If hydrogen ever becomes a real thing, maybe for using green energy in remote areas where electric isn’t feasible or economical, maybe the cost to waste some peak solar/wind to generate hydrogen via electrolysis will somehow make sense cost-wise.
Comment on Hydrogen locomotive
roguetrick@kbin.social 1 year agoThere are zero sources of green hydrogen in the foreseeable future and railways can be electrified. Small runs that aren't electrified can use batteries. There is a zero use case for a leaky fuel that we source from creating CO2 like hydrogen.
Zink@programming.dev 1 year ago
zout@kbin.social 1 year ago
Electrolysis is wastefull, but so are internal combustion engines.
roguetrick@kbin.social 1 year ago
That's not what folks should seriously be comparing this to. You can run electric wires directly over the damn rail and feed a train off the grid. That's where money should be going everywhere 20 years ago.
bioemerl@kbin.social 1 year ago
As we move into green energy we're going to have an excess of power at times that we don't need it, and there's going to be many use cases where stuff like electrolysis, even though it's wasteful, is ultimately well worth it because power will be cheap to free during those times of day.
roguetrick@kbin.social 1 year ago
Not in my lifetime, that's for sure. We currently supply nearly all agricultural hydrogen from oil cracking, for example. There may be a future where wastefully using hydrogen makes sense, but it's not anytime soon.
bioemerl@kbin.social 1 year ago
California literally already has the problem of excess energy on occasion, and it's only going to get worse and worse as time passes until we create some sort of magical low cost energy storage solution.
Hydrogen is created from fracking now because we live in a fossil fuel world right now, but eventually as we're forced to move away from it you're going to have to have high energy density systems, and hydrogen is one of the few fairly reliable ways to do that.