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Comment by neves | Hacker News Reader

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution:

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog...

> The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.

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Do you have actual knowledge of their motives? Or is this speculation, confidently stated as fact?

Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.

I work for an oil and gas company. It has been specifically stated by my company that they are seeking support for hydrogen as a fuel because it adds value to their gas reserves - natural gas is roughly 75% hydrogen on a molar basis.

The idea is to stimulate demand for "green-ish" hydrogen (that is by grid-connected electrolysis); once demand for the hydrogen is there, it can be supplied by blue hydrogen. The O&G companies aren't super keen on green hydrogen made by dedicated renewables off grid, and they LOVE the approach of "we'll start off with grey hydrogen then we'll move to blue and green in the future".

This is very specifically a strategy to increase the amount of natural gas that can move from resources to possible reserves to probable reserve to proven reserves. That's how you increase the value of your company, which is how you get a fat bonus as a CEO.

You don't get a fat bonus by telling the truth or being right.

Can you define your hydrogen colors for us? It sounds like you have something interesting to say, but I can’t parse what it is out of your company’s jargon.

These are common terms. A random link: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/clean-energy-green-h...

* Green: produced from surplus renewable capacity (electrolysis)

* Black, brown, grey: convert various fossil fuels to hydrogen via steam reforming. Basically strip carbon from hydrocarbons, emitting a lot of CO2.

* Blue: same as black/brown/Greg but with carbon capture.

There are other (less common) shades as well.

There's also "white" which is naturally occurring pure hydrogen.

Mostly it's seen as being economically infeasible to extract, though there is one working well in the world, and some other potential sources that may be feasible to extract discovered recently.

But the big problem with hydrogen is that right now, the majority of the supply is grey/brown/black, which all emit CO2 to produce. Green is far more expensive, and the carbon capture needed for blue is also expensive and the methods of storage are dodgy.

The thing about green hydrogen is that it's more efficient to transmit and store electricity than convert it to hydrogen and distribute and store that, so it's basically just a worse way of utilizing green energy sources. The only reason hydrogen is at all economical is that grey/brown/black are cheap, and it's hard to see any path for green or blue to become competitive (and truly zero emissions for blue).

It's possible that we'll find reserves of white hydrogen and efficient ways to extract it, but that's purely speculative right now, while building renewable energy sources, electric distribution, and batteries can be done right now.

And Green is a huge efficiency loss. I suppose if the energy used to do it truly "green" and "surplus"...

> As of 2022, commercial electrolysis requires around 53 kWh of electricity to produce one kg of hydrogen, which holds 39.4 kWh (HHV) of energy.

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

20% loss isn't really "huge", is it?

10% of power is lost to distribution anyway. Batteries can also lose 10%.

The issue with hydrogen isn't producing it, it's that it's an absolute nightmare to transport and store. Hydrogen can soak into metals, causing them to become brittle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement and it leaks if there's absolutely any chance of it possibly leaking (thanks to the small molecules, and its tendancy to cause everything it touches to go brittle), and can cause a very big bang if it does leak.

It might work well for planes (where power to weight is at an absolute premium) but for cars and buses the weight of a bigger but tamer battery just makes more sense. It's absolutely a good rocket fuel.

The issue isn't that it can't be green. The issue is that it's rocket fuel - high performance but dangerous and high maintenance. Putting rocket fuel in a bus is just dumb.

But then you have even more losses when you convert the hydrogen back to energy.

The formula is that 55kW of electricity used to generate hydrogen from water and then converted back to electricity in a gas turbine or fuel cell results in 15kW of energy.

That's a lot more than 20%.

Compare that to just storing the 55kW in batteries and using them to spin an electric engine. "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.

> "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.

Or when batteries are really expensive and global production and/or geopolitics prevents a global power grid.

Both were the case 15 years ago (and geopolitics still prevents a global power grid today, but metal production has increased and is now sufficient).

Hydrogen wasn't entirely stupid back then; even though PV was more expensive than today, the trends were already clear.

