Australia and UAE would be quite ideal for the solar part.
Edit: So changing our energy needs to be reliant on hydrogen is, as Elon says “dumb”?
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They can. That’s also expensive. And hydrogen isn’t nearly as easy to handle as oil. Oil can be pumped, transported in normal steel and plastic containers at room temperature. Hydrogen doesn’t pump well, has a tendency to make metals extremely brittle, and needs to either be pressurized or extremely cold. It will be an expensive uphill battle to go with hydrogen, but it is more sustainable.
I suppose they could, but what would be the point? If you’re using (just for example) 3kw of energy to produce 2kw of energy, why bother with the second step? Even if it’s a small net gain, say 3 for 3.2, it’s not worth the trouble to produce.
It would be better to use Nuclear as we transition to less energy dense power sources that the public isn’t afraid of due to decades of coal, oil and gas lobby funds going towards fearmongering.
They do. But it is still expensive. The cost is measured on cost of electricity. Even if you build more and more renewables, if the cost of electricity goes up the cost of hydrogen goes up. Another issue is that some times there is no sun or wind. The idea of hydrogen economy relies on using excess energy from renewable sources when they aren’t needed for other things. But if there is no wind or sun today, people still need power. Even if you have batteries, after the wind and sun picks up you need to recharge those. Currently gas is used to deal with the fluctuations but that is not renewable or green (no matter how much Germany wants to pretend it is).
If you really want to make hydrogen, you should make it using nuclear reactor and with a catalyst in high temperature. (I don’t think this has been done yet, but the test theory is there.)
Problem with hydrogen is that it is REALLY hard to transport. It just doesn’t want to stay contained or in a pure form or it needs a medium to be stored in. So it is only a local energy solution.
Hydrogen economy as an idea requires there to be reliable peak points during which renewable energy + base load, produce more than is needed.
One of the under discussed problems with hydrogen is that creating clean hydrogen requires water and many parts of the world already have issues with having enough potable water. Take California as an example. It’s sensitive to pollution and with a wealthy economy it is an ideal place to convert. But it also has perpetual water problems. Clean hydrogen plants and desalination plants have the same basic requirements: shoreline location with cheap electricity, the ability to intake water, and dump brine. So which do you build?
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