[jerkstate]

Refueling time and storage equipment seems like major differences between hydrogen and battery. They both have slightly different use-cases that make different bets on future technology. Maybe one will win out or maybe both will play a role. I'm personally waiting for the Nucleon to come back.

[icebraining]

Refueling time (...) seems like major differences between hydrogen and battery.

Unless you do battery swapping, in which case they don't seem all that different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

[sdkjfwiluf]

and transportation. Hydrogen is a very inefficient way to transport electrons compared to wires.

[jerkstate]

I'm not an expert at any of this stuff and this math could very easily be wrong, but I just spent some time with Wolfram Alpha validating that claim. a 40,000 liter hydrogen truck can carry 425 gigajoules of liquid hydrogen; if it drives 500 miles, a diesel tractor trailer getting 5mpg would burn 100 gallons of diesel, that's 14 gigajoules of energy (now keep in mind that much hydrogen only weighs 3000kg - a typical load for a tractor trailer is 10000-20000kg) - if it was a fuel cell truck, it could be twice as efficient as an ICE so would only need 7 gigajoules. 7 gigajoules is 1.6% of the transported 425 gigajoules of energy. A state of the art HVDC transmission line loses 3.5% per 1000 km, so it seems like a hydrogen truck might actually be more efficient than wires.

[sdkjfwiluf]

what about locally-produced electricity ? If an electric car recharges on locally-produced electricity along its journey then we can eliminate transmission losses

[jerkstate]

There are hundreds of what-ifs that influence which will be a better choice, IMO it's not clear cut that one technology is better enough for all situations that it'll crowd the other one out of the marketplace entirely.

[sdkjfwiluf]

firstly, upvote for doing the calculations!

I wonder what happens when you factor-in maintenance, safety and production costs