• ephemeral_gibbon@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there’s an excess of energy

        • ephemeral_gibbon@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn’t just go to waste.

          We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. “this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen”, even though that’d be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).

          As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that’s not going to flip.

          However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they’d be replaced by rail, but that’s not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.