificially cut off from the wider grid, exhibited its domestic governance failings once again. This has no wider implications for energy policy than that grid connectivity covers for multiple sins.

Need for fossil generation backing will decline naturally as storage is built out, but will take a long time to go to zero. Pretending otherwise makes bad policy. Building storage without renewable capacity to charge it from would be stupid because charging storage by fossil fuel burning would be monumentally stupid.

It is a nice demonstration of an impact of a fairly mild unexpected drop in generation. Renewables, as things stand, are that, all the time, on steroids.

You don't need as much storage if you have nuclear and you can't compare the two without accounting for (potentially weeks or months of) storage. "Building out storage" is not an unavoidable expense that just happens automatically, it's a requirement to have a reliable greed that is mostly based on non-dispatchable renewables, and thus a part of their cost.

Seeing how you outright ignore this point, I suspect you are arguing in bad faith.

Seeing how you are promoting instead a thoroughly dead alternative that no one will ever again spend another cent of their own money on...

Good day, sir.

You yet again ignored the point and instead appealed to authority.

It's also factually false.

* UK approving Sizewell C for £20bn https://www.ft.com/content/11ca7193-f7d8-496f-bb90-d3270b2cf...

* about 60 reactors are being constructed as we speak https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

* the US just allocated $2.5b to support the demonstration of two advanced U.S. reactors by 2028 (X-energy and TerraPower) https://www.powermag.com/updates-on-five-big-nuclear-energy-...

* just a few days ago NuScale's SMR got approved https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...

All public money. NuScale is a particularly egregious example.

Funny somehow France had green energy decades ago and France had low energy prices for decades. Really crazy how expensive nuclear is.

Specially now where you have Germany who spend lots on renewables using many 100s of billions to buffer the impacts of their policies. For that price they could have just transformed to nuclear.

Germany could literally have spent the same amount of money over the last 20 and next 5 years and have done what France did in the 70/80s and they would be almost 100% green by now. But nuclear is expensive of course.

And of course those reactors would work for the next 80-100 years, but I guess its much better to rebuild wind turbines 4 times over during that time.

> in steel refining

Far better to use the technology the Boston Metal uses.

> in the future direction of aviation

Questionable. Either use batteries or just go with full synfuels.

France is better known for high taxes than for low energy prices... Maybe there is a connection. No one, anywhere in the world, has ever fielded a nuke not massively propped up by public money.

Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did on renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions instead. France, notably, imported power through summer.

> France is better known for high taxes than for low energy prices... Maybe there is a connection.

No there isn't actually. The French pay high taxes because of their social services.

If you actually inform yourself you would know that the cost of the nuclear fleet went on the books of the utility, not the French state and has been paid down by the utility for 40+ years now DESPITE the very low energy prices.

> Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did on renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions instead.

Germany was actually one of the best operates of nuclear power. Their reactor had amazing uptime.

> France, notably, imported power through summer.

And the reason is that the Anti-nuclear idiots who were in power in the French state for the last 30 years took cheap green energy for granted and instead of doing the needed maintenance, they forced the utility to invest in solar and support fossil fuel (yes really).

And in fact in 2015 the French state literally basically forced threw a law to turn off large parts of the nuclear fleet in 2025. This lead to even more maintenance not being done.

This is a case of the French state shooting itself in the foot and taking for granted what their fathers gave to them and them treating the fleet like shit and just believing the magical pixies of renewables would reliably produce 10s of GW of power for them within a few years.

Germany is literally spending up to a 500 billion $ on a plan to mitigate all the issues with their energy policy, for that they could literally have built a nuclear fleet 2x the size they needed to be 100% green on nuclear.

And it would start to come online in 2035. They would burn coal the whole time until then, while renewables cost continued on down below $10/MWh.

Solar and wind are variable. Putting them in the same category as nuclear without including the storage costs is disingenuous. This is a super basic issue and you tut-tutting with this deeply flawed by oft-repeated talking point is why this comes across as “tone-policing”.

