this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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There are zero sources of green hydrogen in the foreseeable future and railways can be electrified. Small runs that aren't electrified can use batteries. There is a zero use case for a leaky fuel that we source from creating CO2 like hydrogen. The idea of using wastefully using electrolysis to something we can deliver power directly to is ludicrous.
Edit: I can think of ONE use case, and that's maybe logging locomotives that will never be electrified.
As we move into green energy we're going to have an excess of power at times that we don't need it, and there's going to be many use cases where stuff like electrolysis, even though it's wasteful, is ultimately well worth it because power will be cheap to free during those times of day.
Not in my lifetime, that's for sure. We currently supply nearly all agricultural hydrogen from oil cracking, for example. There may be a future where wastefully using hydrogen makes sense, but it's not anytime soon. An actual solution is electrifying the train lines.
California literally already has the problem of excess energy on occasion, and it's only going to get worse and worse as time passes until we create some sort of magical low cost energy storage solution.
Hydrogen is created from fracking now because we live in a fossil fuel world right now, but eventually as we're forced to move away from it you're going to have to have high energy density systems, and hydrogen is one of the few fairly reliable ways to do that.
If hydrogen ever becomes a real thing, maybe for using green energy in remote areas where electric isn’t feasible or economical, maybe the cost to waste some peak solar/wind to generate hydrogen via electrolysis will somehow make sense cost-wise.
Electrolysis is wasteful, but so are internal combustion engines.
That's not what folks should seriously be comparing this to. You can run electric wires directly over the damn rail and feed a train off the grid. That's where money should've be going everywhere 20 years ago. Running a train off of a diesel electric generator is dumb too frankly.