I really wish hydrogen will take off, I mean EV is great and simple, but the process of producing batteries are very polluting, yet hydrogen can be scaled almost everywhere.
98% of hydrogen is currently made from fossil fuels.
While it’s possible to make hydrogen from renewable electricity, you immediately lose at least 60% of your energy in the electricity to chemical to electricity conversion steps. For comparison, batteries only lose 5-10% in the round trip charging.
Hydrogen really only makes sense in applications where batteries can’t be used, or efficiency is not relevant. So many companies have publicly announced their new hydrogen vehicles, then quietly stopped using them and started using battery electric vehicles instead.
Hydrogen just costs too much, and the hard limit of chemical efficiency means it will never be cheaper than batteries.
I really wish hydrogen will take off, I mean EV is great and simple, but the process of producing batteries are very polluting, yet hydrogen can be scaled almost everywhere.
98% of hydrogen is currently made from fossil fuels.
While it’s possible to make hydrogen from renewable electricity, you immediately lose at least 60% of your energy in the electricity to chemical to electricity conversion steps. For comparison, batteries only lose 5-10% in the round trip charging.
Hydrogen really only makes sense in applications where batteries can’t be used, or efficiency is not relevant. So many companies have publicly announced their new hydrogen vehicles, then quietly stopped using them and started using battery electric vehicles instead.
Hydrogen just costs too much, and the hard limit of chemical efficiency means it will never be cheaper than batteries.
If you produce enough green electricity to bring its price down to zero the efficiency is less concerning.
I saw this problem happen in Chile, they use wind to produce it but they still use fossil fuels alongside of it
Hydrogen is also a very flammable substance that needs special handling.
So is gasoline and battery :(
Unless we somehow master converting stable matter into energy with low start up cost, this is just the physics of energy storage.