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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> - 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...

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.

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...

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