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I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear t

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter. Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's not like batteries work, they are fine for short term storage, but even then, they aren't displacing, say, pumped hydro. And yet hydrogen bad, batteries good. And don't even get me started on nuclear. It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points.

eptcyka 4y ago
Hydrogen is a less efficient energy store than a battery, requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive, distributing it is more difficult than petrol or electricity. It has applications, but in general, its often significantly worse than any other greener alternative.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  > Hydrogen is a less efficient energy store than a battery Less energy dense, but not less efficient
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Yes but batteries contain toxic materials and rare earth minerals, require lots of energy to make, lots of energy to recycle, etc... So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost. I'd wager that hydrogen is more energy efficient over the entire lifespan of a vehicle. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electric-cost-lithium-mining-decarbonasation-salt-flats-chile https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electr... Lithium mining is expensive and you need to move a lot of dirt to get a little lithium... 100 billion tons of waste and never mind the waste aspect, it takes a lot of energy to move a ton of dirt.
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    Most of the mining waste you refer to is related to COAL. They produce roughly 5 billion tons a year of coal for which many times of that is waste rocks. 5 billion tons of coal gets mostly burned up. Meanwhile 50 THOUSAND tons of lithium is produced per year. For which maybe millions tons of waste gets created.
    - Mikeb85 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium Hmmm, 500,000 litres of water per ton of lithium. Electrolysis required to create lithium metal. Plus the required dirt being moved, water being moved, energy for electrolysis, etc... Sounds very energy efficient... /s
      - jnsaff2 4y ago
        I know you are a sarcastic troll. But still, that 5 billion tons of coal gets mined, transported and then burned to produce energy once. A kg of coal contains about 8kWh of energy which it can release once. This is the best kind of coal. Also you only get about 40% of it as electricity. A kg of lithium will store about 1.1kWh energy in a battery .. thousands of times before it needs to be RECYCLED. Your efficiency is off by many orders of magnitude.
        Mikeb85 4y ago
        Who's comparing coal to batteries? We're talking the lifetime energy cost of producing batteries from the ground to the recycling depot. Coal production is terrible and I'll never support it.
        jnsaff2 4y ago
        You compared them to coal. You put out 100 Billion tons of waste number. Biggest share of that is from mining coal. So why are you attributing the coal mining waste to lithium then? If you actually look at the numbers the benefits of mining for lithium FAR outweigh its downsides.
- hatmatrix 4y ago
  My impression was that it's possibly acceptable for on-site storage but less for transport or transportation applications.
- KSteffensen 4y ago
  > requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive Is this different in some way from natural gas? Why can't we use the existing storage and distribution infrastructure for natural gas for handling hydrogen?
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Natural gas distribution infrastructure is far leakier than you expect. It's a massive problem. We really need to get away from solutions that involve pushing gas through pipes.
    - pif 4y ago
      > We really need to get away from solutions that involve ... Halt! Propose a working alternative first, we'll talk about banning later.
      - theshrike79 4y ago
        Electricity. It doesn't leak from cables. Now: we need to get away from solutions that involve pressurised gas being piped or transported around the world. =)
        cesarb 4y ago
        > Electricity. It doesn't leak from cables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_discharge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_discharge "[...] Corona discharge from high voltage electric power transmission lines constitutes an economically significant waste of energy for utilities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_power_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_power_line "Transmission higher than 132 kV poses the problem of corona discharge, which causes significant power loss and interference with communication circuits. [...]" It might be unexpected and surprising, but yes, electricity does leak from cables!
  - mastax 4y ago
    Hydrogen is a much smaller molecule, so it leaks out of much smaller holes. It leeches into metals and causes hydrogen embrittlement. It is about 1/3 the energy density per volume of natural gas.
archerx 4y ago
I wonder if these people have investments in battery tech. If you want answers follow the money.
jnsaff2 4y ago
I hope to give a little context on this. I have been fairly active in trying to immerse myself in the CO2 problem of the planet and what I have seen is that there are companies-interest groups that are lobbying for some technology solutions that require outsized investment. Hydrogen and Nuclear come to mind. They are solutions which will soak up massive amounts of capital for years-decades before they will start paying off. They also know that if they don't market themselves as "the one true solution that solves all" they might not get the capital required to build out their vision. So they HAVE TO oversell it to cover all use cases where they could possibly be applicable and try to get money flowing into alternatives for themselves, otherwise they would not be feasible. So this is at least one of the reasons for hydrogen problems. They try to create FUD about BEV so they can say hydrogen is better. Meanwhile fossil companies are like really happy about this: - slows BEV adoption - while alternatives are not there sell their own stuff - hydrogen is also massive molecule shipping infra so they will bid for those projects People who actually look into hydrogen will find lots of issues with the marketing: - "green" hydrogen is nowhere to be seen in quantities - real world round-trip efficiency comparable to ICE engines - which leads to massive need to overbuild green electricity generation (== 2-4x bigger NIMBY/capital problems for nuclear/wind) So the immediately deploy-able solutions of batteries and PV-solar that have no scale threshold are making their projects riskier. In essence both nuclear and hydro require governmental funding to get started. So the same sales pitch is now also on political level. Lobbyists etc doing their dark FUD spewing things. Bottom line of building out hydrogen from governmental monies means that the projects which absolutely have to use hydrogen to be green (steel and some other industrial processes, maybe flying too) will be cheaper because it has been subsidized by nations by having bought into other stuff which will not be used in scale because other market technologies are so much better for those use cases. For example: I have a BEV and the range is good for me, home charging is 10-100x cheaper than hydrogen, I don't need to go to a hydrogen station etc.
