Re:Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked
by renesd on Friday November 25, 2016 @04:35PM
(#13040025)
For the German trains, luckily there is plenty of hydrogen that is a waste product of existing chemical industry in Germany. In many places there is extra power from wind, solar, and hydro which is wasted when production is too high. So the idea is to use this excess power for hydrogen production.
Additionally hydrogen can use the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
In times of high wind, there can be enough energy to power all of Europe/Japan in a few days. New types of turbines need to be put into production that can actually use this however. Current ones are shut down so they are not damaged. So far I'm only aware of prototypes, but it's being worked on.
the storage - you need very high pressure tanks to store them, and while this can be done, this is not cheap and easy
the inefficiency of creating and storing the hydrogen. When you compress a gas a lot of energy is lost by the heat produced by the compression.
So a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle will be 3x less efficient in electricity consumption than a battery electrical vehicle.