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Re:Toyota announces sustainable vehicle ecosystem [video] by gambiting on Friday June 07, 2019 @06:25AM (#20123169)
1) There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth. We currently get it mostly as a byproduct of....fossil fuel production. The other option is to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, but obviously this takes more energy than the resulting hydrogen could ever produce. Makes you think why don't we just use this energy to recharge batteries instead of making hydrogen with huge inefficiencies. It only makes sense if you have nearly free energy that you can dump into the process and don't care about loses.

2) Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in existence - meaning that it escapes through any container you put it in. A 70kg pure lead bottle only holds about 1L of hydrogen, and all of it will evaporate within couple months naturally. And as it does so, it makes the metal brittle. So "producing loads of hydrogen for storage" is not a great idea either.

Re:Toyota announces sustainable vehicle ecosystem [video] by maccard on Friday June 07, 2019 @07:03AM (#20123341)
> It only makes sense if you have nearly free energy that you can dump into the process and don't care about loses.

That's kind of the case in a few different places though - e.g. Solar is "free" and the losses don't really matter in many places.

Re:Toyota announces sustainable vehicle ecosystem [video] by taneq on Friday June 07, 2019 @09:12AM (#20124149)
Sure, but for a given amount of "free" solar you can drive a pure BEV 2-4 times as far as you can drive a fuel cell car, and the BEV will also be a better car. If you have infinite free electricity then hydrogen is potentially viable but since we discovered LiIon it's always inferior to batteries.