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

There is not a single reactor on this list with an operation factor (proportion of hours delivering any energy) over 85%.

Storage, backup, and overprovision are part of any system. 24/7/365 nuclear is a myth.

Once you acknowledge that reality it becomes a calculation of total costs vs. total emissions abated. VRE is about 5x as effective by this metric without even using any strategy other than minor overprovision, existing w2e/hydro, and fossil fuel methane backup, because generating even the mythical 100% green energy starting in 20 years is far worse than generating >80% green energy starting in 2 years.

Even if the long term plan is all nuclear (this doesn't work with commercial technology, there's not enough U235) it's still optimal to max out the VRE pipeline first. The VRE will pay back before your nuclear reactor is done just by the money saved on coal and gas.

Hydrogen is a less efficient energy store than a battery, requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive, distributing it is more difficult than petrol or electricity. It has applications, but in general, its often significantly worse than any other greener alternative.

Yes but batteries contain toxic materials and rare earth minerals, require lots of energy to make, lots of energy to recycle, etc...

So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.

I'd wager that hydrogen is more energy efficient over the entire lifespan of a vehicle.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electr...

Lithium mining is expensive and you need to move a lot of dirt to get a little lithium...

100 billion tons of waste and never mind the waste aspect, it takes a lot of energy to move a ton of dirt.

Most of the mining waste you refer to is related to COAL. They produce roughly 5 billion tons a year of coal for which many times of that is waste rocks.

5 billion tons of coal gets mostly burned up.

Meanwhile 50 THOUSAND tons of lithium is produced per year. For which maybe millions tons of waste gets created.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium

Hmmm, 500,000 litres of water per ton of lithium. Electrolysis required to create lithium metal. Plus the required dirt being moved, water being moved, energy for electrolysis, etc...

Sounds very energy efficient...

I know you are a sarcastic troll.

But still, that 5 billion tons of coal gets mined, transported and then burned to produce energy once.

A kg of coal contains about 8kWh of energy which it can release once. This is the best kind of coal. Also you only get about 40% of it as electricity.

A kg of lithium will store about 1.1kWh energy in a battery .. thousands of times before it needs to be RECYCLED.

Your efficiency is off by many orders of magnitude.

Who's comparing coal to batteries? We're talking the lifetime energy cost of producing batteries from the ground to the recycling depot.

Coal production is terrible and I'll never support it.

You compared them to coal. You put out 100 Billion tons of waste number. Biggest share of that is from mining coal.

So why are you attributing the coal mining waste to lithium then?

If you actually look at the numbers the benefits of mining for lithium FAR outweigh its downsides.

That just compared coal 'to produce energy once' to batteries which have no inherent energy. These are different things.

Coal is an existing form of energy reserve which has stable long-term storage and can be consumed once. Batteries are not native energy, though batteries can be manufactured and then charged to temporarily time-shift energy.

Sure, same goes for hydrogen. I don't think there are any hydrogen deposits that can be readily used.

But important distinction nonetheless.

Yes, I also see hydrogen as a energy storage medium. Compressed air and pumped hydro and hydraulic accumulators have similar functions.

Sometimes the media conflates energy production, storage, and transport. This leads to confusing arguments.

More context here: https://twitter.com/visaskn/status/1616813002547773444

> So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.

This is a standard component of LCA databases and puts the ESOI in the 50-100 range for the first generation of batteries. Subsequent generations are higher.

Electrolysers also require mining, as do fuel cells, as does any source of heat for reverse gas shift or similar.

Your fud about rare earths is also a lie for any chemistry proposed for grid storage. None of them involve rare earths in any measurable quantity (nanoscale films on semiconductors for controllers and such are insignificant)

Hydrogen (or rather hydrogen derived molecules) are a viable method of seasonal storage, but that doesn't mean most of the hype doesn't exist to greenwash gas or that your talking points aren't propaganda.

Hydrogen cars are worse than BEVs and much worse than transit or active transport.

