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Solar panel to battery to electrical engine is pretty efficient. We're talking ~80% efficiencies here. Solar panel to hydrogen you are down to 30-40% right awa

Solar panel to battery to electrical engine is pretty efficient. We're talking ~80% efficiencies here. Solar panel to hydrogen you are down to 30-40% right away before you do anything with the hydrogen. You still need to transport it. Once it gets to a fuel cell, you hit maybe 70-80% efficiencies. That's pretty good but these inefficiencies multiply. So, now you are down to 20%. That's a 4x difference. And of course there are losses along the way, etc. So it's more like 10 to 15%. Burning it is worse.

defrost 4y ago
You're correct that the current state of the art isn't great and may in fact be worse than you imagine [1]. An important fact, though, is that there has been little serious sustained effort to push for hydrogen production until now. Just recently we have seen papers on new techniques [2] some of which are already being tested at trial industrial scales [3] What is happening now is similar to vaccine development during COVID - accelerated parallel development of stages; the heavy industry side of hydrogen development is being pushed and built on the assumption that key stages will be improved in both incremental and hopefully radical ways. The message from the climate side of these developments is there's little to no time to waste. [1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se01761b https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se0... [2] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/seawater-splitting-system-could-scale-up-renewable-hydrogen-production/4013332.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/seawater-splitting-syste... [3] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-splitting-device-solves-puzzle-of-producing-hydrogen-direct-from-seawater/4016645.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-splitting-device-s...
harriet1 4y ago
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defrost 4y ago

You're correct that the current state of the art isn't great and may in fact be worse than you imagine [1]. An important fact, though, is that there has been little serious sustained effort to push for hydrogen production until now. Just recently we have seen papers on new techniques [2] some of which are already being tested at trial industrial scales [3] What is happening now is similar to vaccine development during COVID - accelerated parallel development of stages; the heavy industry side of hydrogen development is being pushed and built on the assumption that key stages will be improved in both incremental and hopefully radical ways. The message from the climate side of these developments is there's little to no time to waste. [1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se01761b https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se0... [2] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/seawater-splitting-system-could-scale-up-renewable-hydrogen-production/4013332.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/seawater-splitting-syste... [3] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-splitting-device-solves-puzzle-of-producing-hydrogen-direct-from-seawater/4016645.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-splitting-device-s...

harriet1 4y ago

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