_hypx 4y ago
It’s pretty obvious that many environmentalists don’t want solutions. They just want to feel superior to others because they have solar panels on their roof and others don’t. Anything that could potentially render those solar panels unnecessary is very aggressively opposed.
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  You are not saying anything relevant about "environmentalists" here, but a lot about your view of the world and your approach to problem solving.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Even if solar panels are used only for domestic energy consumption (ie. Electric appliances) it's worth it. Entirely different subject than BEV vs HEVs...
otherme123 4y ago
If batteries has problems as a long term storage, hydrogen is even worse. If you store liquid hydrogen, you have to let the gas escape or risk explosions. Keeping things below -250ºC is not easy. Worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck Every single actor is pushing for their own interests and highlighting the flaws of the competitors. You cannot say in good faith that hydrogen, nuclear or fuel are supporting the "renewable energy gang", or that they are not a gang themselves. In fact, my opinions is that nuclear gang was so against renewables that they missed the bus of "renewables + nuclear" friendly mix, letting the gas gang conquest "renewables + gas".
hoseja 4y ago
Hydrogen doesn't work at all. Ammonia might.
- vkou 4y ago
  Doesn't burning it create NO2, which causes acid rain?
  - hoseja 4y ago
    I think you can mitigate the NOₓ the same way diesels do - excess ammonia.
POPOSYS 4y ago
We can not discuss these important issues in a football fan like culture of mutual hostility. We need to collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. Hate speech against "the others" does not help at all.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  Not sure if that's the point you are making (or the opposite) but it's precisely how I perceive the discussion: football mentality. A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries. Maybe it's the optimum (I'm not convinced). But to narrow down on one approach that doesn't even quite work seems premature. If you wanted to just throw money at the problem, I'd just throw it at nuclear - reliable, carbon free, well tested and doesn't need much storage. But hey I guess that's the wrong answer to some. My background, FWIW, is also not energy, so I'm just happy to see the research net cast wide and well funded throughout.
  - pydry 4y ago
    >A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries. And most global warming activists aren't climate scientists. Meanwhile the military industrial complex, who DGAF about the environment but crave lavish taxpayer subsidies for a nuclear economy, is shouting down solar, wind and storage - largely because it competes for subsidies and its low cost renders it a no brainer alternative. They are louder, richer, more persuasive (cynically leveraging environmental messaging) and considerably more powerful than people who care more for the environment than military supply chains. As with global warming itself, appeal to moderation doesn't work - the best solution doesnt lie half way between these two extremes.
- pif 4y ago
  I think I see your point, but let me please interject that your proposal contains itself some hostility. > which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. There, you have already decided that lowering the amount of CO2 should be our concern, but should it? I say: let's collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in enhancing the quality of our life.
ekidd 4y ago
I am not a fan of hydrogen, because I once worked with a former NASA robotics engineer. We were looking for a way to power terrestrial robots, and we asked him about hydrogen. He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems: - Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere. - Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—unless you compress it to a couple of hundred atmospheres pressure. Nobody wants to store potentially explosive fuel at 200+ atmospheres. I'm not aware of current hydrogen technology at all, but that's a fundamental physics challenge that needs to be addressed somehow. And it needs to be addressed in a cost-effective way at each step of the distribution chain. The problem with high density energy storage is that you're putting a huge amount of energy in a tiny space. Gasoline is flamable, lithium-ion batteries are notorious for ugly fires, and even flywheels can fail catastrophically. A good power storage system needs to manage this risk somehow. (There was some really interesting work being done with carbon-fiber flywheels and maglev bearings in a vacuum about 20 years ago. Apparently that had decent power density, and it could charge off electric charging infrastructure. But car insurance companies weren't convinced it was safe. Which would also be a problem for hydrogen.)
- 6510 4y ago
  The internet says storing hydrogen in metal hydrides is safe and offers similar kwh/kg as lithium ion batteries. It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production. Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement and I have no idea if it lives up to the hype. If it does it would be quite the game changer.
  - ekidd 4y ago
    Yes, bonding the hydrogen with something could really change the tradeoffs dramatically. For example, the main ingredient in gasoline is C8H18. It has good energy density at atmospheric pressure, and the fire risks are manageable. We already use carbon/hydrogen systems today! I think one of the candidates for metal hydride fuel cells is MgH2? It apparently also has decent energy density. Of course, magnesium poses some risks of its own. And I personally have no idea what a complete supply chain and refueling system would look like, or what it would cost. Still, I fully expect that any portable energy storage is going to come with tradeoffs: cost, pollution, rare materials, and always the risk of catastrophic discharge (via fire, explosion, or messy kinetic failures). We should pursue multiple alternatives and invest in basic science, because portable energy is incredibly useful.
rgbrenner 4y ago
The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are some unresolved issues" "Why is everyone so hostile to hydrogen" Like, release a product already. Everyone is moving forward on green energy without you.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.
  - teamonkey 4y ago
    Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      Which does not change the fact, that mining and refining of raw materials to make batteries so you can repeat the cycle again in 10 years does not scale as making steel tanks.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > weigh too much This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded. Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I thought the article was fairly to the point: > There is a “common understanding worldwide that hydrogen should be limited to applications where it would be difficult to achieve decarbonisation with other methods”, says the report by the Tokyo-based non-profit think-tank Renewable Energy Institute (REI), but Japan has instead laid out a vision of a “hydrogen society where hydrogen is used in every sector”, while promoting and subsidising the use of highly polluting grey H2. The "save the planet" bunch are unsurprisingly not fans of plans that don't "save the planet". edit to add: batteries are now at the point where a new pumped hydro scheme from scratch (i.e. no pre-existing dam) would be challenged to be a viable business case versus spending the same amount on renewables and batteries, even if you have a suitable geographic site for the water.
- incrudible 4y ago
  Pretty much nothing in the renewable sector is a "viable business case" without some sort of government interference. You're speculating that batteries will be better buffers than hydrogen, but in truth nobody can predict the technological trajectories and neither presents a solution in the foreseeable future. If there really is an upcoming climate catastrophe, it would be stupid not to hedge your bets, which includes supporting hydrogen, nuclear, synthetic fuels and many other avenues. The fact that mainstream climate activists reject so many potential alternatives out-of-hand tells me that they don't truly believe in the catastrophe. They believe in fighting the monopoly man.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    > Pretty much nothing in the renewable sector is a "viable business case" without some sort of government interference. While not 100% a flat faced lie, this is intentionally misleading. All energy production is heavily subsidised by the state, but of all methods of producing electricity as of Jan 23 2022, renewables are the cheapest. Issues with storage, human rights, environmental impact, are a mixture of lies and red herring. How many human / environmental tragedies resulted from fossil fuel extraction? People against battery storage don't actually care about that but they know that you do. "The card says moops"
Ensorceled 4y ago
> It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points. This has always been a pain point for me. If you feel the world is facing an existential crisis (and I do), then it seems weird to go down the list of possible ways of avoiding utter catastrophe like you're at a sushi bar: Solar: Ah, yeah. Wind: Of course. Nuclear power: Nope. Geo Engineering: Hell, no. I don't know how you can believe that we are facing millions, if not billions, of deaths and the possible collapse of civilization and then "tone police" the solutions.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  It is not "tone policing". That is an accusation guaranteed to derail any discussion. Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex. Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term (i.e. strategic) underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    It ain't the money cost, we have money coming out our ears. It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals. Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Point. We are in a race against global civilization collapse. But the race is, at base, to displace atmospheric carbon release. So displacing more, faster is the measure of merit.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
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goethes_kind 4y ago
I think it is mostly people who are invested ($$$) in Lithium batteries who are so loud. It is honestly annoying. Hydrogen (also including power-to-gas, e-fuels, Ammonia) is the only technology of its kind that we have; a way of storing energy compactly and long term, and also be able to transport it relatively easy. It is also the only solution to have carbon-neutral aviation, and many industrial processes can also not be easily electrified.
sandworm101 4y ago
Because decarbonization is being combined with all number of other social and technological changes. For instance, there is a strong connection between those who promote EVs and those promoting self-drive cars (ie Tesla). And there are connections between EV proponents and those who want to see fewer cars on the road. (Interesting doublethink there as reducing the cost of owning/operating a car won't exactly reduce their use.) The anti-nuclear crowd is tied up with many who simply want to reduce all forms of energy use. They generally dislike all large projects and want us all to run our own off-grid solar systems. I've even heard people rant about nuclear from a purely anti-mining perspective, not to mention those who cannot envision much difference between nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs. Hydrogen is coming, just maybe not directly to cars for a while. The airline industry (big planes, not Cessnas) sees hydrogen as one of two options, the other being zero-emission hydrocarbons (fuel from air). Every airline exec dreams of the day they might generate their own fuel from water at plants right beside the planes. Airbus is working on a hydrogen demonstration rig inside an A380. Once airlines start generating their own hydrogen supplies locally at airports, a hydrogen fueling infrastructure for cars might just appear overnight.
automatic6131 4y ago
>It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet Yes, it does. It a very thinly veiled anti human movement. Ultimately, there is a loud sub section of environmentalists whose only acceptable solution will be "less humans" and they dupe a number of their fellow travellers with endless "but what about X" problems so that realistic solutions to climate change and pollution will not be enacted, and thus the only outcome left will be "fewer humans". They are despicable people. Also, they can safely be ignored. Anyone who's anti human does not have your best interests at heart, and thus shouldn't be listened to.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  Not sure I understand your thinking here. Are you saying that the current number of humans is exactly the right amount? Or are you saying that we should maximize the number of humans on the planet?
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RetpolineDrama 4y ago
>I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. Well, hydrogen is essentially a scam and giant energy sink. >The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage Sure, and compressed hydrogen is a terrible battery >Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. Hydrogen isn't being pushed by "science", because it's a bad idea at the physics level. It's being pushed as a greenwashing/scam by the oil industry.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  I should add that a lot of the pushing happens from Toyota's CEO. He really thinks electric cars are a fad, and as a result has directly advocated within Japan's government for hydrogen and hybrids.
