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Neat. Amish use compressed air for power within a building. Nowadays, I wonder why we don't have a hydrogen grid instead of an electrical one to eliminate tra

Neat. Amish use compressed air for power within a building. Nowadays, I wonder why we don't have a hydrogen grid instead of an electrical one to eliminate transmission losses.

brians 7y ago
Exploding streets, thunderstorms, whoops there went the dog. And friction still gives you transmission losses.
maxerickson 7y ago
Natural gas distribution is pretty prevalent in areas where homes are heated. (and similar, not all systems are methane)
pedrocr 7y ago
How do you imagine we could make hydrogen distribution better than electrical grids with their ~5% losses? Hydrogen is notorious for leaking easily and converting electricity->hydrogen->electricity is incredibly inefficient. We'd have a lot more transmission loss with hydrogen than even with a very poor electrical grid, while also making the whole system more expensive and dangerous.
detaro 7y ago
Hydrogen is really really annoying (=dangerous) to handle, you would not want it in a public grid. Concepts that synthesize hydrocarbons to be injected are more realistic (and would allow re-use of existing consumers or even mixing with natural gas), but of course rely on efficient and cheap-enough ways of doing the synthesis being developed, beating directly used electricity might be hard. For over-capacity uses efficiency is maybe not so important.
- anonsivalley652 7y ago
  Somehow we manage to deal with gasoline and natural gas just fine and power grid with hundreds of thousands of volts. Hydrogen infrastructure is a solvable problem of fittings, protection systems, piping, odorants and storage. The Japanese government is betting on it heavily. You complete ignore and sweep under the rug the loses of existing infrastructure by proposing creating more GHGs. Where are you going to magically get all of that energy to make that not-FF FF? More FFs? What's the point?

Neat. Amish use compressed air for power within a building. Nowadays, I wonder why we don't have a hydrogen grid instead of an electrical one to eliminate transmission losses.

brians 7y ago

Exploding streets, thunderstorms, whoops there went the dog. And friction still gives you transmission losses.

maxerickson 7y ago

Natural gas distribution is pretty prevalent in areas where homes are heated. (and similar, not all systems are methane)

pedrocr 7y ago

How do you imagine we could make hydrogen distribution better than electrical grids with their ~5% losses? Hydrogen is notorious for leaking easily and converting electricity->hydrogen->electricity is incredibly inefficient. We'd have a lot more transmission loss with hydrogen than even with a very poor electrical grid, while also making the whole system more expensive and dangerous.

detaro 7y ago

Hydrogen is really really annoying (=dangerous) to handle, you would not want it in a public grid. Concepts that synthesize hydrocarbons to be injected are more realistic (and would allow re-use of existing consumers or even mixing with natural gas), but of course rely on efficient and cheap-enough ways of doing the synthesis being developed, beating directly used electricity might be hard. For over-capacity uses efficiency is maybe not so important.

anonsivalley652 7y ago
Somehow we manage to deal with gasoline and natural gas just fine and power grid with hundreds of thousands of volts. Hydrogen infrastructure is a solvable problem of fittings, protection systems, piping, odorants and storage. The Japanese government is betting on it heavily. You complete ignore and sweep under the rug the loses of existing infrastructure by proposing creating more GHGs. Where are you going to magically get all of that energy to make that not-FF FF? More FFs? What's the point?