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[–] 17 points 2 months ago* (17 children)

doesn't hydrogen have way worse round-trip efficiency than batteries, even before things like embrittlement? i've heard as low as 45%, with the rest just becoming heat.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Yes but how will the oil companies take their unnecessary cut if you use batteries?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    why do you think lego is so expensive now

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Because it has strong marketing and a cult-like fan base.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Not quite. I mean, partially that is the case, but the good Chinese competition costs on many sets at least 50% of Lego if not more, so the extra margin is there but not astronomically high. Turns out, Lego is one of the most challenging toys to produce (hence it took China so long to catch up in quality, even though they have fully caught up by now), it needs ridiculously high injection molding precision and each product consists of hundreds if not thousand individual parts that need to be correctly sorted.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    Hydrogen has other uses too. Currently we use gas which results in carbon emissions. But with cheap enough energy, you can get hydrogen from water. There is also an option to not emit the carbon when using gas, but you get less hydrogen for the same input so no one is going to do that at scale.

    Another major use for hydrogen is the haber-bosch process.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    most hydrogen is produced from natural gas unfortunately :(

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    It is currently. But cheap renewable energy makes renewable hydrogen a more viable option.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (7 children)

    it's currently about 5x the cost to produce so i think some other incentives are probably needed as well...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (6 children)

    Currently, but a large part of that cost is due to energy prices. If you have cheaper energy, or periods of excess energy that bring the cost down to/near zero, that is what brings down the cost.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

    if only we actually got there... here the prices have been climbing more and more the more wind turbines we install because of grid instability.

    honestly a great pilot area for energy storage.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    Variable tariffs are an option here and can give you periods of very cheap, free or even negative cost energy.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Think of negative cost energy as paying someone to dispose of something you don't need, like how trash haulers get paid to take stuff away.

    If we get to the point where we have a bunch of generation for peak demand plus storage, and still have excess energy in other times, we can and should investigate fixing that excess energy into stable chemical molecules that are useful for other things (whether it's good for a material, for energy storage, for some other consumable like fertilizer, or even simply reversing carbon emissions by fixing carbon into stable non-CO2 compounds).

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    here too, but it doesn't really help the people who live in apartments :(

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    No but I don't expect you to make hydrogen or ammonia in your apartment beyond perhaps some hydrogen chemistry experiments for fun. Ammonia is probably a bit much to do at home.

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