Now? I think hydrogen is suboptimal for most users. But I wouldn't bet against the idea of someone, somewhere, likely in the arctic or antarctic circles, deciding that they really do need multiple months of energy storage, and for those specific weird edge cases I think it's at least possible they might decide a cryogenic liquid hydrogen tank the size of the space shuttle external tank, refuelled every summer by a comically large PV array that works 24 hours in some days, is less silly than 3 gigawatt-hours of batteries.

And don't you lose a significant amount compressing it for reasonable storage as well? Or is that considered part of the generation loss?

That's calculated in the total losses. You either need to compress it or freeze it. Usually for vehicles it's compressed, for long term storage or transfer it could be either.

Ok now added hydrogen losses due to distribution and storage.

Frequently the green energy used to split water is "surplus" energy. For example the bulk of offshore wind energy happens between 10pm and 2am when energy demand is at its lowest. That energy goes to waste if not stored in hydrogen. Hence, efficiency is irrelevant.

When the energy is free (solar) efficiency doesn't matter, or at least not nearly as much.

Same reason the mob could sell their hijacked goods under wholesale prices... it was all profit no matter what.

Then force all electric cars to be charged only by solar!

Sure, but as long as we are burning natural gas, hydrogen is a bonus. Either use it or let it be wasted.

Using it to power public transportation is a great idea, if only we can get some better hydrogen fueling infrastructure. It should have a fair shake against electrics as electric vehicle power generation is using a lot of natural gas stations to charge up those cars !

Red hydrogen: produce hydrogen from a thermochemical reaction between water, iodine, and sulfur at a high temperature, around 900°C, using the thermal energy from a nuclear reactor.

"Blue hydrogen" is commonly used for hydrogen produced from natural gas. If it is produced by steam reforming (most common), then the associated CO2 emissions are worse than if you just burn the natural gas directly.

"Green hydrogen" is usually hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis, using electricity from non-CO2 source, e.g. wind or electricity.

Blue hydrogen is supposed to capture the carbon. If its just emitted, then it's grey hydrogen: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/hydrog...

Right, if you "oops" don't have working capture because it's never been practical you're making "Blue" hydrogen in which your customers can tell everybody they're environmentally friendly but due to a technical hitch you are emitting lots of CO2. Maybe you can agree a token $1B fine, of course offset against the taxes you were already going to pay, and everybody carries on as before. Hooray for your profitable corporation and oops, too bad for the stupid humans who live on the gradually less inhabitable planet you're destroying.

This would only be really dumb if the corporation was owned by humans. Huh.

1bi fine? i wish. they just sign up for those carbon buyback scams and won't cost more than 20mi, including the bribes.

You are entirely correct.

Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas.

Green hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from a renevable source. (Imagine solar panels which are directly connected to an electrolysis plant.)

“Green-ish” hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from the grid. (And thus as green as your grid is.)

Thanks. Any idea what “grey” would mean in this context?

Grey hydrogen is produced from natural gas

Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas with carbon capture

These are quite obvious for anyone who has been following energy tech at a surface level.

> natural gas is roughly 75% hydrogen on a molar basis

I thought it was methane. Wouldn't that be 80% hydrogen on a molar basis? (Or... 67%, if we're counting moles of molecular hydrogen?) Is the discrepancy coming from impurities, or different types of fuel, or what?

Natural gas is a mixture of methane and heavier hydrocarbons, the composition varies by region, depending largely on how the LPGs (propane and butane) are used. Ethane usually ends up in natural gas, unless there is a petrochemical complex nearby.

So, 80% is a theoretical maximum, which is never achieved in practice. 75% hydrogen looks pretty right.

I'm still curious about the measurement "on a molar basis". If you have 20 moles of methane, and you process that to separate out the carbon, you'll end up with 20 moles of some form of carbon and 40 moles of hydrogen gas, right?

I think that "on a molar basis" is there to clarify that it's counting by number of atoms rather than grams. On a gram-for-gram basis, methane is ~75% carbon.

"Molar" refers to a number of elementary entities, which could be atoms or molecules or w/e. So yes, if you are counting moles of H2 gas, but not if you are counting atoms...

