[cbkeller]

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery.

After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been slow but steady. It's not really clear to me what advantages H has over Li as an electron donor, at this point.

[pfdietz]

Hydrogen is a battery with very particular uses cases.

In particular: hydrogen is bad for use cases with large numbers of charge/discharge cycles, because the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of such cycles.

However, for use cases with small numbers of charge cycles, like seasonal storage or backup against rare grid outages, hydrogen's big advantage -- the low cost of storing it, vs. typical short term storage technologies like batteries -- will dominate. Storing hydrogen underground in caverns has a per energy capacity capital cost of just $1/kWh, two orders of magnitude cheaper than Li-ion batteries.

[Retric]

Let’s assume at scale you’re buying seasonal power for 0$ so efficiency doesn’t matter and selling it at 10c/kWh given 1$/kWh and a once a year discharge you might break even in 10 years which looks fine except...

1$/kWh is only storage for already existing hydrogen. For this application you also need equipment to both produce and burn it which adds to these costs. Hydrogen generation can’t depend on 0$ prices for very long each week in the off season so you either need a lot of excess equipment that’s rarely used or be willing to pay more for electricity. Further, nobody building a grid would be willing to depend on seasonal storage running out on the last day it’s needed. So you need a large guaranteed storage surplus alongside redundancy in your generating capacity.

Start running the numbers and the annual ROI doesn’t look to be even enough to pay for the interest on your setup costs let alone profit. It might have some ultra niche applications but the economics don’t seem to work out for large scale deployment.

[RetpolineDrama]

>hydrogen's big advantage -- the low cost of storing it

Hydrogen by its very nature, due to it being the smallest atom, embeds itself into the walls of its container. It will rot the metal walls you use to hold it long term.

Look up "hydrogen embrittlement"

[rtpg]

What’s the pricing compared to stored energy like pumping water up a hill? I get that it’s not exactly a universal strategy but not like underground caverns don’t have the same issue

[cbkeller]

Seasonal storage is an interesting idea. Rare grid outages seems pretty easy with batteries if the South Australia example is anything to go by though, and for medium-term storage there's also pumped hydro -- not sure where that compares in cost?

[jojobas]

Fuel cells might end up better than batteries if you consider the cost/lifetime of batteries. Energy density and safety are also valid considerations, the batteries are already at the limit of what you'd want to sit on top.

[etherael]

Energy density. I'm not sure exactly what it is for lifepo4 but it's lower than 1,406.6 kWh/m^3 for hydrogen at 700 bar, i think roughly half.

Both compare poorly against diesel though so I'm left wondering if synthetic fossil fuels produced from renewable inputs might not actually be the way to go. In the beginning it seemed like efficiency was going to be important and a limiting factor to all this, and batteries definitely have an edge on fuels produced from renewable sources. But now it's seeming like actually producing large amounts of energy isn't as much of a problem as ensuring that it is available at the point of consumption economically and logistically. Synthetic fossil fuels that pull carbon from the atmosphere would be carbon neutral and fit neatly into the existing system with no other modifications.

It stands to reason there's a threshold at which the cost of production is so much lower than the cost of transmission and storage that it makes sense to take efficiency losses for storage and transmission gains.

[credit_guy]

Hydrogen is the way to send energy from sunny places, like Australia to not-so-sunny places, like Japan. You can't send batteries, and you can't lay a cable that long. You can try to pack that energy in a different form of chemical energy like ammonia, or methylcyclohexane, or methanol, or synthetic methane or gasoline. The jury is still out. Europe is investing big time in hydrogen too, so chances are that hydrogen makes sense.

[XorNot]

You absolutely could lay a cable that long, and IMO we should. There is no reason not to export abundant renewable energy today while we can, and figure out the long term storage issues as we go.

Hydrogen can be manufactured anywhere you have seawater and electricity, so it would be a much better use of resources to lay a subsea superconducting cable once and let Japan store power by generating hydrogen locally.

[RetpolineDrama]

>and you can't lay a cable that long

Sure you can, and at megavolt DC levels it is _extremely_ efficient to move GW of power that way.

[gary_0]

It also makes a lot more sense to scale up the grid and battery manufacturing than to try and invent entirely new infrastructure for hydrogen production, storage, and transport. I had an open mind about hydrogen in decades past, but it increasingly just seems like a scam to get money to develop something that doesn't work and isn't economically viable in most cases.

