Sergey Brin’s airship aims to use world’s biggest mobile hydrogen fuel cell

Hydrogen fuel cells on a hydrogen blimp make a remarkably decent amount of sense.

I'm not sure if this is quite whats being implied, but I can definitely see loading up supplies, floating to a disaster area, dropping supplies, & spending a while acting as a power station as useful & sensible. This particular mission cycle involves dropping a bunch of cargo before starting to burn your float/power reserves, which makes consuming your float sound less crazy. Not sure how these things work, but alternatively, if it's fixed volume, you're not even consuming your float: you're trying to pull vacuum where you had gas. Not sure how do-able that is!

Hydrogen zeppelins could also works around one of the unfortunate down-sides of a potential hydrogen economy, which is that typically one has to (non-recoup-erably) pour a bunch of energy into making the hydrogen one is generating transportable/compressed: here there's a balloon one can fill effortlessly. Attach a hose & open a hatch in the bottom.

The article talks about the current fuel cell systems only being 250kW (equal to ~336 HP). For reference, the Hindenberg (unforunate reference point but whatever) used 4 x 890 kW (1200 HP) diesel engines. It does make me think an airship would be absolutely drinking the heck out of it's own float to move, but hopefully the cruise demands are much much lower. Ah, ok: this page[1] alleges the cruise power was 610 kW / 820 HP. Could be worse!

[1] https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/flight-operations-proced...