glenstein 4y ago
>It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points. That might be how things appear from a view from 10,000 ft perspective, but once you zoom in, there's serious logistical problems that are unique to hydrogen, and they are problems that can't be brushed away by saying "gee why can't we all get along." I'm far from an expert here, but off the top of my head, hydrogen is uniquely difficult to store, and while it scores relatively well as an energy source per unit weight, it is not nearly so effective per unit volume. Meanwhile the practical highly scalable applications for the more mainstream renewable sources have already arrived at our doorstep. If we were in a situation where people loved wind, loved solar, loved geothermal but were randomly against, say, tidal power I could see your point. But this isn't that.
BurningPenguin 4y ago
> I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. Really? I usually just see the "vroom vroom gang" hyping up hydrogen as the ultimate power source for their overpowered cars, while completely ignoring the huge amount of energy needed to produce that stuff. They're glorifying Toyota for their decision to invest heavily into hydrogen cars. I'm fine with using it as some form of storage, combined with renewable energy. Maybe even in certain applications for mobility, like trucks (which i think could be replaced by trains anyway, at least here in Europe) or other things that need plenty of power and flexibility. But not in the car of the average Joe, who just uses it to drive to our equivalent of a burger place 500 meter away.
Gravityloss 4y ago
Hydrogen has a lot of issues. It is hard to store. As gaseous it has terrible energy density. As liquid it needs to be stored at extreme cold, 20 Kelvin (-250C or -420F). Compare to balmy 110K for methane. It leaks out of tiny holes. Electrolyzers and fuel cells (currently) need expensive platinum group metals. Round trip efficiency is bad. There absolutely should be research and prototypes, there I agree. But companies are already looking for massive amounts of government money for large projects.
jackmott42 4y ago
It is pretty simple: 1. To make hydrogen you need energy 2. If you just put the energy in a battery you lose less energy than you do if you make hydrogen So hydrogen only makes sense if #2 should change, and that is fundamentally impossible, or if for whatever other reason no battery exists that is suitable for the application.
- shagie 4y ago
  The issue in Japan that hydrogen seems to have an advantage is the storing of that energy and the time/space required to to transfer that stored energy (be it hydrogen or electrical energy) into a vehicle. Things like "most homes in Japan don't have a convenient place to put a DC charger or external electrical outlets" and "the larger scale Tesla charging places don't fit in existing infrastructure." This sort of home parking places (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6772271,139.70988,66626m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6772271,139.70988,66626m/dat... ) don't match the American style "room enough for a car and space on the side with power for lights and a garage door opener. On the flip side, a h2 station in Japan has about the same footprint as a regular gas station ( https://youtu.be/UHft5Lbf2Ho https://youtu.be/UHft5Lbf2Ho ). That doesn't present a "it takes 40 minutes to get an 80% charge at a dedicated super charger station" but rather something closer to the "fill up the tank" of ICE cars. If this switches to the US, the H2 infrastructure compared to electrical infrastructure (Note: Japan is kind of weird there too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Tr... - "Electricity transmission in Japan is unusual because the country is divided for historical reasons into two regions each running at a different mains frequency. Eastern Japan has 50 Hz networks while western Japan has 60 Hz networks."), population density, and the ability to charge at home makes the idea of a H2 based vehicle throughly impractical.
robotnikman 4y ago
Imo, it's a good idea we are not putting all our eggs in one basket when it comes to renewable energy. To determine what works best requires testing, and testing all the possible options out there is probably a good thing. Who knows, maybe with enough development hydrogen will be a good alternative. We won't know until we see it in practice on a large scale though.
elihu 4y ago
I think there's a growing sentiment that we need to be decarbonizing our economy right now. We don't need any new technology necessarily (though some technological advances might make it cheaper and/or easier), we just need the will to do it. In that context, betting on hydrogen is a way of smashing the snooze bar: the technology isn't quite ready, so we'll do some research projects and so on, and maybe we'll have something ready as a mainstream product in a few years, or perhaps a decade. Same thing with nuclear fusion. I'm all for fusion if it pans out, but we should treat it as something that will make decarbonization a lot easier if it works, but in the mean time we should plan as if we don't expect it to save our bacon. There's an idea that "if climate change is a problem, some currently non-existent technology will save us so we don't need to change what we're doing now." That's what many of the climate-aware public are reacting against. Hydrogen has some additional problems as well: almost all hydrogen comes from cracking natural gas, so it's effectively a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen is a thing, but it's not very energy efficient to use electricity to make hydrogen from water, and get the energy back by turning it back into water. Lithium ion batteries are in the high 90's percentage in terms of energy out/energy in. Hydrogen is, what, about 60% or so? Or maybe less? That's a lot of lost energy, so anywhere there's a viable alternative that doesn't waste huge amounts of energy we should use that. As far as storing months worth of grid power: that's a really hard problem but I'm not convinced it's one that we even need to solve. Perhaps we need grid storage more on the scale of 12 or 24 hours to buffer solar variability. For seasonal variability we need better grid interconnection, including long distance HVDC lines to enable buying and selling electricity across time zones and perhaps even between the northern and southern hemisphere if that's what's needed. Keeping fossil fuel plants online as an emergency backup to be used in rare circumstances is also an option, we just have to make sure the rest of the system is able to handle the load the vast majority of the time.
morpheos137 4y ago
I am not sure if you are pretending to be oblivious or not but it isn't "weird" at all. Batteries make Elon money. Hydrogen fueled machines do not. If you are online in an English speaking forum expect the majority to support Elon, pied piper de jour.

