Comment on Hydrogen's Big Year Continues With New California H2 Transit Project
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks agomost people do not know that.
thought the promise is that you could establish a hydrogen infrastructure and it would get greener over time - similar to EV’s which get greener over time as power generation includes more renewables.
why would we use renewables to produce hydrogen when we could just use that renewable energy as it is? That’s just adding extra steps and inefficiency for very little benefit, if any.
Attacker94@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Because hydrogen isn’t trying to replace the source of energy, it is trying to replace the storage of it, at present batteries are not nearly good enough for the EV only transportation boom, but hydrogen works and only really needs to deal with the volatility issue
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
H2 is the smallest molecule there is, and among the worst to contain. It’s also quite reactive. And the production of H2 for storage is not wonderfully efficient, nor is the whole lifecycle from production to consumption.
The only real reason for hydrogen is to repurpose rather than scrapping the existing gasoline supply chain. That benefits nobody but the fossil-fuel companies. And that’s why it’s being endlessly hyped, despite being a profoundly suboptimal solution.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
it’s not just volatility that’s an issue. Entirely new infrastructure needs to be built. Even setting aside volatility, Hydrogen is extremely difficult to contain because it’s such a small molecule. And it’s also corrosive. These are not trivial challenges at all.
It’s true that batteries present their own challenges but we are making much more progress in battery tech than we are with hydrogen.