Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
Why is this article so agressively angled?
While it’s clear the infrastructure isn’t there right now, isn’t hydrogen in the long term a clearly better alternative than ev’s? The biggest problem with EV’s being the battery, with all the horrible chemicals that go in to making them.
Shouldn’t hydrogen, in the long term, be the obviously greener alternative, or am I missing something?
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.
In a conference that in attended, they talked about usbhavimg to look at energy sources like a flow of energy and not as limited sources.
Currently, wind turbines are imtemtionally stopped, when there is so much wind that the generated electricity becomes too cheap to sell!
Instead, you could run them and use the electricity to convert the energy into hydrogen. Yes some energy is lost but it would be lost anyway as wind
With wind, sun, wave energy, we can look at energy in different ways that we usually do with fuel and coal. It’s there and it just keeps coming.
Yes but the overhead we have is nothing compared to the energy needed to make everything hydrogen powered. we would need an absolute absurd amount of overhead to generate all the hydrogen from overhead alone.
It’s kind of dumb to intentionally waste 75-80% of the total electric energy initially generated to power hydrogen vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea, it should absolutely be done ASAP…but it’s not a solution to hydrogen powered vehicles.
A factory which only runs some of the time will be really expensive. From what I’ve seen it’s way more cost effective to rely on batteries for surplus electricity.
So far grid scale battery storage only scales to stabilizing the grid. It’s better than anything else at that, but it’s not cost effective to for example power a town overnight until solar is back
For personal vehicles, no, that is not at all clear and many of us would say clearly the opposite.
However there are more heavy duty applications where batteries are unlikely to ever scale. I don’t think we have a clear winner yet so hydrogen is likely still in the running for things like aviation, shipping, construction and farm equipment, industry, maybe even grid scale energy storage