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That's how the world works. (mander.xyz)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 11 points 7 months ago* (7 children)

Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn't understand that hydrogen isn't free and production is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

"Oh it comes from ammonia". Alright, where does the ammonia come from???

You're just moving the problem around, not fixing anything.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    You'll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (5 children)

    But why not just make electricity from renewable energy?

    Like, I get the benefit of fuel cells, but people need to realize that hydrogen closer to a battery than a fuel source itself. You're expending energy now to make storage of energy that can be tapped later.

    It's good for places where vehicles can't tap into the grid and need dense energy storage (i.e. transoceanic freighters), or where long charging times are infeasible (like long-range trucking).

    And probably good for grid-level storage, too.

    But for a typical family car/commuter? There's really no point. You're adding more steps in energy conversion, and losing efficiency at every additional step (thanks to basic physics), and to gain what? A faster refueling time on a long road trip? An experience closer to what we were used to with ICE-cars? An experience that really isn't that great anywhere that has a winter. Or an excessively hot summer.

    Maybe for people who can't have a charger at home, even an L1, but there are better solutions for that (like...adding an outlet? Making landlords responsible for providing power whenever there is parking? More municipal charging locations?)

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    You can't fertilize crops with electricity, nor can you eat it

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Some startups are trying to synthesize edible fats from non-biological feedstocks, using just energy, water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, through the Fischer Tropsch process.

    Personally I'm more interested in seeing whether that can expand into just manufacturing hydrocarbons with excess solar energy, rather than synthetic food, but it's still cool to see that people can do it.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    You can't store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can't be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.

    If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.

    Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.

    The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let's you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.

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