• Eatspancakes84@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I really don’t get why hydrogen remains popular. Hydrogen is significantly less efficient than lithium batteries in storing electricity. There are currently dozens of technologies on the way for improving batteries beyond what’s possible with lithium. So what’s the market potential for green hydrogen again?

    • ButtDrugs@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      It wins by a huge margin on the energy to weight ratio. In scenarios where weight doesn’t matter it’s dumb, but there is potential in places like air travel where it does make sense.

      • dustycups@aussie.zone
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        7 months ago

        I had to scroll way too far to find this - surely the main pro/con if hydrogen.

        Storage was an issue in the past. Is it better now?

    • JoBo
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      7 months ago

      Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).

      That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Hydrogen is useful in a lot of industrial processes. It also maybe win the race for green aviation fuel, but this one is not likely. There is plenty of market for green hydrogen.

      There is also absolutely no reason to hype about any of it. Everybody hyping it on the media is trying to make global warming worse.

    • xkforce@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Industry uses A LOT of Hydrogen and that would increase dramatically if we stopped using fossil fuels as chemical feedstocks. eg. plastics, pharmaceuticals, dyes etc.