this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Now we just have to hope that people dont dig up this bullshit idea of using hydrogen to heat your own house.
There's really nothing wrong with generating hydrogen when power costs are negative.
Except that only happens like 500 hours a year.
And hydrogen will leak from any tank.
And it turns metal brittle.
And I wouldn't trust my neighbor with a propane tank, let alone hydrogen.
And its nearly impossible to transport through existing infrastructure.
But other than that, its great!
Most of your claims are just climate change denial arguments. Many of them were directly made up by the fossil fuel industry.
You forgot about the part where the possibility of generating hydrogen cleanly from electricity later is used as an excuse to build infrastructure and fuel-cell cars for it now, even though hydrogen now is dirty hydrogen produced by cracking fossil fuels.
I have no confidence that the second phase of switching to electrolysis would actually happen, and that "the hydrogen economy" isn't just a greenwashing scam perpetrated by natural gas producers.
What's that? I couldn't hear you over the nonstop greenwashing of gas cracking plants.
Wow! so glad we have clean coal now!
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The Gang Heat Their House With Hydrogen
I always love the stupidity of this idea: You were able to generate pure hydrogen at high costs... Now what should we do with it? Well lets just do what we did since the middle ages and burn it!
Craziest implementation? Burn the hydrogen in your home. But not in a furnace. Burn it in a mechanical combustion-powered heat pump!π
Hydrogen has one of the highest energy densities by mass. It's a very reasonable energy storage
If you're launching a rocket, sure. If cost or difficulty matters in any way compared to raw mass, not really.
It was talked about for cars where density kinda matters, but you could put them in a fuel cell that way instead of just burning it, and I'm not sure if it was ever anywhere close to economical.
The cost probably will go down, and with any luck the cost of polluting will go up, but electricity is going to be more practical for most things.
Electricity has gotten dramatically more expensive too. It is no panacea. In all likelihood, most of transportation will shift over to either green fuels (e-fuels) or hydrogen. Those are one-to-one replacements for fossil fuels.
I mean, to make e-fuel you still need the e (which stands for electricity). It's ~guaranteed to have lower round-trip efficiency and higher cost in a car than just a battery. Ditto for green hydrogen. Theoretically blue hydrogen or white hydrogen could be used instead, but it's not certain how much white hydrogen there is, and blue hydrogen needs carbon capture and storage which will add a lot to the cost.
Gas generators are pretty much the same as ever, while renewables have gotten much cheaper than them. If your power bill went up, it's some local issue doing it.
(Air-breathing aviation is the other application I didn't mention. Battery planes work but not well, so it's closer to rockets. I don't know if anyone has tried hydrogen, but that's where e-fuel comes up a lot)
Round-trip efficiency is not that important. If it really was as important as claimed, we wouldn't be talking about cars at all. It would all be about bikes, buses, trains, walkable neighborhoods, etc., instead. But in the real world, we will need to accept less-than-perfect solutions. So as long as the idea is green, it should be tolerated.
We also have far more renewable energy available to us than we could ever hope to use. It is orders of magnitude more plentiful than fossil fuel energy. As a result, there will be an overabundance of green energy in the long run. It is fine to use that excess of energy to make stuff e-fuels or hydrogen.
Okay, but then why not just go with battery cars? You're the only person I've heard say hydrogen cars will make a comeback, if that is what you're saying.
Hydrogen cars are dead and EVs won already. This pro hydrogen position has only ever benefited the fossil industry, and is laguhable considering the state of the industry in 2026 (gestures broadly at China). Their arguments are simply disingenuous (e.g. obviously efficiency doesn't matter because bikes are more efficient than cars, so let's all agree to use inefficient cars). Hydrogen will be a thing for some industries, but not cars.
They're creative, original arguments (AKA out there), but I haven't seen any evidence of malice.
Edit: So much of what comes at you on Lemmy is the same tired canards over and over again. If someone wants to say hydrogen is actually winning, or I dunno, that Abraham Lincoln never existed, that's fascinating.
I did not say you can't have battery cars. It is just a limited technology and would likely shrink to a niche market without subsidies.
As far as I can tell like a million people use them no problem. They need less maintenance and drive better. The limits they have only come up in niche cases, like "I need to cross the Australian outback".
There was the one commercial hydrogen car, but I only remember hearing about it from southern California where the gas stations were, and I'm not sure if it's still being made or they gave up.
Millions, sure. But that's still a niche.
It's important to note that the car itself is a luxury or extravagance. The most practical form of a car is a bicycle, which most people don't want. So inevitably, cars always become a way of showing off capacities that you don't need. Cars with any kind of deficiency get weeded out, simply because they can't show off those extra capacities. And battery cars have something like that. People will move away from them specifically they can't do things like crossing the Outback.
If you have a white collar job and live in a very urban area, maybe. They're slow and have a low capacity even with a trailer; the advantage is that they're cheap, small and lightweight, and that you get some exercise. If you're not mobile and in reasonably good health also forget it.
In terms of getting you and some cargo anywhere you need to be in a hurry, I'd guess the most practical vehicle is a small car, like the BYD Seagull or a Smart, or transit where it exists. If your personal cargo needs are elevated, like if you're a plumber, it's a full-size van.
Many people need a change in lifestyle or livelihood to adapt to BEVs. It is hypocritical to claim that people can't further adapt to bikes or at least e-bikes.
Cargo bikes exist too. You can carry significant cargo with them.
I have heard about about those, and they probably could carry as much as a small car, but do they work anywhere remotely hilly? Hauling your own weight up a hill on a normal bike already sucks, unless you're really really good at it. You could add an electric motor to do most of the work, but at some point you just have the car again. Looking at the physics, human power provides maybe 50 sustained watts, and there's only so much you can do with that.
It's a matter of degree. You have to plug in your EV, and on the rare road trips have to plan charge stops. That's it. Getting on a bike is completely different experience, and for the majority of people at least in North America, would require a relocation and complete change of architecture to really fully be possible. And a significant minority would still need motor vehicles for their job.
Can't vs. won't might be an important thing to bring up here. Even if it can and should happen...
A cargo bike can go anywhere a normal car can go. An e-bike is many times more efficient than a car. The argument used in favor of EVs over ICEVs also applies to e-bikes over EVs.
I understand that it is a matter of degree. But that means accepting that the BEV is a compromise no matter what their boosters claim otherwise. And there is room for another level of compromise, where people get out of their cars and into something even greener. If people are to stay in their cars, then we might as well stop pretending to care about efficiency.
Well, there are useful appliances for hydrogen, where you just burn it. Burning it to heat your own home isnt one if them.
Like, in place of natural gas?
Yeah
But think of the fireworks! /s