Frederick Bott
3 min readJun 22, 2023

--

Your link to the information used as reference for this assertion is from a battery manufacturer rep, of course they will never present a positive case for hydrogen vs batteries.
The power to weight ratio of a non liquid hydrogen system is heavily dependent on how much hydrogen can be pumped into the tank. A lower quality tank might only be good for 1000 psi or less, whereas top quality tanks can be good for 7000 psi or more. This energy storage capability is nonlinear, so not easy to map energy capacity to tank storage pressure, it is an area ripe for painting an unrealistically good or unrealistically bad picture, depending on whether we are trying sell or trash the case for or against hydrogen. As always it is made even more complicated by the profit interests of both sides.
But the single unarguable case for hydrogen is that it is the most obvious fuel which functionally replaces fossil fuels with none of the pollution in its consumption, and none of the cost to Earth of its production, since it can be created direct from solar energy, for which nothing was asked in return by the sun, only that we do something with it other than create the heat it might have generated if we didn't use it. From that point of view nothing can touch hydrogen. Add to that the advantages of using it include natural cleaning and circulation of both water and air, and that hydrogen even converts onwards to human consumable fuel (Food! see "Solein"), and it's a no brainer for adoption in a 100% solar powered scenario, since this also will end with a different kind of economy, as I've tried to show, no longer involving profit, our resistance to moving to this is our addiction to living from capital, which is actually stored energy. In terms of energy handling, if we compared humanity with an engine, or even a body, likening the flow of money to the flow of energy, since money is energy per token, it would look like this body or engine is completely blocked by clumps of fat, with very little flow of energy getting to flow through the engine, most components, all of which could potentially add value, are actually starved of the energy flow they / we all need to function to our full capacity of adding value, by adding to the creation processes of Earth, which in essence is just anything that puts the energy of the sun to use other than the heat it would result in, if we didn't use it.
In that scenario, the more flying, driving, actually the more human activity we could do, would all be things adding to creation, this maximising the temperature reduction and cleaning processes we would be doing. In other words our activity would have alomos directly the opposite effects than those done on energy extracted from Earth.
I know this maybe looks like this redirects attention away from the specific comparison of batteries with hydrogen, but actually all of these life impacting / enhancing characteristics of each need to be taken into account, when looking at things like how much power to weight ratio we can squeeze from hydrogen.
Long and short of it is that we will make hydrogen do whatever we want it to do, if we want it bad enough, including pushing the power to weight of it way beyond what we ever achieved of fossil fuels, because in essence, nothing fundamentally limits it, absolutely nothing, which we cannot overcome technically. We have to know all the systemic benefits to want to use it bad enough, if you know what I mean.

--

--

Frederick Bott
Frederick Bott

No responses yet