What is actually the simplest answer why hydrogen is not feasible yet for a replacement of our usual ways to heat buildings or drive cars. I heard that Hydrogen makes sense for larger vehicles that have to drive for a lot of miles but smaller ones are not really in development outside of toyota’s experiments. Is there already a way to when it could get feasible?
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The simplest answer is that hydrogen is just another type of battery. Currently, it is a battery that is difficult to produce at scale, hard to transport, and extremely challenging to hold.
The idea that hydrogen is good for larger vehicles comes from the idea that you can store a lot of energy in a small volume of space. The problem is that the requirements bring so much weight back into the mix, that the entire thing is not better than just using some common battery.
There is an additional problem with this idea. Batteries continue to get smaller and cheaper. It already looks like hydrogen has lost the battle for trucks. Planes and boats are perhaps still in play, but even those are becoming questionable.
Toyota is going after hydrogen for two main reasons. The first is that the electrical grid in Japan is, scientifically speaking, a little fucked up. The second reason is that they have waited so long on aggressively going into batteries that they stand no chance of catching up to either Tesla or the Chinese. So hydrogen is a Hail Mary.
At the moment, there are no clear paths for hydrogen to become feasible. This could change, of course. Fifteen years ago, it looked like hydrogen had the easier path compared to batteries. But unless somebody is keeping a really good secret, hydrogen is at least ten years away from even reaching a stage that BEVs reached 5 years ago. In the meantime, batteries keep improving.
Even if hydrogen would develop to the point that it is somewhat better than batteries, nobody is going to completely redo the entire infrastructure to switch to hydrogen. And in this game, that means that hydrogen is already dead for this use case.
One last thing: there are areas in industry where hydrogen has a good future. As a replacement for heating or for manufacturing, hydrogen could be extremely useful. So the problem is not that hydrogen is useless; it’s just not really any good for transport.
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