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Comment by DoesntMatter22 | Hacker News Reader

There is no world where hydrogen would ever work for cars.

It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity.

Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame.

Or, you just use electricity.

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You are repeating pure FUD. This is pretty much what BEV companies want people to believe so that they never consider any alternatives.

In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually.

And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.

Car makers like BEVs because (a) no new infrastructure other than electricity which is available almost anywhere already and (b) none of that energy lost to compression or fancy cryogenic compression tanks to keep the hydrogen in the car or at the gas station. Lastly, most people don't want to go from $5/gallon gas to $10/gallon hydrogen.

Car makers are just following the subsidies and the hype. It is not even a sustainable idea and it will eventually die.

Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.

> Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.

How is that different from charging a battery at a super charger? Because it can be delivered via more expensive pipeline or trucks rather than cheaper wires? Heck, it doesn't even store well, you need to keep those tanks cold so the hydrogen stays compressed, you are going to be using more electricity for that.

Because you can't always have electricity available at super chargers. How do you power your car if the wind is not blowing and it is not daytime? You will need energy storage, something hydrogen provides in spades. That ensures hydrogen will be needed and be very cheap since it is made from wind, solar and water alone.

A pipeline is cheaper than a wire at moving energy around. About 10x cheaper in fact. This is just another example of BEV FUD. BEV companies just make shit up to demonization the competition, and often times the exact opposite is true.

I’d love to see a peer reviewed paper or even a report on a project that’s already been built showing that a hydrogen pipeline is cheaper to run per kWh final electricity, much less 10x cheaper.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422...

Hydrogen is absolutely NOT safer than gasoline. This is a ridiculous claim. For starters, it’s an explosive gas rather than a flammable liquid.

It is much lighter than air. Any hydrogen leaks will float away a lot faster than gasoline.

This is not even wrong.

On the other hand, it burns almost invisible.

The hydrogen cells in production and used in motorsport are literally bulletproof. The type of accident that results in your tank exploding would have to be so severe you would be dead before the gas had time to ignite.

Whether the tank is bulletproof is irrelevant.

Again, whether or not your dead doesn’t change the fact that the tank will explode, not just burn.

The system as a whole is not leak-proof. All you need is a leak in a contained area, like a garage.

Since I can’t edit my last comment, here’s the newest disaster in the news[0]. No need to go through the tank walls when there’s another weaker link.

[0]: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/exclusive-hydrogen...

You are an account that is a couple hours old and has only talked about how bad electric is and how good hydrogen is.

My account is older than yours...

Not in terms of posting it isnt

It's time to stop digging...

It's bad form to accuse people of being shills on here, but you do seem rather... well, religious about hydrogen tech at the consumer level, including making some downright-silly arguments. Either you're being paid or you really do see a serious technical injustice in the trend toward BEV adoption.

In the latter case I sympathize; I feel the same about the failure of swappable-battery tech, which would have given us the best of both worlds. Charge at the point of generation or at least at a point of efficient distribution, deploy instantly at the point of use.

And either way, I envy your ability to generate an enormous quantity of posts without getting rate-limited.

He literally thinks I’m a new account, which is wrong.

And FYI, the anti-hydrogen argument is a generic anti-green, anti—progress viewpoint. It is easily described as outright Ludditism. It’s pretty obvious the critics are totally wrong, and likely just Tesla fanboys or investors.

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