> This is a standard component of LCA databases and puts the ESOI in the 50-100 range for the first generation of batteries. Subsequent generations are higher.

Yes that's the number I found WITHOUT accounting for mining the materials... Just manufacturing the battery.

> Electrolysers also require mining, as do fuel cells, as does any source of heat for reverse gas shift or similar.

Yes but there's far less of those materials required than the sheer amount of battery cells being produced for automobiles.

> Hydrogen (or rather hydrogen derived molecules) are a viable method of seasonal storage, but that doesn't mean most of the hype doesn't exist to greenwash gas or that your talking points aren't propaganda.

Greenwash gas? The whole point of hydrogen is to create it using renewable sources of energy... The whole problem with renewables is storing the energy since they don't produce reliable baseline energy. Hydrogen accomplishes that.

> Yes that's the number I found WITHOUT accounting for mining the materials... Just manufacturing the battery.

Are you sure you are reading the study right 'manufacturing' in standard LCA methodology also includes embodied enery/carbon of the ingredients?

You can also fermi analyse it. The absolute cheapest form of energy is lignite burnt at the mine front which is about $5/MWh. Before shortage induced price hikes, the 100 or so grams of lithium in a 1kWh battery was worth $1-2. The battery can store around 5MWh in its lifetime. This puts a fairly hard upper bound of 4-8% of the cycled energy. Phosphorus and iron are less scarce, copper might be significant. Any cost that isn't the cheapest possible energy pushes the lower bound down.

Green hydrogen is fine in niches where it's suited, but most of the hydrogen-for-everything schemes rely heavily on fossil fuel derived hydrogen whenyou look under the hood and ignore the amount of methane, CO2, and H2 that will escape at various stages. H2 is not a greenhouse gas on its own, but it makes methane much worse.

> Yes but there's far less of those materials required than the sheer amount of battery cells being produced for automobiles.

And if you look at the quantities required to replace the role of BEVs rather than as an adjunct, it's worse.

Li-ion batteries don't contain rare earths.

Recycling li-ion is currently a booming business because it requires much less energy than processing raw ores - see Redwood Materials for more info.

Everyone takes these calculations into account because batteries come under intense scrutiny from people with ulterior motives.

I can't wrap my head around how much lithium or other rare earth metals will need to be mined to transition entirely to solar, wind, and electric cars. What countries are these mined in? What percentage of the US grid is from wind or solar? Like 10%?

Here is a nice infographic of one years mining output for perspective

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

No lithium or "rare earths" (which are not anyway at all rare) are needed for a transition to solar and wind for power.

Electric cars use lithium, just now, and a bit of rare-earths. (They are used in wiper and window motors.) Cars are their own thing, which we would be better off with less of.

Obviously before you have built out wind and solar, you don't have much yet. It is a vacuous observation. Instead, look at the rate of deployment, which follows a classic exponential curve.

> What percentage of the US grid is from wind or solar?

That question needs to be qualified with a date and time. It's a moving target. Generally: number go up.

26% of electricity generated in Texas in 2021 was from wind. Installed wind and solar capacity has grown quite a bit since 2021.

what does the li in li-ion stand for

I don't know if you have glanced at a Periodic Table recently, but Lithium is on the far left hand side and far distant from anything marked "rare earth" much less the "rare earth metals" (which are primarily just right hand of the center-line). As element number 3 on the periodic table it's also per some basic interesting Big Bang statistics the third most common element in the universe. Admittedly most of the universe's Lithium at this point has settled into various compounds which are regularly called "salts" (a short, common name, because they are so common), though household table salt is usually Lithium's "big brother" on the periodic table Sodium, but Lithium itself is still just about as common as dirt on this planet even if don't tend to sprinkle it haphazardly on our foods.

I was misremembering how the term "rare earth metal" is used, my apologies.

My impression was that it's possibly acceptable for on-site storage but less for transport or transportation applications.

> requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive

Is this different in some way from natural gas? Why can't we use the existing storage and distribution infrastructure for natural gas for handling hydrogen?

Natural gas distribution infrastructure is far leakier than you expect. It's a massive problem. We really need to get away from solutions that involve pushing gas through pipes.

> We really need to get away from solutions that involve ...

Halt! Propose a working alternative first, we'll talk about banning later.

Electricity. It doesn't leak from cables.

Now: we need to get away from solutions that involve pressurised gas being piped or transported around the world. =)

> Electricity. It doesn't leak from cables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_discharge

"[...] Corona discharge from high voltage electric power transmission lines constitutes an economically significant waste of energy for utilities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_power_line

"Transmission higher than 132 kV poses the problem of corona discharge, which causes significant power loss and interference with communication circuits. [...]"

It might be unexpected and surprising, but yes, electricity does leak from cables!

Hydrogen is a much smaller molecule, so it leaks out of much smaller holes. It leeches into metals and causes hydrogen embrittlement. It is about 1/3 the energy density per volume of natural gas.

> Hydrogen is a less efficient energy store than a battery

Less energy dense, but not less efficient

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong.

- First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842

- Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~

You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on.

I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage.

Hydrogen? "There are some unresolved issues"

"Why is everyone so hostile to hydrogen" Like, release a product already. Everyone is moving forward on green energy without you.

This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.

Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...

Which does not change the fact, that mining and refining of raw materials to make batteries so you can repeat the cycle again in 10 years does not scale as making steel tanks.

> weigh too much

This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded.

Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.

> Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight

Road wear actually grows with the 4th power of weight, not the weight in the exponent, but that is a really bad argument regardless because trucks exist.

> Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight

I thought something like 90%+ of road wear and tear was due to tractor trailers, dump trucks, and other massive vehicles. Meanwhile cars were a rounding error. Do EVs change that?

99%+. So, no.

100+ years ago someone in France build a tunnel for horse and carriage with a propeller and a steam engine on both ends. The tunnel went down at the start helping acceleration and up at the end to slow the cart down.

It might not be incredibly fast or even useful it does show we don't need to put the engine on the vehicle (entirely)

I just imagined a hilarious contraption using slow moving water in a canal. A screw is inserted in the stream driven by a wheel on the road. As long as the speed at which the road moves is different from the speed of the water you can keep extracting more speed from the flow. (haha)

Will not the H2 tanks scale better than batteries for large scale storage?

Battery capacity scales linearly (n) to material requirements , while a gas tank's capacity scales quadrically to material requirements (n^2, because of only using a surface of materials to store a volume).

I'd also assume the energy required to keep the tank cold relatively lower as the tanks gets larger.

Why keep it cold? Just fill an enormous balloon...

So, the context is: various organisations are researching how hydrogen storage might work. And a gaggle of, hmm, commentators goes "omg did they not get the memo? Hydrogen is stoopid. Batteries much better soon".

I'm glad research is funded, because you literally never know where the breakthrough will come. Solar was painfully expensive for most of its history, now it's super-cheap.

As far as I'm concerned, a battery+wind+solar grid is just as much vapourware with serious barriers to success. I'm glad they are worked on though...

EDIT: for example, I'm quite excited about gravitation nal storage in disused mines (coal ones often, in fact). By the same token, should that be sacrificed on the altar of batteries? Or actually pursued, possibly to a happy end?

The organizations researching it /funding it tend to be oil/gas. They are usually more focused on staying relevant and greenwashing themselves. With hydrogen they are interested because they see potential to extend the life of their natural gas assets - and not necessarily in a "green" way.

In regard to your point that we ought not to be cynical - it is true that these organizations can do great research. For instance, they knew all about global warming in the 70s.

Funding it is fine.

Funding electrolysers is fine.

Credulously accepting 1 electrolyser as a justification for 10 fossil fuel hydrogen reformers is not.

Accepting hydrogen busses and trucks as green before they actually run on green hydrogen is not.