eptcyka 4y ago

Hydrogen is a less efficient energy store than a battery, requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive, distributing it is more difficult than petrol or electricity. It has applications, but in general, its often significantly worse than any other greener alternative.

raverbashing 4y ago
> Hydrogen is a less efficient energy store than a battery Less energy dense, but not less efficient
Mikeb85 4y ago
Yes but batteries contain toxic materials and rare earth minerals, require lots of energy to make, lots of energy to recycle, etc... So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost. I'd wager that hydrogen is more energy efficient over the entire lifespan of a vehicle. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electric-cost-lithium-mining-decarbonasation-salt-flats-chile https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electr... Lithium mining is expensive and you need to move a lot of dirt to get a little lithium... 100 billion tons of waste and never mind the waste aspect, it takes a lot of energy to move a ton of dirt.
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  Most of the mining waste you refer to is related to COAL. They produce roughly 5 billion tons a year of coal for which many times of that is waste rocks. 5 billion tons of coal gets mostly burned up. Meanwhile 50 THOUSAND tons of lithium is produced per year. For which maybe millions tons of waste gets created.
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium Hmmm, 500,000 litres of water per ton of lithium. Electrolysis required to create lithium metal. Plus the required dirt being moved, water being moved, energy for electrolysis, etc... Sounds very energy efficient... /s
    - jnsaff2 4y ago
      I know you are a sarcastic troll. But still, that 5 billion tons of coal gets mined, transported and then burned to produce energy once. A kg of coal contains about 8kWh of energy which it can release once. This is the best kind of coal. Also you only get about 40% of it as electricity. A kg of lithium will store about 1.1kWh energy in a battery .. thousands of times before it needs to be RECYCLED. Your efficiency is off by many orders of magnitude.
      - Mikeb85 4y ago
        Who's comparing coal to batteries? We're talking the lifetime energy cost of producing batteries from the ground to the recycling depot. Coal production is terrible and I'll never support it.
        jnsaff2 4y ago
        You compared them to coal. You put out 100 Billion tons of waste number. Biggest share of that is from mining coal. So why are you attributing the coal mining waste to lithium then? If you actually look at the numbers the benefits of mining for lithium FAR outweigh its downsides.
hatmatrix 4y ago
My impression was that it's possibly acceptable for on-site storage but less for transport or transportation applications.
KSteffensen 4y ago
> requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive Is this different in some way from natural gas? Why can't we use the existing storage and distribution infrastructure for natural gas for handling hydrogen?
- kibwen 4y ago
  Natural gas distribution infrastructure is far leakier than you expect. It's a massive problem. We really need to get away from solutions that involve pushing gas through pipes.
  - pif 4y ago
    > We really need to get away from solutions that involve ... Halt! Propose a working alternative first, we'll talk about banning later.
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      Electricity. It doesn't leak from cables. Now: we need to get away from solutions that involve pressurised gas being piped or transported around the world. =)
      - cesarb 4y ago
        > Electricity. It doesn't leak from cables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_discharge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_discharge "[...] Corona discharge from high voltage electric power transmission lines constitutes an economically significant waste of energy for utilities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_power_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_power_line "Transmission higher than 132 kV poses the problem of corona discharge, which causes significant power loss and interference with communication circuits. [...]" It might be unexpected and surprising, but yes, electricity does leak from cables!
- mastax 4y ago
  Hydrogen is a much smaller molecule, so it leaks out of much smaller holes. It leeches into metals and causes hydrogen embrittlement. It is about 1/3 the energy density per volume of natural gas.

archerx 4y ago

I wonder if these people have investments in battery tech. If you want answers follow the money.

jnsaff2 4y ago

I hope to give a little context on this. I have been fairly active in trying to immerse myself in the CO2 problem of the planet and what I have seen is that there are companies-interest groups that are lobbying for some technology solutions that require outsized investment. Hydrogen and Nuclear come to mind. They are solutions which will soak up massive amounts of capital for years-decades before they will start paying off. They also know that if they don't market themselves as "the one true solution that solves all" they might not get the capital required to build out their vision. So they HAVE TO oversell it to cover all use cases where they could possibly be applicable and try to get money flowing into alternatives for themselves, otherwise they would not be feasible. So this is at least one of the reasons for hydrogen problems. They try to create FUD about BEV so they can say hydrogen is better. Meanwhile fossil companies are like really happy about this: - slows BEV adoption - while alternatives are not there sell their own stuff - hydrogen is also massive molecule shipping infra so they will bid for those projects People who actually look into hydrogen will find lots of issues with the marketing: - "green" hydrogen is nowhere to be seen in quantities - real world round-trip efficiency comparable to ICE engines - which leads to massive need to overbuild green electricity generation (== 2-4x bigger NIMBY/capital problems for nuclear/wind) So the immediately deploy-able solutions of batteries and PV-solar that have no scale threshold are making their projects riskier. In essence both nuclear and hydro require governmental funding to get started. So the same sales pitch is now also on political level. Lobbyists etc doing their dark FUD spewing things. Bottom line of building out hydrogen from governmental monies means that the projects which absolutely have to use hydrogen to be green (steel and some other industrial processes, maybe flying too) will be cheaper because it has been subsidized by nations by having bought into other stuff which will not be used in scale because other market technologies are so much better for those use cases. For example: I have a BEV and the range is good for me, home charging is 10-100x cheaper than hydrogen, I don't need to go to a hydrogen station etc.

