this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Nope, that's bullshit. Biomass is only co2-neutral if it grows on its own and is used up on the spot.
So while I pay an amount X for electricity to load a battery you are wiliing to pay 5 times as much for eFuels just to support your strange political views? That's in some way commendable...
Even an open mind can't cheat thermodynamics
Go figure out a better path of electrification of the large 737 airplanes.
Go on. I'm waiting. Kerosene is 100% compatible with airliners.
100% renewable electricity is a pipedream. The "mouth" of that graph is bullshit. Today we're still using coal + natural gas for the majority of the grid.
You're also ignoring the gross amounts of pollution that EV Batteries emit during production. H2 and ICE are made of far simpler, and more efficient, materials. You'll need substantial numbers of batteries to power the world at night as well (IE: an impossible number as no battery technology can handle daytime-charge vs nighttime usage of the USA).
You can't cheat impossibility. The assumptions of that graph are already impossible and you know it.
EDIT: The real advantages to H2 are multiple fold:
Hydrogen is energy storage. You can store H2 for months in various forms. Solar does not have any energy storage and needs to be factored separately.
Clean Hydrogen is needed to clean up our food supply. As you might know, our food supply relies upon ammonia / fertilizer made from fossil fuels right now. This isn't necessary, H2 -> Ammonia is a well known and well proven path, and seems to be the only way to electrify our nitrogen-fertilizer production.
If we are already mass producing clean H2 (for #2), then #1 becomes cheap, and then we might as well use it for transportation as well to help spur investments and consolidate resources.
Why would I when we were talkiong about cars? Sure, you will need some synthetic fuel for air travel. But if you want to pay the same sums to power your car, when you could do it for a fraction of that cost that's still stupid.
No, you can actually build batteries from very simple materials that are far more efficient that fuel production and then burning it (both times with a huge loss). Just because the world focussed on lithium-ion batteries in the last decades (because of small portable devices where energy density was key) and thus used what was already widely available for cars in the beginning, rare materials for car batteries are not actually a requirement.
That also a big nope. In reality solar and wind can power the world through the day, wind can power the world through the night. The only storage needed for a day/night cycle is a small fraction fo the prodcution. Just enough to shift parts of the production peaks at the afternoon and in the middle of the night ~5 hours forward to the consumption peaks in the evening and early morning.
And don't let me even start with how cheap you can produce massive batteries if you don't care for energy density at all because no one gives a fuck if the warehouse-sized installation for your town or city district is 20% bigger and a few tons heavier. Quite the opposite actually... Li-ion batteries nowadays are incredible bad for such a task. We accept their bad thermal properties in our smartphones and laptops, in cars it's already a drawback that prompted the development of other materials that are already serial produced. For fixed storage they would basically be a unneccessary fire hazard.
The real drawback of H2 availability. You lose energy to produce it. You lose more energy when you consume it. You will never see cheap H2 as the production is just too inefficient, so there will only be demand in sectors that simply cannot be electrified (air transport, some industries) as well as in chemical production as a raw material and for long-term seasonal storage.
Again... if you want to compete with high-energy demanding industries for the gas to power your car, that's your decision. Everyone else will use batteries for less than a ¼ of the cost. If your ICE is worth it for you, go for it. But don't pretend that the world will collectively decide to use a mode of transportation needing 4-5 times as much energy just for laughs and giggles.
You're ignoring that energy will literally be free for significant parts of the USA as we overdeploy solar panels.
The most expensive part of solar is storage (aka: batteries), and H2 storage is near infinite, as a cheap steel container can contain more-and-more hydrogen (liquefied hydrogen, pressurized hydrogen, etc. etc. Doesn't matter, its just steel and concrete to hold it all).
Between the costs of near-$0 storage and literally free energy as we overproduce, H2 plays a role in being long-term seasonal storage of power. No other "battery" technology has anything close to the chance of storing enough energy for days, weeks, or months like H2 does.
This isn't even theoretical. California's grid is so chock-full of solar panels that there are times where the 1-hour market goes negative, as in the price of electricity drops below $0 (you get paid to use energy). Its already happening, there's not enough storage in practice and solar panels must be overdeployed for them to be anywhere close to effective. There will be questions about how to actually store (and use) all the extra solar panels as we move forward.
H2 plants are one of the best solutions I've heard of for addressing this phenomenon. Store H2 in the summer (where we get excess 15-hour days), and use the H2 later in the winter months when the daylight times drop to 9-hours... depending on latitude of course. But any solar-based grid will have to deal with the fundamental problem of seasonal variations in energy... having far excess (aka: $0 / free) energy in the summer, and not enough in the winter.
H2 naturally smooths out this curve. We can overproduce electricity, send it to H2 plants and store H2 with the excess energy.