Letting fossil fuel hydrogen steal funding from renewable projects is not.

Gravity storage in weights held far above the sea floor is probably more viable than in mineshafts, because you cannot share the motor/generator and winch between multiple mineshafts, and most mineshafts do not go not very deep.

There is a lot of seabed.

That's not really the strongest argument though, you may as well compare whatever happens to be the most recent version of a hydrogen fuel cell to the original battery developed by Volta.

I mean the whole cathode / electrolyte / anode idea hasn't changed much, we just found better materials for all three.

> - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842

> - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~

You just limit to lithium-ion to mislead. Battery vehicles predate all of that:

> The invention of the first model electric vehicle is attributed to various people.[7] In 1828, the Hungarian priest and physicist Ányos Jedlik invented an early type of electric motor, and created a small model car powered by his new motor. Between 1832 and 1839, Scottish inventor Robert Anderson also invented a crude electric carriage.[8] In 1835, Professor Sibrandus Stratingh of Groningen, the Netherlands and his assistant Christopher Becker from Germany also created a small-scale electric car, powered by non-rechargeable primary cells.[9]

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

>It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points.

That might be how things appear from a view from 10,000 ft perspective, but once you zoom in, there's serious logistical problems that are unique to hydrogen, and they are problems that can't be brushed away by saying "gee why can't we all get along." I'm far from an expert here, but off the top of my head, hydrogen is uniquely difficult to store, and while it scores relatively well as an energy source per unit weight, it is not nearly so effective per unit volume.

Meanwhile the practical highly scalable applications for the more mainstream renewable sources have already arrived at our doorstep.

If we were in a situation where people loved wind, loved solar, loved geothermal but were randomly against, say, tidal power I could see your point. But this isn't that.

Hydrogen has a lot of issues. It is hard to store. As gaseous it has terrible energy density. As liquid it needs to be stored at extreme cold, 20 Kelvin (-250C or -420F). Compare to balmy 110K for methane. It leaks out of tiny holes. Electrolyzers and fuel cells (currently) need expensive platinum group metals. Round trip efficiency is bad.

There absolutely should be research and prototypes, there I agree. But companies are already looking for massive amounts of government money for large projects.

Because decarbonization is being combined with all number of other social and technological changes. For instance, there is a strong connection between those who promote EVs and those promoting self-drive cars (ie Tesla). And there are connections between EV proponents and those who want to see fewer cars on the road. (Interesting doublethink there as reducing the cost of owning/operating a car won't exactly reduce their use.) The anti-nuclear crowd is tied up with many who simply want to reduce all forms of energy use. They generally dislike all large projects and want us all to run our own off-grid solar systems. I've even heard people rant about nuclear from a purely anti-mining perspective, not to mention those who cannot envision much difference between nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs.

Hydrogen is coming, just maybe not directly to cars for a while. The airline industry (big planes, not Cessnas) sees hydrogen as one of two options, the other being zero-emission hydrocarbons (fuel from air). Every airline exec dreams of the day they might generate their own fuel from water at plants right beside the planes. Airbus is working on a hydrogen demonstration rig inside an A380. Once airlines start generating their own hydrogen supplies locally at airports, a hydrogen fueling infrastructure for cars might just appear overnight.

If batteries has problems as a long term storage, hydrogen is even worse. If you store liquid hydrogen, you have to let the gas escape or risk explosions. Keeping things below -250ºC is not easy. Worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck

Every single actor is pushing for their own interests and highlighting the flaws of the competitors. You cannot say in good faith that hydrogen, nuclear or fuel are supporting the "renewable energy gang", or that they are not a gang themselves. In fact, my opinions is that nuclear gang was so against renewables that they missed the bus of "renewables + nuclear" friendly mix, letting the gas gang conquest "renewables + gas".

> I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is.

Really? I usually just see the "vroom vroom gang" hyping up hydrogen as the ultimate power source for their overpowered cars, while completely ignoring the huge amount of energy needed to produce that stuff. They're glorifying Toyota for their decision to invest heavily into hydrogen cars.