But hydrogen gas is the only thing you can get from that reaction. There is a theoretical construct of monatomic hydrogen, also a gas, but you're guaranteed to get molecular hydrogen instead. And there will only be 40 moles of it. There isn't a way for you to end up with 80 moles of hydrogen product.

I'm the original commenter, and quite simply you're right and I slipped up. It's not really using the terminology correctly for me to say "natural gas is ~75% hydrogen on a molar basis".

Whenever talking about hydrogen's physical properties etc on a molar basis, we'd be talking about H2. So if you had a mole of methane (CH4) we'd say you could make two moles of hydrogen (H2) out of it.

My point was really just that the gas companies' reserves of natural gas mean that they'll do anything to try to stimulate demand for blue/grey hydrogen, because their reserves of natural gas are reserves of hydrogen.

Ooh, I love pedantry contests!

Let's go back to your opening comment which was something like "I thought methane was 80% hydrogen on a molar basis". Methane does not contain H2 molecules, it contains 4 atoms of hydrogen. Plus one atom of carbon, which would indeed make it 80% hydrogen on a molar basis.

If that does not convince you: note also that atomic carbon is also a very unstable, and will auto polymerize into one of its allotropes (eg. C60 - buckyballs). And yet we count carbon by the atom.

The current US administrations moves against renewables should make you realize how powerful the oil gas lobby is. They got some pushback from local politicians so were slowed down but the way they started they were looking to end all wind and solar for a false promise of nuclear tomorrow.

The last decades' worth of German administrations (and EU countries in general) removed nuclear on the promise of a cheap grid made from green hydrogen and renewables. What they delivered was a EU grid dependent on imported natural gas and a record high ~€400 billions energy subsidies.

It is hard to see whose promise of a bright future seems most realistic.

I don't think poor transition planning should be seen as an indictment of renewables. Germany planned their transition poorly; that's on them.

(Germany also is culturally/politically somewhat anti-nuclear, too, which is a shame.)

Germany is not the same as other countries. They have a culturally different view towards nuclear power.

Italy used to be similar (though they have seemed to be softening their stance recently). Austria is even more anti-nuclear than Germany ever was.

Sweden was also on the same german track, shutdown some of the nuclear fleet, but is now going back and forth on the issue. They are also investing in new natural gas fueled thermal plants, with similar "future" plans of using green hydrogen.

The national debate in Sweden is also similar. The right is arguing that the future is nuclear, and the left is arguing that green hydrogen is the future and natural gas is the stepping stone to get there. It is a miniature copy of the general energy discussion in EU.

except that there are more than two possibilities, but the debate is reduced to artificial Left and Right -- a miniature copy of the American political duopoly

That is correct, and I would add that the debate is also addressing the wrong questions. We should ask what role government should have in providing reliable and steady energy grid, what the values such grid provide to society, and how the costs should be distributed between market forces and taxes.

It is the failure to define what people actually want from the grid that results in people creating a religion behind power production, believing in a promise of a future that we have never seen.

Germany is not unique either. Both France and Belgium are struggling with their inventory of nuclear power plants: many are operating near or past their designed lifespans, so maintenance is getting more expensive but they can't be decommissioned because there are no replacement plants (and due to electric transportation, demand is only going up). Germany definitely made the wrong choice, but at least they were aware enough to make an explicit choice. Other European countries have basically been burying their head in the sand on the same issue.

As of today, France is looking to start construction on six new plants but that still means the plants likely won't be in operation until 2040. And Belgium hasn't even started the planning phase. That's 15 more years of operating nuclear power plants designed in the mid 1900s.

> The current US administrations moves against renewables

It is promoting electric cars fairly forcefully.

Only Teslas.

Without a doubt it’s ‘despite being electric’ rather than ‘because they are electric’.

Only because of Musk's involvement. This is crony capitalism at its worst.

If they had their way, we'd all be driving Teslas, charging them with electricity generated from fossil fuels.

Powerful is correct. It's strange to me the number of people on this site who think we should just throw away trillions of dollars. We should use natural gas to make renewable dirt cheap, just that would offset any externalities you can make up.

