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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* Production. The current way of making hydrogen essentially converts fossil fuel into hydrogen and CO2. This is obviously a really bad idea. They have been trying to “greenwash” this by storing the CO2 in oil&gas fields afterwards, but this still results in quite a few CO2 emissions due to things like leaks.
* Efficiency. There *is* a way to make clean hydrogen by essentially running electricity through water, turning water into hydrogen and oxygen. However, this is not 100% efficient, so you lose quite a lot of energy. Hydrogen has a best-case scenario of about 70% efficiency for something like driving, compared to batteries at 95%+. When you burn it for heating, you are *way* below that 70%, compared to the 400%ish (not a typo!) for grid-powered heat pumps.
* Safety. Hydrogen contains relatively little energy per volume. Luckily it is a gas, so we can just compress it. However, that means you now have to carry around a tank pressurized to 700 times ambient pressure, filled with a highly flammable gas. If you thought battery fires were bad, hydrogen fires are *way worse*.
Some people claim we can solve the first two issues by generating hydrogen from excess green energy. However, this means building a conversion plant which sits idle most of the time – which is incredibly expensive. In reality it’d be way cheaper to just build more solar panels and windmills to keep the plant running – at which point it is no longer taking up the excess!
There *are* valid use cases for hydrogen because some industrial processes physically **need** it to properly function without fossil fuel. But for stuff like heating or driving, it’s just a subsidy-seeking distraction for which way better alternatives are already being used.
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