I'm fine with using it as some form of storage, combined with renewable energy. Maybe even in certain applications for mobility, like trucks (which i think could be replaced by trains anyway, at least here in Europe) or other things that need plenty of power and flexibility. But not in the car of the average Joe, who just uses it to drive to our equivalent of a burger place 500 meter away.

We can not discuss these important issues in a football fan like culture of mutual hostility. We need to collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. Hate speech against "the others" does not help at all.

Not sure if that's the point you are making (or the opposite) but it's precisely how I perceive the discussion: football mentality. A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries.

Maybe it's the optimum (I'm not convinced). But to narrow down on one approach that doesn't even quite work seems premature.

If you wanted to just throw money at the problem, I'd just throw it at nuclear - reliable, carbon free, well tested and doesn't need much storage. But hey I guess that's the wrong answer to some.

My background, FWIW, is also not energy, so I'm just happy to see the research net cast wide and well funded throughout.

>A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries.

And most global warming activists aren't climate scientists.

Meanwhile the military industrial complex, who DGAF about the environment but crave lavish taxpayer subsidies for a nuclear economy, is shouting down solar, wind and storage - largely because it competes for subsidies and its low cost renders it a no brainer alternative.

They are louder, richer, more persuasive (cynically leveraging environmental messaging) and considerably more powerful than people who care more for the environment than military supply chains.

As with global warming itself, appeal to moderation doesn't work - the best solution doesnt lie half way between these two extremes.

I think I see your point, but let me please interject that your proposal contains itself some hostility.

> which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2.

There, you have already decided that lowering the amount of CO2 should be our concern, but should it?

I say: let's collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in enhancing the quality of our life.

> collect facts

The physical properties and limitations of hydrogen are well-known. Many people repeat them in other posts in this thread.

Here's a very factual explanation of why hydrogen internal combustion engines won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8

(In summary, you can't compress hydrogen enough to fit in a reasonably-sized tank. The energy that it takes to compress hydrogen will be expensive.)

I think it is mostly people who are invested ($$$) in Lithium batteries who are so loud. It is honestly annoying.

Hydrogen (also including power-to-gas, e-fuels, Ammonia) is the only technology of its kind that we have; a way of storing energy compactly and long term, and also be able to transport it relatively easy.

It is also the only solution to have carbon-neutral aviation, and many industrial processes can also not be easily electrified.

Imo, it's a good idea we are not putting all our eggs in one basket when it comes to renewable energy. To determine what works best requires testing, and testing all the possible options out there is probably a good thing. Who knows, maybe with enough development hydrogen will be a good alternative. We won't know until we see it in practice on a large scale though.

It is pretty simple:

1. To make hydrogen you need energy 2. If you just put the energy in a battery you lose less energy than you do if you make hydrogen

So hydrogen only makes sense if #2 should change, and that is fundamentally impossible, or if for whatever other reason no battery exists that is suitable for the application.

The issue in Japan that hydrogen seems to have an advantage is the storing of that energy and the time/space required to to transfer that stored energy (be it hydrogen or electrical energy) into a vehicle.

Things like "most homes in Japan don't have a convenient place to put a DC charger or external electrical outlets" and "the larger scale Tesla charging places don't fit in existing infrastructure."

This sort of home parking places (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6772271,139.70988,66626m/dat... ) don't match the American style "room enough for a car and space on the side with power for lights and a garage door opener.

On the flip side, a h2 station in Japan has about the same footprint as a regular gas station ( https://youtu.be/UHft5Lbf2Ho ). That doesn't present a "it takes 40 minutes to get an 80% charge at a dedicated super charger station" but rather something closer to the "fill up the tank" of ICE cars.