It'd be reasonable if hydrogen was competitive with electric, but it's not.

Electricity is a by product of some source of energy, it doesn't just materialise unless your taking about capturing lightening in a bottle.

Hydrogen is also a byproduct of some source of energy, it doesn’t just materialize.

The difference is batteries are vastly more efficient at storage and doing useful work with that stored energy. There’s use cases where that’s fine like rocketry, but efficiency or energy density is usually a dealbreaker.

Vastly more efficient at storing electricity. Vastly more expensive to construct, using rare materials. Have a Vastly shorter lifespan than a hydrogen tank and much lower energy density. Everything is a compromise

Many batteries actually last significantly longer than common hydrogen storage tanks, hydrogen embrittlement is a major issue. Type III and IV tanks have a life cycle of 10 years. https://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Storage-LCA.html

Hydrogen has also terrible volumetric energy density. It’s also really heavy until you scale to huge tanks.

Hydrogen's volumetric energy density is about as good as lithium-ion. The cost of replacing a hydrogen tank vs a lithium battery is absolutely massive. You also aren't considering the energy density lost in cold weather for batteries.

Almost the same in the short term requires you to liquify hydrogen and then use it immediately. Because the energy density rapidly goes to zero for any application with a moderately sized tank. On top of which you need a cryogenic tank, costing you even more volume.

Liquifying hydrogen also costs you another ~10-13 kWh /kg where Hydrogen only contains 33kWh if you want heat, but more like 10-15kWh/kg if you want to do useful work. So you’re roughly paying double the energy for the same amount of energy stored.

How expensive, big, and heavy would a hydrogen tank (farm) be if it had to supply a whole winter for, say, 1million people. I ask because one of the bigger transition issues I see in Europe is load shifting from summer surplus to winter deficits, specifically for heating.

On such a scale hydrogen would be store underground in solution-mined salt caverns, not above ground in tanks.

Europe has enough salt formations to potentially store millions of GWh of hydrogen, far more than would be needed.

Why would you want to store enough energy to supply for a whole winter? Wind energy delivers most power during the winter and even solar contributes a bit. The actual amounts to store would be a fraction of that. Of course, that might be the one single good use of hydrogen as a means of storage, but way less storage is needed than most would think.

What the hell are you talking about, a. batteries weren't mentioned and b. hydrogen is on the periodic table and exists as an element, and can actually be found in its pure form.

Pure hydrogen is not found in meaningful quantities on earth.

There’s a huge demand for hydrogen in industry and it’s almost exclusively met with steam methane reforming there’s some methane pyrolysis and a little green hydrogen but not much. If people could just drill for it, they would happier do so as being so light it’s easy to separate out from other gasses.

> Pure hydrogen is not found in meaningful quantities on earth.

This is not necessarily true. A recent discovery in France could contain as much as 250 million metric tons of hydrogen (but that's a generous upper bound).

Sure there’s useful amounts of grey hydrogen but not enough for any kind of energy transition.

We’re talking about the useful energy from ~1 number power plant over its lifespan. So find ~1,000 such locations and that would be a big deal.

This is white hydrogen, not grey hydrogen.

It's not clear what would be available globally if it were looked for as it was in France.

Ahh ops flipped though there’s a really long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

While hydrogen can be found in its pure form, the reserves are not really developed.

Hydrogen is generally considered a storage, not a resource. Same as battery.

> a. batteries weren't mentioned

What do you think people mean when they say "electric" in this context? It's batteries.

Given how hard and how long the fossil fuel industry has been fighting tooth and nail to suppress science, kill public and private projects, and fund bogus studies, all to avoid ever losing even a fraction of their ironclad control of the energy market, I think it's fair to deny them the benefit of the doubt at this point.

If they're saying or doing something that would stand in the way of or compete with the existing rise of renewable energy, even without any specific evidence, I believe it is fully justified to say they are doing it for selfish reasons that will harm literally every other human being on the planet.

Oil companies, vehicle manufacturers, tire companies and other powerful lobbyists have been doing this for decades so it’s an unsurprising theory.

