I have basic idea of working of hydrogen fuel cell but why just hydrogen? Isn’t there any better or maybe cheaper alternative?
(I know it’s bit complex for but I would appreciate your answers)
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A lot of reasons. An incomplete list:
1. A decent amount of fuel cell work was done by NASA because of space applications before this was seriously considered.
2. There’s a concept in this that is criminally understated, and it’s the necessity of a “primary” or “secondary” carrier to actually reasonably transport hydrogen without spending ridiculous sums. These are just chemicals with more favorable transit+storage properties that can be converted back to hydrogen cheaply at high efficiencies. Ammonia is the big and obvious solution there, and the conversion to and from ammonia is ridiculously optimized with high efficiency because ammonia is one of the most important chemicals made. It’s not impossible to use ammonia as the fuel directly, but it’s probably not going to ever get to high enough efficiency to beat hydrogen fuel cells directly.
3. Hydrogen has a pretty simple chemistry and closed cycle that doesn’t create long lived greenhouse gases. In a fuel cell you have a very tractable number of side products to deal with.
4. Batteries are a shitty solution for most things. It’s bad for grid scale energy storage, and it’s bad the second you try to use it for towing anything or to drive anything bigger than an ~F150. Either hydrogen or methane is going to happen in the trucking industry at some point because there’s just not an alternative. It’s also not clear that the current air cooled transformer strategy will actually work with a full EV transportation infrastructure. They currently assume that usage will be way down at night allowing them to cool.
5. Renewables are very geographically limited with very high long term drift no matter how much some apologists try to downplay this. Any serious renewable grid proposal requires something called a “dense energy carrier” to get power from areas of high generation (like the Texas panhandle for wind) to areas of low generation (like the north east in general) and to act as energy storage to get you through the months where solar irradiance is down 15% over the average year on your solar farm. Hydrogen is an obvious choice here because it can double as a fuel source for vehicles which will be needed no matter what. “Green methane” is another serious proposal, but I haven’t kept up with that much.
Hydrogen combustion is a pretty non serious proposal even though some car manufacturers are working on it so I don’t feel the need to address it much. THe grid balancing aspect of the renewable economy is also why I pretty heavily support a nuclear grid. It’s not impossible to make a renewable grid work, but man, it’s definitely a lot easier to just not fuck up nuclear power which is already a pretty high bar on the complexity side. It’s also just expensive because a renewable grid needs to be very, very, very overbuilt to be reliable.
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