_hypx 4y ago

It’s pretty obvious that many environmentalists don’t want solutions. They just want to feel superior to others because they have solar panels on their roof and others don’t. Anything that could potentially render those solar panels unnecessary is very aggressively opposed.

POPOSYS 4y ago
You are not saying anything relevant about "environmentalists" here, but a lot about your view of the world and your approach to problem solving.
Mikeb85 4y ago
Even if solar panels are used only for domestic energy consumption (ie. Electric appliances) it's worth it. Entirely different subject than BEV vs HEVs...

otherme123 4y ago

If batteries has problems as a long term storage, hydrogen is even worse. If you store liquid hydrogen, you have to let the gas escape or risk explosions. Keeping things below -250ºC is not easy. Worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck Every single actor is pushing for their own interests and highlighting the flaws of the competitors. You cannot say in good faith that hydrogen, nuclear or fuel are supporting the "renewable energy gang", or that they are not a gang themselves. In fact, my opinions is that nuclear gang was so against renewables that they missed the bus of "renewables + nuclear" friendly mix, letting the gas gang conquest "renewables + gas".

hoseja 4y ago

Hydrogen doesn't work at all. Ammonia might.

vkou 4y ago
Doesn't burning it create NO2, which causes acid rain?
- hoseja 4y ago
  I think you can mitigate the NOₓ the same way diesels do - excess ammonia.

POPOSYS 4y ago

We can not discuss these important issues in a football fan like culture of mutual hostility. We need to collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. Hate speech against "the others" does not help at all.

rich_sasha 4y ago
Not sure if that's the point you are making (or the opposite) but it's precisely how I perceive the discussion: football mentality. A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries. Maybe it's the optimum (I'm not convinced). But to narrow down on one approach that doesn't even quite work seems premature. If you wanted to just throw money at the problem, I'd just throw it at nuclear - reliable, carbon free, well tested and doesn't need much storage. But hey I guess that's the wrong answer to some. My background, FWIW, is also not energy, so I'm just happy to see the research net cast wide and well funded throughout.
- pydry 4y ago
  >A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries. And most global warming activists aren't climate scientists. Meanwhile the military industrial complex, who DGAF about the environment but crave lavish taxpayer subsidies for a nuclear economy, is shouting down solar, wind and storage - largely because it competes for subsidies and its low cost renders it a no brainer alternative. They are louder, richer, more persuasive (cynically leveraging environmental messaging) and considerably more powerful than people who care more for the environment than military supply chains. As with global warming itself, appeal to moderation doesn't work - the best solution doesnt lie half way between these two extremes.
pif 4y ago
I think I see your point, but let me please interject that your proposal contains itself some hostility. > which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. There, you have already decided that lowering the amount of CO2 should be our concern, but should it? I say: let's collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in enhancing the quality of our life.

ekidd 4y ago

I am not a fan of hydrogen, because I once worked with a former NASA robotics engineer. We were looking for a way to power terrestrial robots, and we asked him about hydrogen. He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems: - Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere. - Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—unless you compress it to a couple of hundred atmospheres pressure. Nobody wants to store potentially explosive fuel at 200+ atmospheres. I'm not aware of current hydrogen technology at all, but that's a fundamental physics challenge that needs to be addressed somehow. And it needs to be addressed in a cost-effective way at each step of the distribution chain. The problem with high density energy storage is that you're putting a huge amount of energy in a tiny space. Gasoline is flamable, lithium-ion batteries are notorious for ugly fires, and even flywheels can fail catastrophically. A good power storage system needs to manage this risk somehow. (There was some really interesting work being done with carbon-fiber flywheels and maglev bearings in a vacuum about 20 years ago. Apparently that had decent power density, and it could charge off electric charging infrastructure. But car insurance companies weren't convinced it was safe. Which would also be a problem for hydrogen.)

6510 4y ago
The internet says storing hydrogen in metal hydrides is safe and offers similar kwh/kg as lithium ion batteries. It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production. Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement and I have no idea if it lives up to the hype. If it does it would be quite the game changer.
- ekidd 4y ago
  Yes, bonding the hydrogen with something could really change the tradeoffs dramatically. For example, the main ingredient in gasoline is C8H18. It has good energy density at atmospheric pressure, and the fire risks are manageable. We already use carbon/hydrogen systems today! I think one of the candidates for metal hydride fuel cells is MgH2? It apparently also has decent energy density. Of course, magnesium poses some risks of its own. And I personally have no idea what a complete supply chain and refueling system would look like, or what it would cost. Still, I fully expect that any portable energy storage is going to come with tradeoffs: cost, pollution, rare materials, and always the risk of catastrophic discharge (via fire, explosion, or messy kinetic failures). We should pursue multiple alternatives and invest in basic science, because portable energy is incredibly useful.