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

It’s why we don’t have rail in the US like you see in Europe. At one point in time we had a ton of rail and streetcar networks but these groups destroyed it all because it was a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.

> ... a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.

Hydrogen is no threat to oil and gas companies, quite the contrary, as discussed by comments all around.

For example, they can produce hydrogen from fossil fuels and justify expanding gas infrastructure while talking about some "future transition".

Plenty of this in Europe. In my country there's less km of rail now than there was in 1910.

which country?

Pretty much all of them. At least in the west, less sure about the east.

France had 70000km of rail around ww1, now it has about 30000. The main (though not only) casualty was the rural narrow gauge lines ("local interest network") which got obliterated by car and low productivity (about 20000km progressively closed from about 1930 to 1960, a handful survive as tourist attractions).

Dunno which country they are in but this has happened in a lot of places. This is a an infamous example in the UK:

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

Which this politician who owned a major road engineering company was quite involved in

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

This just sounds intentionally naive.

I think you mean disingenuous

yeah that's a better word for it

One can extract hydrogen from fossil fuels. So if a hydrogen break through is coming, they already have a cheap source for the material. Not really green though...

not really cheap either.

I remember natural gas vehicles (busses and cars, like the honda civic). You could actually fill up at home if you had natural gas, but the electricity just to compress the natural gas for the car cost as much or more than the compressed fuel in the car.

For hydrogen, it is even harder. take a look at cars running compressed hydrogen. I remember $17 for the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. I think it is even more expensive now.

Easier to burn CH4 than use energy to split out the H2, then compres it, then store it.

I actually think solar is better.

Most of the Hydrogen that is currently being produced is "gray". Meaning that it is produce with steam reforming from natural gas.

This is currently the cheapest and most used method (around 60%). Coal (around 20%) and oil (around 20%) are also used for hydrogen production.

Green hydrogen is below 1%.

So fossil fuels are still currently the cheapest option there. Just not a green one.

Dollars are fake, or more accurately, a social construct, remember that. You can always tax the cheaper fuel and subsidize the more expensive one.

Dollar costs of physical things (pre tax) quite accurately measure how much effort it takes to produce/acquire that thing. Hydrogen being more expensive than X quite stronly suggests that it is much more effort to get than X.

I agree, that’s why I say tax the right things and subsidize the right things.

All well and good until you have producers burning (or otherwise using) the cheap, taxed fuel to produce the expensive, subsidized one while creating more net pollution in the process. It's hard to get this stuff right at the best of times.

Carbon credits should also fix that. The bigger problem is getting everyone to agree something needs to be done.

"trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources" sounds very close to what op claims. For them, the goal is to get aboard, not to get to a destination.

My province has a hydrogen village powered by windmills no oil companies involved.

https://frontierpowersystems.ca/hydrogen-village/

Are you sure the hydrogen storage is still active? That page does say "This project has been operating autonomously since 2009" but the projects page on the same site lists the hydrogen village as lasting from 2008-2010 https://frontierpowersystems.ca/projects/. Frontier Power Systems is also a "wind-diesel" provider - so they certainly aren't separated from oil companies (though this doesn't automatically mean their intentions aren't genuinely to reduce fossil fuel usage as GP was saying, they even seem to be doing battery storage systems now).

Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.

Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.

Where are all the details? All the articles of project seem to be pre-build.

How many MW of wind turbines? How big electrolyzer? How big energy storage? Investment cost? Running costs? Reliability?

It’s a rather old project (2009), so many articles covering it are defunct. Found some of the info: “The purpose of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Wind-Hydrogen Village is to use excess wind energy along with hydrogen technologies to offer sustainable energy. Excess electricity produced by wind turbines on the island is being used to power a 300kW uni-polar electrolyzer.

A uni-polar electrolyzer uses alkaline liquids, rather than solid polymer, as its electrolyte. The electrolyzer can produce about 6kg of hydrogen per hour. The hydrogen is then stored as compressed gas in storage tanks that have a total capacity of about 500kg. The hydrogen is then used in the bi-fuel hydrogen/diesel genset to power the village when there is no wind.”

