Allero
I mean obtaining and using. You have energy losses converting water to hydrogen and hydrogen to energy, and those two compound nastily, even while using the most efficient tech.
Also, safety is a concern that can be addressed, but that was beyond my point. You still need to transfer hydrogen from point A to point B, and it is way more expensive and eco-unfriendly than moving electricity around. Or, if you want to put electrolyzers on each petrol station, you need to make sure the water supply is adequate and hydrogen storage is large enough to supply for peak demand, and that your station gets enough electricity, too (and you’ll need more of it compared to a regular charging station).
Scaling mostly reduces economic costs, not environmental ones (latter primarily through better logistics).
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.
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.
Batteries take up about 15-20% of the vehicle mass and have around 90% efficiency
Hydrogen cycle has, at best, 60% efficiency (assuming amazing logistics and fuel cell for hydrogen-to-energy conversion); also, hydrogen systems also weigh a lot, but even if they would weigh literally 0kg, they would lose on efficiency anyway.
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.
