Technology

They just announced they’re shutting down some in California.

To be fair, EV's had that same obstacle, and have pretty much overcome it.

And most electricity is still made from fossil fuels. The point is that it doesn’t have to be, unlike gasoline.

We could use wind electricity, instead of stopping the windnturbines when the production gets so high that prices drop...

At some point hopefully we will realize

It's important to see where the hydrogen is being sourced from. Grey Hydrogen comes from natural gas and is not ideal as you point out.

Green hydrogen is promising however, and comes from electrolyzers. The key there is where the electricity to operate them comes from, but that's true for electric vehicles as well. It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn't done for electric vehicles.

In any case, I think we do want to build out hydrogen infrastructure (and I'm biased since I work in hydrogen energy). The future we're envisioning is one where solar and wind provide us excesses fairly often. That's where it's perfect to run electrolyzers to store the energy as hydrogen.

Yeah one of the big downsides of hydrogen is that you need massive amounts of clean energy to make it worthwhile.

You could fill the tank with the hot air from the pro-hydrogen crowd.

Hydrogen is incredibly inefficient compared to using electricity directly. You have to first use the electricity to make the hydrogen, this is very inefficient in itself. then you have to "burn" it to drive the vehicle, which wastes most of the energy just like ICE vehicle. So you need several times the initial energy generation to drive a hydrogen vehicle the same distance compared to using electricity directly.

Of course the batteries is then the issue when it comes to EVs, so they're not a magic bullet. But I wouldn't say hydrogen is the obvious better choice either since it is so wasteful with the energy.

Hydrogen cannot be greener than an EV, because it's just an EV with more steps. It's energy intensive to turn electricity + water to hydrogen, transport it, pump it, then convert it back to electricity.

The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.

It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you'd have to break laws of physics.

E: ok people. You live in your little fantasy world where thermodynamics aren't a thing.

Honestly, the article answers its own question and acts oblivious to it, but I've been saying it for years.

It's for boats. The easiest and most convenient place to store hydrogen is near a port, which conveniently also generally has the infrastructure for natural gas, used to make hydrogen.

Honda and Toyota do make EVs, as does Hyundai, as well as patents for batteries, which would put them near the top of the market. Clearly, they're also betting on BEV cars. But they all also have a marine sector, and Toyota just partnered with a company to test out fuel cells for marine applications. The cars might as well have been a useful test bed which had its costs subsidized by consumers. Seems pretty clear what their angle is.

Or maybe they're out of their mind. Who knows?

In H2 car the H2 is just a really inefficient battery. Sure it can hold a lot, but it loses a lot. You lose it in energy conversions (to H2 and from H2) and you have to transport the stuff, and it leaks (smallest element) and it has to be cooled and compressed.

Battery tech is getting all the time, and really, you only need 300 mile range (many have that now) as humans have to stop for a rest/wee. With a charge network like or petrol network, you can charge then.

Edit: English

Hydrogen is good when it's green hydrogen- made via electrolysis. Blue hydrogen is produced by gas companies, so it isn't clean, unfortunately. There are some other snags, such as designing a really hard gas tank that cannot be punctured, and hydrogen storage is a bit challenging. It's less dense than gasoline, particularly at normal temps. So it has to be cooled down, which takes additional power and delivery complications, and it's still less dense even as a liquid, so you don't get as far of a range vs gasoline or jet fuel.

Hydrogen storage as a battery medium for overproducing wind, solar, even solar towers might make sense. I, for one am excited about the idea of hydrogen blimps coming back for lifting heavy loads to remote places, which Canada is toying with right now.

Hydrogen might make sense for something like container ships, but short term, I think other efuels will be used for things like planes, buses, trucks, maybe cars. Stuff that is more inert or just less expensive to design across a supply chain. It also has potential offworld uses in the further future. It definitely has its uses, it just seems a bit difficult in personal vehicles.

Hydrogen was as good as dead for years because compressing it is so wasteful