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this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Do you have a hydrogen car?
Right now, there are 59 public hydrogen fueling stations in all of the United States, all of which are in CA. Good luck on a road trip. Even in a big city like Los Angeles they are hard to find and far apart. Pretty awesome to drive 30 minutes in traffic just to fuel up!!
And before you say something like, "we just need to build out the infrastructure;" think how fucking expensive that will be. We already have a MASSIVE infrastructure for electricity and for gas stations. Each hydrogen station costs around $5 million to build. There are roughly 116,000 gas stations in the US, so even adding a quarter of that number in hydrogen would cost $143 billion. It would be better to spend that on beefing up the electrical grid, especially in places like Texas who can't even handle a tough winter.
As far as the experience, there is nothing better than pulling up to your house and plugging in. It absolutely sucks having to go to a dirty gas station and stand outside in cold or heat or rain while some homeless person asks for money to fill up their car to get to a doctors appointment. Take that gas station experience and then spend time trying to find a far away hydrogen station to fuel up. Even on road trips, I can take a 30 minute lunch break to get 50-80% before driving again. In a hydrogen car I'll be lucky to find a place to fuel up at all.
Finally, the economics of hydrogen for cars is dumb. Why spend money converting electricity into hydrogen, then put it in a tanker truck that uses diesel to drive it to a station, where it takes electricity to run the pumps, to put hydrogen in a car that TURNS HYDROGEN INTO ELECTRICITY. Compare that to just sending electricity down some wires to charge a battery.
People said the same thing when BEVs were coming out. Personally, I think the main hidden benefits of hydrogen isn't fast refueling and range, but rather weight and ease of storage.
Hydrogen may be the solution to enable mass adoption of variable renewable power plants, allowing relatively cheap energy storage between seasons. Doesn't matter if you only get 50% efficiency if you can produce it when electricity is dirt cheap and then store it nigh indefinitely.
As for the weight - the real money in vehicles is in the commercial sector, where weight is precious. Any weight lugging around batteries is dead weight - and hydrogen means less weight than lithium batteries.