Father; husband; mechanical engineer. Posting from my self-hosted Lemmy instance here in beautiful New Jersey. I also post from my Pixelfed instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Okay, but this application only requires 1.9MWh on board. That would be about 57kg of hydrogen. The required capacity would actually be less since the hydrogen refuel time should be significantly less than recharging a battery. Anyway, I just doubt very much that 11,900kg storage vessels and fuel cell would be required. There’s simply less dead weight in a hydrogen vehicle as well as better performance and less externalities associated with battery production and disposal/recycling.

    As for the efficiency of hydrogen production and delivery, it shouldn’t matter. We need to produce it anyway for emissions free steel and fertilizer production. The real problem is that we don’t have enough emissions free energy production, which isn’t one that battery vehicles or storage facilities solve. The current paradigm is one of deficit in order to create a market and I think battery storage unfortunately facilitates that. Instead, we need to build out capacity so that there’s almost always a surplus of electricity with the extra getting diverted to hydrogen production. It should be rare that the process is reversed to turn hydrogen back into electricity for the grid. That hydrogen is currently too expensive is the result of bad policy, which BEVs just reinforce.






















  • That’s because we’ve been stuck with an irrational mode of production that requires too many people and goods to get far places quickly while burning lots of fossil fuel. A more logical system would only have people traveling by jet and helicopter on an emergency basis. People traveling on vacation or non-emergency business should be able to slowly cruise in relative comfort on battery and solar power. Airship ports can be built along the paths of the atmospheric streams and then rail can be used for the next leg of travelers’ journeys.

    As far as capacity goes that’s just a matter of building bigger airships and using relatively cheap hydrogen instead of helium as the lifting gas.