Source: https://martinottaway.com/rhemmen/hydrogen-as-the-ultimate-f...

I guess it’s no fun covering things that just work. News need drama…

this is amazing

Not just to delay, but they're hope is that they'll be able to control it when it happens. Oil companies move fluids, using pipes and tankers. Hydrogen is a fluid. They want to keep doing what they've been doing. Electricity doesn't fit into their M.O.

I don't think its really viable to transport hydrogen via existing (oil) pipelines.

Hydrogen leaks everywhere.

Oil pipelines, no. Gas pipelines, yes. The effort to requalify existing gas pipelines for hydrogen use is well underway in Europe. There might be a need to run at lower pressure, depending on the type of steel, but leaks are not an issue.

Hydrogen embrittlement is a massive issue, I’d be interested to hear how this can be engineered around. My understanding is it requires more exotic materials than those used in any existing NG or oil pipelines. Everything I’ve seen claiming it’s viable to use existing infrastructure seems reasonable at first glance, but invariably contains a massive hand-wave or 2.

I think the obfuscation is that they are generally talking about stuffing small quantities of hydrogen into natural gas pipelines. Similar to alcohol in gasoline.

The existing infrastructure was originally built for town gas which is ~50% hydrogen, and run successfully for many decades as such. So this is mainly about checking out the more recently designed parts. My understanding is embrittlement is mainly a problem for storage tanks, which need to use high strength materials due to the enormous pressure -and ironically those materials are more susceptable.

Existing infrastructure is designed for & can be used for hydrocarbons with varying levels of hydrogen in their molecular structure; I don't believe there's an issue there. Most of the H2 in town gas is in the form of hydrocarbons, which are less reactive than pure H2, even if there's a relatively high percentage of H2 in the mix (as the H2 is strongly bound to the carbon). Embrittlement is definitely an issue for more than just storage tanks.

Leaks are an issue… hydrogen is a smaller molecule and leaks from natural gas pipes and there’s a lot of gas infrastructure in the ground in some countries e.g. in UK most houses have a connection

I don't know what you are talking about, electricity is a fluid.

The only sense in which "electricity" could be said to be fluid is in its definition. There's no such physical quantity, it's just a vague term for a variety of phenomena.

It flows, you use fluid equations to describe it's state. I will grant that it flows in a different medium than molecular fluids. but that does not prevent it from being a fluid.

As for what is flowing, my understanding is that it is electrons in an em field. which if you think about it is almost the same thing that is flowing in a molecular fluid, only that has drag a bunch of protons around at the same time limiting performance.

The fluid analogy is ok for introducing the concept of electricity but it has some significant limitations, so one should grow out of it fairly quickly if you want a deeper understanding of the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy#Limits_to_th...

What is "static electricity" then?

Potential difference without flow. A discharge is a dam breaking.

Maybe he was talking about aether theory of electricity lol.

>to delay a green revolution

There's no "green revolution". Just different compromises and tradeoffs, and practical considerations for roll-out times (including for solar, wind, and batteries - no free lunch.

It seems to me like green fundamentalist see nothing but enemies and subterfuge everywhere. Hydrogen, biofuel, nuclear, switching from oil to natural gas where possible, the list goes on.

I don't have enough of an opinion to comment on anyone of them individually, but I notice a really striking pattern where every time the idea of alternative energy sources are brought up that are not wind or solar, whoever brings it up is accused of sabotaging the energy transition in some way or another.

Maybe because there is evidence of fossil companies doing exactly that since the sixties?

Benefit of doubt has it's place but this is just naivety or outright trolling.

Fossil companies hugely profit from the anti-nuclear green movement that solely focuses on wind and solar.

Because no matter how many wind and solar plants you build, they will never be able to provide baseload and hence you need fossil backup power plants.

I mean, read the current top sibling comment to yours. Someone who worked at an oil & gas company confirmed that this was their strategy.

