Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,...
It’s not about free electricity though. It’s about efficiency
It’s not about cost
The facts are, with hydrogen, you waste at least 40% of the energy excluding transport due to inefficiencies and manufacture and fuel wastage . So you need to build a lot more solar panels. You also need clean water to do it
With electric, you waste less than 10%
We don’t have hydrogen planes yet, and it might not really be that feasible (there are a lot of considerations for planes. I’ve actually got a pilot licence).
With hydrogen, you need almost twice the solar panels to produce the same results
You also need to consider, battery technologies are still early days. If lithium at the moment supports 1000km of travel, later generation lithium air can support 12000km with the same space.
That’s why hydrogen has such limited applications too. Because even if you increase the density of lithium 2x, most applications where hydrogen benefits disappears
But in reality we’d probably shift from lithium anyway I’m guessing
Hydrogen still hugely better than gas though, and Trump is an idiot lol
Let’s start by agreeing Trump is an idiot and battery electric vehicle technology covers personal transportation. We need to move as completely as possible to renewable energy.
However
One possible choice to cover both storage and creation of renewable fuel for the cases where batteries do not scale, is hydrogen. We do need to overbuild renewables, because production is affected by the weather, plus we need to produce enough energy in part of a day to run everything for a full day. Production of hydrogen might let us productively convert that daylight (for solar) energy into nighttime energy, and might help other areas where batteries don’t scale. And it doesn’t have to be hydrogen directly: perhaps we need a liquid fuel that works at room temperature and green hydrogen can be a precursor to methane or some variation of synfuel. That can be stored or manipulated more regularly. A tank of green synfuel might be an effective storage for turning daylight energy into nighttime time energy. We already have an approved synthetic aviation fuel - using renewable energy to create that might be more efficient than the more difficult task of scaling batteries for aviation
While I completely agree on the limitations of green hydrogen as a primary fuel, I also see that there are many usages that neither renewable nor storage nor batteries can yet scale for. Hydrogen as a storage medium is no worse than those options