Absolutely, I see no problem with using excess energy to produce hydrogen or other stuff. Maybe it’s arguably better to put that into battery storage or something, but it takes time to build all of that, and diversity isn’t a bad thing in most cases.
Like I said, we do need hydrogen for some things - what I’m saying is that we should be focusing on using it for things that have no other option, rather than trying to grow the hydrogen consumption market by moving anything that can be over to it, regardless of whether or not that is a good idea. Particularly if we’re basing long term predictions on the current rates of hydrogen production, primarily black hydrogen ie produced from petrochemicals, which would be expected to decline and rise in price alongside a decline in petrochemical use.
And where did I say we can’t build enough renewable capacity? I said we would need at least 3x the current renewable capacity dedicated to producing hydrogen to meet our current demand with green hydrogen for things that have no other option. The point I’m making is that running everything on hydrogen will drastically increase this demand, thus delaying the path to net zero as we’ll need to use fossil fuels for longer while we build even more renewables than if we were just aiming to meet our current, essential hydrogen demand.
Absolutely, I see no problem with using excess energy to produce hydrogen or other stuff. Maybe it’s arguably better to put that into battery storage or something, but it takes time to build all of that, and diversity isn’t a bad thing in most cases.
Like I said, we do need hydrogen for some things - what I’m saying is that we should be focusing on using it for things that have no other option, rather than trying to grow the hydrogen consumption market by moving anything that can be over to it, regardless of whether or not that is a good idea. Particularly if we’re basing long term predictions on the current rates of hydrogen production, primarily black hydrogen ie produced from petrochemicals, which would be expected to decline and rise in price alongside a decline in petrochemical use.
And where did I say we can’t build enough renewable capacity? I said we would need at least 3x the current renewable capacity dedicated to producing hydrogen to meet our current demand with green hydrogen for things that have no other option. The point I’m making is that running everything on hydrogen will drastically increase this demand, thus delaying the path to net zero as we’ll need to use fossil fuels for longer while we build even more renewables than if we were just aiming to meet our current, essential hydrogen demand.