rgbrenner 4y ago

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are some unresolved issues" "Why is everyone so hostile to hydrogen" Like, release a product already. Everyone is moving forward on green energy without you.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.
- teamonkey 4y ago
  Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Which does not change the fact, that mining and refining of raw materials to make batteries so you can repeat the cycle again in 10 years does not scale as making steel tanks.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > weigh too much This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded. Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I thought the article was fairly to the point: > There is a “common understanding worldwide that hydrogen should be limited to applications where it would be difficult to achieve decarbonisation with other methods”, says the report by the Tokyo-based non-profit think-tank Renewable Energy Institute (REI), but Japan has instead laid out a vision of a “hydrogen society where hydrogen is used in every sector”, while promoting and subsidising the use of highly polluting grey H2. The "save the planet" bunch are unsurprisingly not fans of plans that don't "save the planet". edit to add: batteries are now at the point where a new pumped hydro scheme from scratch (i.e. no pre-existing dam) would be challenged to be a viable business case versus spending the same amount on renewables and batteries, even if you have a suitable geographic site for the water.

incrudible 4y ago
Pretty much nothing in the renewable sector is a "viable business case" without some sort of government interference. You're speculating that batteries will be better buffers than hydrogen, but in truth nobody can predict the technological trajectories and neither presents a solution in the foreseeable future. If there really is an upcoming climate catastrophe, it would be stupid not to hedge your bets, which includes supporting hydrogen, nuclear, synthetic fuels and many other avenues. The fact that mainstream climate activists reject so many potential alternatives out-of-hand tells me that they don't truly believe in the catastrophe. They believe in fighting the monopoly man.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  > Pretty much nothing in the renewable sector is a "viable business case" without some sort of government interference. While not 100% a flat faced lie, this is intentionally misleading. All energy production is heavily subsidised by the state, but of all methods of producing electricity as of Jan 23 2022, renewables are the cheapest. Issues with storage, human rights, environmental impact, are a mixture of lies and red herring. How many human / environmental tragedies resulted from fossil fuel extraction? People against battery storage don't actually care about that but they know that you do. "The card says moops"

Ensorceled 4y ago

> It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points. This has always been a pain point for me. If you feel the world is facing an existential crisis (and I do), then it seems weird to go down the list of possible ways of avoiding utter catastrophe like you're at a sushi bar: Solar: Ah, yeah. Wind: Of course. Nuclear power: Nope. Geo Engineering: Hell, no. I don't know how you can believe that we are facing millions, if not billions, of deaths and the possible collapse of civilization and then "tone police" the solutions.

moloch-hai 4y ago
It is not "tone policing". That is an accusation guaranteed to derail any discussion. Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex. Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term (i.e. strategic) underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  It ain't the money cost, we have money coming out our ears. It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals. Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Point. We are in a race against global civilization collapse. But the race is, at base, to displace atmospheric carbon release. So displacing more, faster is the measure of merit.
  - panick21_ 4y ago

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goethes_kind 4y ago

I think it is mostly people who are invested ($$$) in Lithium batteries who are so loud. It is honestly annoying. Hydrogen (also including power-to-gas, e-fuels, Ammonia) is the only technology of its kind that we have; a way of storing energy compactly and long term, and also be able to transport it relatively easy. It is also the only solution to have carbon-neutral aviation, and many industrial processes can also not be easily electrified.

sandworm101 4y ago

Because decarbonization is being combined with all number of other social and technological changes. For instance, there is a strong connection between those who promote EVs and those promoting self-drive cars (ie Tesla). And there are connections between EV proponents and those who want to see fewer cars on the road. (Interesting doublethink there as reducing the cost of owning/operating a car won't exactly reduce their use.) The anti-nuclear crowd is tied up with many who simply want to reduce all forms of energy use. They generally dislike all large projects and want us all to run our own off-grid solar systems. I've even heard people rant about nuclear from a purely anti-mining perspective, not to mention those who cannot envision much difference between nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs. Hydrogen is coming, just maybe not directly to cars for a while. The airline industry (big planes, not Cessnas) sees hydrogen as one of two options, the other being zero-emission hydrocarbons (fuel from air). Every airline exec dreams of the day they might generate their own fuel from water at plants right beside the planes. Airbus is working on a hydrogen demonstration rig inside an A380. Once airlines start generating their own hydrogen supplies locally at airports, a hydrogen fueling infrastructure for cars might just appear overnight.

automatic6131 4y ago

>It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet Yes, it does. It a very thinly veiled anti human movement. Ultimately, there is a loud sub section of environmentalists whose only acceptable solution will be "less humans" and they dupe a number of their fellow travellers with endless "but what about X" problems so that realistic solutions to climate change and pollution will not be enacted, and thus the only outcome left will be "fewer humans". They are despicable people. Also, they can safely be ignored. Anyone who's anti human does not have your best interests at heart, and thus shouldn't be listened to.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago
Not sure I understand your thinking here. Are you saying that the current number of humans is exactly the right amount? Or are you saying that we should maximize the number of humans on the planet?

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RetpolineDrama 4y ago

>I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. Well, hydrogen is essentially a scam and giant energy sink. >The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage Sure, and compressed hydrogen is a terrible battery >Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. Hydrogen isn't being pushed by "science", because it's a bad idea at the physics level. It's being pushed as a greenwashing/scam by the oil industry.

gwbas1c 4y ago
I should add that a lot of the pushing happens from Toyota's CEO. He really thinks electric cars are a fad, and as a result has directly advocated within Japan's government for hydrogen and hybrids.

glenstein 4y ago

>It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points. That might be how things appear from a view from 10,000 ft perspective, but once you zoom in, there's serious logistical problems that are unique to hydrogen, and they are problems that can't be brushed away by saying "gee why can't we all get along." I'm far from an expert here, but off the top of my head, hydrogen is uniquely difficult to store, and while it scores relatively well as an energy source per unit weight, it is not nearly so effective per unit volume. Meanwhile the practical highly scalable applications for the more mainstream renewable sources have already arrived at our doorstep. If we were in a situation where people loved wind, loved solar, loved geothermal but were randomly against, say, tidal power I could see your point. But this isn't that.

