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bremidon t1_j2cxmr7 wrote

Reply to comment by zenfalc in Green Hydrogen - Not The Fuel Of The Future by Realistic-Plant3957

Agreed. About 15 years ago, I was absolutely convinced that hydrogen was the obvious choice and that batteries were a dead-end. Hydrogen only had a few (admittedly big) problems to solve and batteries seemed like they had a never-ending list of challenges to get past.

Fast forward to today and batteries have pretty much solved all their challenges and are now simply going from strength to strength. Meanwhile, hydrogen has barely moved forward from where it was 15 years ago.

My two observations are:

  1. Hydrogen does not merely need to be better than batteries; it needs to be significantly better than batteries to justify even bothering to develop and roll out. It cannot even keep up with batteries currently, is losing ground, so hoping hydrogen can leapfrog batteries seems unrealistic.
  2. While I readily accept that life is full of surprises and perhaps we'll get yet another twist in the hydrogen-vs-battery fight, there is no indication that something like that is building up.
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FeatheryBallOfFluff t1_j2d5zz0 wrote

There have been more investments and longer development times in battery tech than in hydrogen tech. I believe we should develop both. Who knows what amazing results hydrogen tech can achieve once it's fully developed? Perhaps once hydrogen tech is optimized, it can be synthesized from anywhere (say a boat on sea, or on the moon once water is found) and may provide a higher energy density than any other storage form (solid hydrogen storage is being investigated as it is). Perhaps rockets will make use of new hydrogen tech. Perhaps it can be used to create drinkable water in space, from non-drinkable components.

We should give it a chance before focusing only on batteries, as we would miss out on possible amazing tech by focusing only on batteries.

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bremidon t1_j2d9wze wrote

>There have been more investments and longer development times in battery tech than in hydrogen tech.

I would love to have link on this. It's not surprising that battery tech would be getting more investment now; proving a technology works and a market exists does wonders for encouraging investment. But I would be willing to bet that the situation was quite different even 5 or 10 years ago.

So do you have anything for me?

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