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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Note that Hydrogen in this use case isn’t so much a “fuel” as an “energy storage mechanism”.
By this I mean that most things we think of as fuels (oil, gas, coal, wood/charcoal, peat, even nuclear) we go and take the fuel, maybe purify it depending on use case, and then burn that fuel.
This isn’t what we do with Hydrogen. There are no hydrogen mines. We have to make hydrogen. The way we make this (in a hydrogen fuel of the future scenario) is typically to take some other energy source and then use it to do electrolysis on water to separate the hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then basically storing the energy from the original power source and can then be used in the end application in a way that has little or no pollution at the end use location (if you burn hydrogen you get water).
Hydrogen’s potential here on earth is that we could have large scale centralized clean power (hydro, wind, solar, nuclear – albeit most have some issue in other costs) to generate the energy without churning out all this carbon, and then store that energy in hydrogen so it can be distributed for use where needed where it results in virtually zero pollution.
Hydrogen also has potential for Space exploration where we have little/no ability to mine fuels – if you have a solar power system and water you can use the Solar to turn water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, that you can then store and burn when needed, to get energy and water. Capture the water produced and you can redo the process, which is very useful in a highly resource-scarce environment like space or on barren worlds.
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