If this switches to the US, the H2 infrastructure compared to electrical infrastructure (Note: Japan is kind of weird there too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Tr... - "Electricity transmission in Japan is unusual because the country is divided for historical reasons into two regions each running at a different mains frequency. Eastern Japan has 50 Hz networks while western Japan has 60 Hz networks."), population density, and the ability to charge at home makes the idea of a H2 based vehicle throughly impractical.

I think there's a growing sentiment that we need to be decarbonizing our economy right now. We don't need any new technology necessarily (though some technological advances might make it cheaper and/or easier), we just need the will to do it.

In that context, betting on hydrogen is a way of smashing the snooze bar: the technology isn't quite ready, so we'll do some research projects and so on, and maybe we'll have something ready as a mainstream product in a few years, or perhaps a decade.

Same thing with nuclear fusion. I'm all for fusion if it pans out, but we should treat it as something that will make decarbonization a lot easier if it works, but in the mean time we should plan as if we don't expect it to save our bacon. There's an idea that "if climate change is a problem, some currently non-existent technology will save us so we don't need to change what we're doing now." That's what many of the climate-aware public are reacting against.

Hydrogen has some additional problems as well: almost all hydrogen comes from cracking natural gas, so it's effectively a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen is a thing, but it's not very energy efficient to use electricity to make hydrogen from water, and get the energy back by turning it back into water. Lithium ion batteries are in the high 90's percentage in terms of energy out/energy in. Hydrogen is, what, about 60% or so? Or maybe less? That's a lot of lost energy, so anywhere there's a viable alternative that doesn't waste huge amounts of energy we should use that.

As far as storing months worth of grid power: that's a really hard problem but I'm not convinced it's one that we even need to solve. Perhaps we need grid storage more on the scale of 12 or 24 hours to buffer solar variability. For seasonal variability we need better grid interconnection, including long distance HVDC lines to enable buying and selling electricity across time zones and perhaps even between the northern and southern hemisphere if that's what's needed. Keeping fossil fuel plants online as an emergency backup to be used in rare circumstances is also an option, we just have to make sure the rest of the system is able to handle the load the vast majority of the time.

I am not sure if you are pretending to be oblivious or not but it isn't "weird" at all. Batteries make Elon money. Hydrogen fueled machines do not. If you are online in an English speaking forum expect the majority to support Elon, pied piper de jour.

>I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is.

Well, hydrogen is essentially a scam and giant energy sink.

>The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage

Sure, and compressed hydrogen is a terrible battery

>Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here.

Hydrogen isn't being pushed by "science", because it's a bad idea at the physics level. It's being pushed as a greenwashing/scam by the oil industry.

I should add that a lot of the pushing happens from Toyota's CEO. He really thinks electric cars are a fad, and as a result has directly advocated within Japan's government for hydrogen and hybrids.

I wonder if these people have investments in battery tech. If you want answers follow the money.

Hydrogen doesn't work at all. Ammonia might.

Doesn't burning it create NO2, which causes acid rain?

I think you can mitigate the NOₓ the same way diesels do - excess ammonia.

>It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet

Yes, it does. It a very thinly veiled anti human movement. Ultimately, there is a loud sub section of environmentalists whose only acceptable solution will be "less humans" and they dupe a number of their fellow travellers with endless "but what about X" problems so that realistic solutions to climate change and pollution will not be enacted, and thus the only outcome left will be "fewer humans".

They are despicable people. Also, they can safely be ignored. Anyone who's anti human does not have your best interests at heart, and thus shouldn't be listened to.

Not sure I understand your thinking here. Are you saying that the current number of humans is exactly the right amount? Or are you saying that we should maximize the number of humans on the planet?

It’s pretty obvious that many environmentalists don’t want solutions. They just want to feel superior to others because they have solar panels on their roof and others don’t. Anything that could potentially render those solar panels unnecessary is very aggressively opposed.

You are not saying anything relevant about "environmentalists" here, but a lot about your view of the world and your approach to problem solving.

Even if solar panels are used only for domestic energy consumption (ie. Electric appliances) it's worth it. Entirely different subject than BEV vs HEVs...

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