Fuel cells have the potential to help overcome the challenges associated with Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), namely a dependency on limited natural resources, electric grid capacity, battery charging time and vehicle range. Fuel cells can also be as cheap to manufacture as internal combustion engines and can be produced using recycled and recyclable materials.
Reminder that fuel cells are less dependent on resources than batteries, can be about as cheap as ICEs to make, and can be made out of recycled materials.
Natural gas leakage is a significant and poorly measured issue on its own. Hydrogen distribution will exacerbate these problems and fossil fuel companies will use it to try to push more gas connections to people rather than renewables.
That’s pretty cool then! I don’t think anything other than electric is going to match the torque those big diesels crank out, but if it’s better than NG, that’s a realistic fuel source for something needing to tackle steep mountain roads. Supposedly, the NG engines can just barely handle that kind of driving, only with horrible fuel usage.
With hydrogen, assuming the infrastructure gets handled, the fuel usage isn’t as big a concern, afaik.
Mind you, I’m coming at this second and third hand; I don’t drive the things, just have family that do. But that’s been the big objection any of them have raised, that they didn’t think the alternate fuels would be able to get the job done outside of flat ground.
Hydrogen is energy storage, not energy creation. So this "breakthrough" is just storing nuclear energy into hydrogen. No mention of the hazards of nuclear power here, or it's highly toxic waste products that last tens of thousands of years. Expensive concentrated energy production is not the answer. It just keeps the power in the hands of a few wealthy corporations, and relies on protecting a fragile extended grid. Instead, the solution is low-cost distributed power sources. Then store it in hydrogen if that is practical.
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