Anyone can work out the math and show how hydrogen is less efficient than battery storage. That applies not only to vehicles, but grid storage too. So… Game over for hydrogen, right? It’s a non-starter.
Well, here’s an analogy to consider: Raising livestock for meat is severely inefficient in comparison with raising food crops and eating them ourselves. If you give that food to your cows or your chickens or your pigs instead, only a small percentage of those calories and nutrients ever make it back to your table in the form of meat (or dairy, for that matter). So, game over for meat and milk, right? It’s a non-starter.
And yet, for thousands of years people have persisted in raising livestock for meat, some of them in societies and times where food was not plentiful. Why did they do that? Were they “mind-bogglingly stupid?”
No, they were not. There are two very good reasons for raising livestock for food. For one, it lets you convert low quality food sources that would not be considered fit for human consumption. Your sheep and cows can graze on grass. Your chickens can eat wild seeds and bugs. You can feed all kinds of scraps and, basically, garbage to your pigs. Who cares if it’s inefficient? You probably want to get rid of as much of that garbage as you can. Dairy has also been a real life saver at times, when no real food-as-such was available, but there was still grass for the milk cow to graze on.
For another thing, keeping livestock lets you store food on the hoof. If you don’t have refrigeration, and storing food is a challenge, you can feed some of the harvest surplus to your pigs and fatten them up. Next winter, there is bacon!
So, think of hydrogen as an electrical power pig. It’s not the most efficient way to store energy, but if you can use it to store energy that otherwise would have been wasted, and you can recover some portion of that energy at a time-and-place where it’s needed, then the losses and inefficiency may not matter at all.
Our food system also offers a warning. In today’s industrialized world meat and dairy are not produced from low-grade fodder. It’s not cows grazing in an open pasture, or pigs eating the scraps and expired leftovers. It’s livestock kept in huge, filthy, factory-like compounds and stuffed with corn, antibiotics and hormones. This system has been very successful in terms of producing vast quantities of meat and dairy at very low monetary cost, but the cost to our health and environment has become very high. In retrospect, this system has been a big mistake of our society.
Could the world ever convert to a “hydrogen economy” as the policy wonks touted in the 1990s (and Japan still seems dedicated to even now)? Sure… It’s technically possible. With enough determination and commitment, we could have made that vision work, but I think it would have been another big mistake. The resulting system would be super expensive to build out, expensive to maintain, fundamentally wasteful of energy, and hydrogen leakage into the environment would need to be tightly controlled. (BTW, the natural gas industry are only now beginning to add up—with some horror—how much methane they routinely leak into the atmosphere.)
We don’t have to all go vegan. Meat and milk are great, as long as they are kept in the niche where they make sense. Hydrogen energy storage will probably find some niche where it makes sense too. It’s not going to be everything, everywhere.
Well, here’s an analogy to consider: Raising livestock for meat is severely inefficient in comparison with raising food crops and eating them ourselves. If you give that food to your cows or your chickens or your pigs instead, only a small percentage of those calories and nutrients ever make it back to your table in the form of meat (or dairy, for that matter). So, game over for meat and milk, right? It’s a non-starter.
And yet, for thousands of years people have persisted in raising livestock for meat, some of them in societies and times where food was not plentiful. Why did they do that? Were they “mind-bogglingly stupid?”
No, they were not. There are two very good reasons for raising livestock for food. For one, it lets you convert low quality food sources that would not be considered fit for human consumption. Your sheep and cows can graze on grass. Your chickens can eat wild seeds and bugs. You can feed all kinds of scraps and, basically, garbage to your pigs. Who cares if it’s inefficient? You probably want to get rid of as much of that garbage as you can. Dairy has also been a real life saver at times, when no real food-as-such was available, but there was still grass for the milk cow to graze on.
For another thing, keeping livestock lets you store food on the hoof. If you don’t have refrigeration, and storing food is a challenge, you can feed some of the harvest surplus to your pigs and fatten them up. Next winter, there is bacon!
So, think of hydrogen as an electrical power pig. It’s not the most efficient way to store energy, but if you can use it to store energy that otherwise would have been wasted, and you can recover some portion of that energy at a time-and-place where it’s needed, then the losses and inefficiency may not matter at all.
Our food system also offers a warning. In today’s industrialized world meat and dairy are not produced from low-grade fodder. It’s not cows grazing in an open pasture, or pigs eating the scraps and expired leftovers. It’s livestock kept in huge, filthy, factory-like compounds and stuffed with corn, antibiotics and hormones. This system has been very successful in terms of producing vast quantities of meat and dairy at very low monetary cost, but the cost to our health and environment has become very high. In retrospect, this system has been a big mistake of our society.
Could the world ever convert to a “hydrogen economy” as the policy wonks touted in the 1990s (and Japan still seems dedicated to even now)? Sure… It’s technically possible. With enough determination and commitment, we could have made that vision work, but I think it would have been another big mistake. The resulting system would be super expensive to build out, expensive to maintain, fundamentally wasteful of energy, and hydrogen leakage into the environment would need to be tightly controlled. (BTW, the natural gas industry are only now beginning to add up—with some horror—how much methane they routinely leak into the atmosphere.)
We don’t have to all go vegan. Meat and milk are great, as long as they are kept in the niche where they make sense. Hydrogen energy storage will probably find some niche where it makes sense too. It’s not going to be everything, everywhere.
