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Refueling a hydrogen car in California is so annoying that drivers are suing Toyota
(www.latimes.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Hydrogen gas will leak though steel since the molecule is so small while making it brittle and incapable of handling pressure through hydrogen entitlement. It's not trivial to ship. Power lines are cheap and transport extremely high power density.
Only for certain types of steel. And there are many materials that are impermeable to hydrogen. This is mostly a marketing argument rather than one based on fact. Pipelines are far cheaper and send far more energy than high voltage wires.
So why not send hydrogen from a production location to (essentially) an electrical sub-station where it can generate power that can be used to charge electric vehicles. Why does a gas that burns invisibly need to be involved in transportation?
That's just an indirect way of power a car via hydrogen. Sure, it can work. But it just implies that having cars directly powered by hydrogen are the better idea.
We already have electric infrastructure everywhere but not hydrogen infrastructure. It would be far cheaper and easier to use hydrogen as a method of bulk clean energy transportation than to directly power vehicles with them.
Plus since there is less surface area from the vastly reduced amount of piping required, you can mitigate evaporative losses through the pipelines.
Your proposal still doesn't address my safety concern of having a gas that burns near invisibly in passenger and commercial vehicles.
Using hydrogen as a bulk energy carrier will enable the hydrogen infrastructure. Unlike wires, you do not have to physically link it to every home. You can have last-mile solutions like using trucks. You also only need to convert existing fuel stations. So the scale is much lower, and likely much cheaper too.
Hydrogen cars are proving to be safer than gasoline cars. The fuel is lighter than air, so it does not linger like gasoline does. There are no known serious car fires in FCEVs. Even li-ion batteries have the same problem of gasoline, namely that the energy source of the fire stays in place. As a result, many people have died or been injured.