Which unless you have solar, you are paying for. Even if you have solar, you are paying off the panels, batteries and inverter/chargers over a period of time.
I know, I have one of those weird H shaped flasks with the plat electrodes.
I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.
Round trip efficiency of hydrogen is at best 50% and at worse half that. You have the horrendous efficiency of electrolysis and then the equally bad efficiency in the fuel cell.
Efficiency pumping your excess solar into the EV itself is more like 80-85%, most of which is loss in the electronics, not the battery - those typically have a coulombic efficiency of over 95%.
Hydrogen a boondoggle. It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Also, "gas fitter and metal fabrication" experience isn't worth anything unless it was hydrogen-specific. It is far leakier than natural gas/propane. One of the biggest hassles of a hydrogen fuel chain is that the stuff leaks through everything.
> Round trip efficiency of hydrogen is at best 50%
In fact, even this level of efficiency may be sufficient. Solar panels are so cheap that if we had affordable, long-term energy storage options, even with such efficiency, we would have completely abandoned fossil fuels. But, unfortunately, storing hydrogen is difficult and dangerous. It is not like natural gas.
> It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security. It's like a placeholder for real corn so that if there's a crop failure for a couple of years, the low-iq idiots who think it's stupid to make ethanol from corn don't starve to death.
Well... How successful is the US in cutting ethanol consumption on the years the corn production is lower?
Meat usually does that stabilizing. Fuel consumption not even is almost completely inelastic, but corn ethanol on the US is subsidized on every stage to the point that market forces become meaningless.
> Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security
Source? First time I read this, might make sense. Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
> Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
I believe the argument being made here is "we need to overproduce corn in order to get food security; what can we do with the spare capacity in the good years given we're already eating too much?"
I don't know if this argument is correct, but I believe that's what's being claimed.
Yes, this is literally bribing farmers (extremely cheaply) so that in the event of a prolonged crop failure they will have more arable land and equipment to cultivate it and compensate for the crop failure.
Same with nuclear. The most expensive form of electricity generation there is. No grid operator wants to touch it, but the nuclear industry has been very busy lobbying congress and both the current and last administration.
Nuclear is incredibly energy dense, can be stockpiled for a long time and is extremely safe.
Yes its expensive but its one those industries any serious nation needs to subsidise for the energy security it offers and the countless high skill jobs it fosters.
Well, no it's never been extremely safe by any stretch of the imagination.
That's just an extreme interpretation of the way it's not as extremely unsafe as it could be.
Plus at the rate it's being addressed by a few enthusiasts, it could be getting remarkably safer, maybe even in one person's lifetime someday.
Developments may be positive but it makes the most sense to be realistic and avoid the completely unfounded hype involved.
Plus when nuclear works best the high-skill jobs resulting have to be as non-countless as possible, that's one of the big factors which might someday allow the economics to be less unfavorable.
Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.
10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.
The land available for solar and wind is immense, especially because wind can be put in the ocean. The land required for batteries is tiny, especially compared to a nuclear power plant.
The challenges are going to be political, not spatial or geographic. China could put enough solar panels in its western deserts to power the whole country. The US could do the same in its southwest. It would take about 15% of the land area of Arizona to power the entire US.
That's physically achievable but politically difficult.
The numbers say that nothing is extremely safe, and experience has shown that having more maturity may not be necessary to recognize that, but it helps.
It just hurts the case for positive progress to mindlessly exaggerate. Especially to the absolute max.
Plus I'm not one of the ones who follow any boomer lunatic trends when I can come up with my own which people of many ages have adopted quite a bit.
Remember wacky lunatic science turns into regular science more often than you think once the dust settles.
But the advantage of that doesn't really depend on elderliness, mainly dedication to science.
Any age can do it if you try.
Well, maybe not if you're completely non-gifted in some way or another.
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.