I used to think gas vehicles and power plants would be a good stop gap on the way to hydrogen, nut now I think in practice there is too much leakage.
I thought servos could be converted to gas, with all the tanks, pipes, etc ready for hydrogen. Unfortunately, hydrogen, even green hydrogen is very inefficient for vehicles...Transcript: The Big Switch with Saul Griffith
Recorded live on 24/02/2022
Please note this transcript is automated
hydrogen at scale is green hydrogen and green hydrogen starts with electricity anyway. So if we're
going to drive an electric car, for example, we start with one unit of electricity gets stored in the
battery you lose a couple of cent goes into the motor, it loses about five percent. And so, you know,
85 90 per cent of that one unit of electricity drives the car. If you go take that electricity and you
make hydrogen, you lose 25 per cent or more. Most likely more generating the hydrogen through
electrolysis. Then you lose another 10 to 15 per cent when you compress the hydrogen down so that
it has enough energy density to be stored in the car. Then you either have to burn it in the car
engine or run it through a fuel cell, which is going to lose another 50 per cent of the energy. All told,
that means, you know, you're going to get 30 or 40 per cent of that original electricity out, not 90
per cent as you do with the electric car that before you even consider the cost of the tank, the fuel
cell, the compressors, the electrolysis means that the cost of driving that vehicle will be two to three
times the cost of driving an electric vehicle. So you sort of fail on a technical argument, you fail on an
economic argument. Now you could go through the other uses. What about for heat? What about
for various things? And most of them end up with a like? It's a thermodynamic story that looks that
bad or worse, which then you might say, Well, what might we use it for? Absolutely. We need it for
agriculture for in the form of ammonia. That's about one per cent of the world's energy today.
Maybe we need it for steel. That's another half of one per cent of the world's energy today. So you
start to see that it's looking like a two to five per cent component of the future, not a 50 per cent
component. And that has an enormous impact on how you would allocate precious resources in
addressing climate risks....
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