Now, I don't think these people are sitting in their carved-out mountain lair, scheming to destroy the world; I'm sure they don't see themselves as villains. But they are making deliberate decisions to protect their business models and bottom line by adopting -- and, importantly, lobbying for -- technology that is polluting and emits greenhouse gases.

Wind and solar power heavily depend on fossil backup plants which is why oil companies have long been proponents of the energy transition.

The only technology that is actually able to get rid of fossil technology is nuclear power.

Sure are lots of HN software developers that confidently know everything about everything in this thread.

I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.

To be fair a lot of us had a lot of education on the topic, and come from engineering backgrounds.

That's the problem. I often tell engineering interns that school gives them just enough information to be dangerous. This is doubly true for software developers.

> delay a green revolution:

Batteries are pretty messy for the environment. And carrying a ton (1000 kg) with your car, just to be able to move, is a bit too much.

this is the best answer and it's not the only way they do it, they've become extremely sophisticated saboteurs of anything energy related through pure marketing alone

Just not true. Lots of oil companies have a vested interest in renewables now. A lot of the infrastructure for offshore oil is being redeployed for offshore wind.

There's no "green revolution" coming, just the powers that be taxing us, normal citizens, to the hell and the back if we'd still want to hang on to our gasoline-powered cars, which taxing policies will for sure bring about the revolution of people choosing to not travel anymore, because too expensive. That's the revolution that they're now putting in place.

Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the techies in here) helping bring forward guys like Musk, they did that by purchasing and aggressively marketing for his vehicles, they've actually empowered him and brought him into his actual position of power.

I think it's a bit weird to blame people who bought Teslas for the current situation with Musk. That's a huge, bad-faith stretch of an argument.

> it's a bit weird to blame people who bought Teslas for the current situation with Musk

It’s implausible to blame them. But they absolutely bear responsibility for giving him wealth and power.

(And politicians in Sacramento, who didn’t do a good enough job of forcing their subsidies to cause competition.)

" Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution"

well NO, contrary to popular belief. there is no such things because

1. Oil is scarce resource that not every country have

2. since not every country has, they must import it with expensive trade deficit meaning that Oil alternative or replacement is very much needed

since country like china,south korea and japan that has massive economy dependant on oil for their survival, hydrogen tech would come out of necessity but they are not because its not feasible

that's why china is leading an EV revolution, government seeing that as very much important geopolitic and economic wise

if hydrogen is feasible in mass scale, trust me someone in Asia would already make it

I think a lot of people miss the fact that China did not get to electric out of the blue it invested heavily in all these techs Hydrogen, Nuclear, Wind, Solar and batteries the cheapest and easiest to scale turned out to be Solar, Wind and then batteries.

Even today China is still building more hydrogen and nuclear plants than most of the world combined but those technologies have not scaled or gotten cheaper at the same rate as solar, wind and batteries so are not growing where as solar and wind are. China is close to reaching the point where it could start replacing its coal electricity with solar, wind and battery as it is cheaper.

Most of China’s solar and wind capacity is in its empty west where its people aren’t. They have a bit of transmission, but clearly there is a limit. Western cities like Lanzhou have really cleaned up though as a result. They are limited in how many people can live near renewable sources by water availability.

That must be why China is building so much nuclear power.

There really is no accounting for China. They are building everything at an incredible rate, solar, wind, nuclear and coal power!

They are building far more renewables than nuclear.

> if hydrogen is feasible in mass scale, trust me someone in Asia would already make it

That is a ridiculous proposition. Electric vehicles themselves were being pushed hard around the world before China saw the way the wind was blowing and overtook it.

"That is a ridiculous proposition. Electric vehicles themselves were being pushed hard around the world before China"

I never said they are first, I said they lead at the EV industry and usage, the amount of resource and how people use EV is gargantuan even compared to the west

Toyota bet big on hydrogen.

Bet in the past tense? It seems they are moving further away from that position. There are also some domestic market issues for Toyota - Japan having the lowest voltage mains electricity in the world for example.

Isn't it the same as in US ? Eq. ~120V.

Most EVs sold in China are hybrids and not BEVs. Hence they call them NEV = New Energy Vehicle.

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