[mlindner]

I think it's actually significantly worse than just a scam. It's a way for oil companies to create a value added product that can be sold by moving the carbon emissions out of one country and into another. They can then sell the hydrogen as "green" by washing the hydrogen with other sources even though it came from oil.

[Telemakhos]

I think most of the enthusiasm lies in the toxicity or safety of the energy store. Lithium batteries are toxic waste that doesn't get recycled well yet and requires minerals currently produced by child laborers in appalling conditions. Hydrogen fuel cells produce pure water as their byproduct and could theoretically be loaded with hydrogen fuel produced through green-powered electrolysis. They both explode on a bad day, but one rapidly oxidizes in a more environmentally friendly way.

[mlindner]

> Lithium batteries are toxic waste that doesn't get recycled well yet

Actually it does get recycled well, especially with larger batteries. There's just been very little that actually needed recycling that was sufficient to run a business. There's many smaller size businesses making healthy profit off lithium battery recycling already.

Here's two examples:

https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

https://li-cycle.com/

[Panzer04]

Disagree - the biggest nominal advantage of hydrogen is mass storage. In theory, tanks scale up in capacity more easily than battery cells (perhaps to the point of seasonal storage). In almost every other respect hydrogen would be worse than lithium batteries (requires complex infrastructure for power conversion, terrible roundtrip efficiency, etc)

In the end, the shortfalls of hydrogen are turning out to be simply too insurmountable.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Batteries are not going to work on things like bigger airplanes, or where you want to transport energy very long distances.

Hydrogen does have niche applications, but it's clearly not a mainstream solution.

[viraptor]

> It's a bad battery.

I think there are use cases where it's a very good battery if small enough devices are created. Specifically, an empty cell on its own is going to be much cheaper than a lithium battery. I could swap and store many cells in my garage, but I can't do that with a typical mounted battery. This means the capacity of cells would be limited by physical storage space. And if my solar system produces a lot more electricity that I could use on a normal day, it could make sense for a rainy day.

[cbmuser]

Japan’s hydrogen strategy is based upon the high-temperature reactor HTGR in Ibaraki prefecture.

This reactor doesn’t use electricity to produce H2 but high temperature hydrolysis.

See: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...

[the-anarchist]

I'm lost, I thought hydrogen is the goat. Many manufacturers (eg Benz) push it no?

[ryao]

Hydrogen automotive technologies are a research scientist’s dream. Basically, it represents life long employment with no need to produce useful results.

Management at many automotive companies likely love it for that reason too, since putting money into it makes it look like they are doing something to change when in reality they are not doing anything at all.

Here is a neat fact about hydrogen vehicles. Fueling them causes the nozzles to cool to below freezing temperatures. Try fueling vehicle after vehicle and the nozzle will freeze to each one. Coincidentally, hydrogen vehicle refueling is a sadist’s dream.

[cbkeller]

It has good power/weight ratio in theory, esp. if you're burning it (c.f. space shuttle), but hard to store or transport it both densely and safely in a practical way -- i.e., unless you're comfortable dragging around cryogenic lH2 in your sports car

[mlindner]

The more you need to care about the weight of energy storage the more hydrogen is useful. For land vehicles hydrogen is basically completely pointless and for stationary storage it's truly pointless. Hydrogen makes some sense for aircraft but not for anything on land.

[naravara]

It is a bad battery (along certain dimensions). But there is serious doubt as to whether the world actually has enough Lithium and other rare earths to actually meet battery demand indefinitely, even assuming we get the supply chains and infrastructure to where the materials are infinitely recyclable.

[astrange]

Lithium is not a rare earth metal (neither is cobalt). There is actually quite a lot of it, but it's evenly distributed so needs a lot of demand to be worth extracting from seawater. On the other hand, if we got a lot of cheap lithium we could use it to improve everyone's mental health like those fluoride conspiracy theories.

Notably people think Tesla gets lithium from Bolivia because Elon made a joke about it once, but I think it actually comes from Australia.

[ryao]

Dr. Goodenough’s new battery design allows people to use either sodium or lithium. Given that the entire world has adopted his previous battery designs, I would not be surprised if sodium based batteries are next. Sodium is so incredibly prevalent in the earth’s crust that scarcity should not be a problem.

[eru]

Lithium would just get more expensive in that case, until other materials and techniques (including perhaps hydrogen storage) become more viable.