The equipment is mostly made out of steel or other cheap materials. You read about using fiberglass or HDPE for a lot of the components. Those aren’t expensive materials. Certainly, way cheaper than what batteries use. Transportation is via pipelines which is 10x cheaper than wires. The costs of infrastructure should be very cheap.
> Further solar panels and wind turbines got cheaper due to learning effects. These effects are not present for over half of the things involved in a hydrogen fuel system. Pumps and tanks and valves and pipes are already mass produced.
Solar panels and wind turbines are over a century old. Hell, wind power existed for millenia in form or another. But as it turns out, it still benefits from the learning effect. So you’re just spouting more of your anti-progress agenda here.
And with that, I'm leaving this conversation and letting anyone else reading to clearly see that pro-hydrogen zealots are alive and well, despite the astonishment of one of the top-level comments.
Heat recapture is great, but we care about electricity output.
> Finally, as the economics of hydrogen production scale up, we can expect cost to approach zero. That’s because it is very much like wind and solar: We’re using a basically free resource
It will never reach zero because the equipment, transportation, and people involved are not free.
Further solar panels and wind turbines got cheaper due to learning effects. These effects are not present for over half of the things involved in a hydrogen fuel system. Pumps and tanks and valves and pipes are already mass produced.
And while the sunlight might be free, the electricity from it is now, and never will be since the equipment isn’t free.