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This is nonsense. This guy is an automotive journalist and if he or his editors had used "Hydrogen personal cars are a cult," he would have had a point and I w

This is nonsense. This guy is an automotive journalist and if he or his editors had used "Hydrogen personal cars are a cult," he would have had a point and I would have agreed with him. Literally everything he has said is specifically about hydrogen cars. "These ideas appear to have been propagated to delay the uptake of battery-electric vehicles. In Europe at least, it doesn’t seem to be working yet, with every month an improvement on the last for EV sales." Have they been propagated for that purpose? I don't think they have. "The UK government is also putting a lot of emphasis on hydrogen, with some dramatic numbers about how many jobs could be created and how much the industry could be worth by 2050 (100,000 jobs and £13 billion / $17 billion). The UK has already switched a lot of its generation grid to renewables, particularly wind, which sometimes now supplies over half the country’s electricity. But that still doesn’t mean there will be loads of surplus to be used for producing hydrogen." By 2035, the UK will have more offshore wind nameplate capacity than the forecast Average Cold Spell consumption peak. When you combine that with onshore wind, and solar PV it actually does mean a lot of instantaneous surplus. Some of that will go into charging chemical batteries but even after that, there's a lot of MWhs going spare looking for a home. The poor efficiency of electrolysis is a lot less important at that point that electrolyser capex.

pjc50 5y ago
The problem is that hydrogen is a submarine; most of the people advertising it at the moment come from the natural gas industry, and they want to sell H2 from natural gas as a "stopgap" and hope that nobody asks where the CO2 goes in practice. You could make it from electrolysis, but unless you check all the time, that's not where it actually comes from.
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  Doesn't the same thing apply to electricity though? In some countries, quite a bit of it comes from coal
  - danaris 5y ago
    To some extent, yes, but as I understand it, the effort and expenditure needed to produce hydrogen purely by electrolysis (so-called "green hydrogen") is fairly significant—and, perhaps more importantly, is a separate expenditure from that required to green our electrical grid, which is an effort that's already underway in many places and more or less guaranteed to eventually complete, barring further shenanigans on the part of the fossil fuel industry.
- Mvandenbergh 5y ago
  I work on energy systems modelling and while there is, of course, an element of existing players wanting to find a way for their assets to survive, the reality is that every single decision maker who is actually involved in this knows the score on the relative merits of CCS derived H2 vs electrolysis derived.

pjc50 5y ago

The problem is that hydrogen is a submarine; most of the people advertising it at the moment come from the natural gas industry, and they want to sell H2 from natural gas as a "stopgap" and hope that nobody asks where the CO2 goes in practice. You could make it from electrolysis, but unless you check all the time, that's not where it actually comes from.

LinAGKar 5y ago
Doesn't the same thing apply to electricity though? In some countries, quite a bit of it comes from coal
- danaris 5y ago
  To some extent, yes, but as I understand it, the effort and expenditure needed to produce hydrogen purely by electrolysis (so-called "green hydrogen") is fairly significant—and, perhaps more importantly, is a separate expenditure from that required to green our electrical grid, which is an effort that's already underway in many places and more or less guaranteed to eventually complete, barring further shenanigans on the part of the fossil fuel industry.
Mvandenbergh 5y ago
I work on energy systems modelling and while there is, of course, an element of existing players wanting to find a way for their assets to survive, the reality is that every single decision maker who is actually involved in this knows the score on the relative merits of CCS derived H2 vs electrolysis derived.