Why is Hydrogen not feasible yet for heating or driving?

799 views

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?

In: 475

30 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hydrogen isn’t magic. You need to produce it because it doesn’t really exist on its own on Earth. Currently hydrogen is usually made from fossil fuels (because they are, you know, HYDROcarbons) so that isn’t really useful as you can just use the fossil fuel instead. The idea is that you create hydrogen by separating it from water with electricity. It is rather electricity intensive though so it’s not really plausible until we get really cheap electricity from renewables. In fact, due to the losses at every stage in the production and usage of hydrogen, it makes more sense to use the electricity directly if at all possible. But when there’s excess production of electricity (aka cheap or even free electricity), hydrogen production would enable us to store some of that energy for later use. Think of it as a complicated battery.

You are viewing 1 out of 30 answers, click here to view all answers.