BurningPenguin 4y ago

> I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. Really? I usually just see the "vroom vroom gang" hyping up hydrogen as the ultimate power source for their overpowered cars, while completely ignoring the huge amount of energy needed to produce that stuff. They're glorifying Toyota for their decision to invest heavily into hydrogen cars. I'm fine with using it as some form of storage, combined with renewable energy. Maybe even in certain applications for mobility, like trucks (which i think could be replaced by trains anyway, at least here in Europe) or other things that need plenty of power and flexibility. But not in the car of the average Joe, who just uses it to drive to our equivalent of a burger place 500 meter away.

Gravityloss 4y ago

Hydrogen has a lot of issues. It is hard to store. As gaseous it has terrible energy density. As liquid it needs to be stored at extreme cold, 20 Kelvin (-250C or -420F). Compare to balmy 110K for methane. It leaks out of tiny holes. Electrolyzers and fuel cells (currently) need expensive platinum group metals. Round trip efficiency is bad. There absolutely should be research and prototypes, there I agree. But companies are already looking for massive amounts of government money for large projects.

jackmott42 4y ago

It is pretty simple: 1. To make hydrogen you need energy 2. If you just put the energy in a battery you lose less energy than you do if you make hydrogen So hydrogen only makes sense if #2 should change, and that is fundamentally impossible, or if for whatever other reason no battery exists that is suitable for the application.

shagie 4y ago
The issue in Japan that hydrogen seems to have an advantage is the storing of that energy and the time/space required to to transfer that stored energy (be it hydrogen or electrical energy) into a vehicle. Things like "most homes in Japan don't have a convenient place to put a DC charger or external electrical outlets" and "the larger scale Tesla charging places don't fit in existing infrastructure." This sort of home parking places (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6772271,139.70988,66626m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6772271,139.70988,66626m/dat... ) don't match the American style "room enough for a car and space on the side with power for lights and a garage door opener. On the flip side, a h2 station in Japan has about the same footprint as a regular gas station ( https://youtu.be/UHft5Lbf2Ho https://youtu.be/UHft5Lbf2Ho ). That doesn't present a "it takes 40 minutes to get an 80% charge at a dedicated super charger station" but rather something closer to the "fill up the tank" of ICE cars. If this switches to the US, the H2 infrastructure compared to electrical infrastructure (Note: Japan is kind of weird there too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Tr... - "Electricity transmission in Japan is unusual because the country is divided for historical reasons into two regions each running at a different mains frequency. Eastern Japan has 50 Hz networks while western Japan has 60 Hz networks."), population density, and the ability to charge at home makes the idea of a H2 based vehicle throughly impractical.

robotnikman 4y ago

Imo, it's a good idea we are not putting all our eggs in one basket when it comes to renewable energy. To determine what works best requires testing, and testing all the possible options out there is probably a good thing. Who knows, maybe with enough development hydrogen will be a good alternative. We won't know until we see it in practice on a large scale though.

elihu 4y ago

I think there's a growing sentiment that we need to be decarbonizing our economy right now. We don't need any new technology necessarily (though some technological advances might make it cheaper and/or easier), we just need the will to do it. In that context, betting on hydrogen is a way of smashing the snooze bar: the technology isn't quite ready, so we'll do some research projects and so on, and maybe we'll have something ready as a mainstream product in a few years, or perhaps a decade. Same thing with nuclear fusion. I'm all for fusion if it pans out, but we should treat it as something that will make decarbonization a lot easier if it works, but in the mean time we should plan as if we don't expect it to save our bacon. There's an idea that "if climate change is a problem, some currently non-existent technology will save us so we don't need to change what we're doing now." That's what many of the climate-aware public are reacting against. Hydrogen has some additional problems as well: almost all hydrogen comes from cracking natural gas, so it's effectively a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen is a thing, but it's not very energy efficient to use electricity to make hydrogen from water, and get the energy back by turning it back into water. Lithium ion batteries are in the high 90's percentage in terms of energy out/energy in. Hydrogen is, what, about 60% or so? Or maybe less? That's a lot of lost energy, so anywhere there's a viable alternative that doesn't waste huge amounts of energy we should use that. As far as storing months worth of grid power: that's a really hard problem but I'm not convinced it's one that we even need to solve. Perhaps we need grid storage more on the scale of 12 or 24 hours to buffer solar variability. For seasonal variability we need better grid interconnection, including long distance HVDC lines to enable buying and selling electricity across time zones and perhaps even between the northern and southern hemisphere if that's what's needed. Keeping fossil fuel plants online as an emergency backup to be used in rare circumstances is also an option, we just have to make sure the rest of the system is able to handle the load the vast majority of the time.

morpheos137 4y ago

I am not sure if you are pretending to be oblivious or not but it isn't "weird" at all. Batteries make Elon money. Hydrogen fueled machines do not. If you are online in an English speaking forum expect the majority to support Elon, pied piper de jour.