this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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There's always a lot of hatred for hydrogen in these threads but I'm yet to see a strong argument against it.
Hydrogen is not the solution to climate change in the same way nuclear energy is not the solution - it's probably an appropriate part of the picture in some instances. A lot of large, sophisticated companies and governments are heavily invested in hydrogen.
No one is talking about using hydrogen produced from fossil fuel extraction.
Yes cracking hydrogen from sea water is not efficient, but in places with an abundance of sun and wind but no population hydrogen might be a good way to store and transport energy.
I don't really understand your reasoning here. Yes producing energy requires resources. Using wind and solar to crack hydrogen from sea water does not require batteries nor "a much more powerful source". In the right environment (arid areas) it's easy enough to mitigate the impact on the environment.
1.That's where it normally comes from in the industry. I later made an assumption that this will maybe change 2-3.My point was, all energy has a cost, including environmental one. Even if you put it in an uninhabitable area, you still have to manufacture components and install the plant in a remote area (which is expensive and requires ton of landscape engineering and logistics with a very real and large footprint), and then transport hydrogen to the destination.
That's where it comes from presently because we haven't started producing significant amounts of green hydrogen yet. "This tech is useless because we aren't doing it yet!"
Constructing large solar and wind arrays in remote / uninhabitable areas is not free, but the land is "free" because in many cases it's not suitable for any other use. I think a lot of people dreaming of a wind & solar renewable future underestimate the physical area required to capture enough sunlight to power everyone's EVs.
Scaling mostly reduces economic costs, not environmental ones (latter primarily through better logistics).
Exactly! And we'll need even more if we want to use hydro. That's my point, besides the fact that building cars is extremely wasteful to begin with.