Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Sabine Hossenfelder" channel.

  1. Hydrogen as a fuel is being pushed by ignorant politicians. In my State, the State Government decided to run a trial of hydrogen powered cars in government departments. They purchased a fleet of hydrogen powered cars easily enough, at only about 30% more than gasoline powered cars would have cost them. Then they cast around for a contract supplier to supply the hydrogen. The most prominent gas company here, whose main business is supplying welding gases (acetylene, argon, etc) to industry and oxygen to hospitals, said "Yep. we can do it. So many dollars per kg of hydrogen." They then set up at their various depots machinery that produces hydrogen - a big diesel engine powers a generator, whose AC electric output is rectified and used to split water into hydrogen, and oxygen which they vent to atmosphere. It's hilarious - it would be a lot cheaper and emit a heck of a lot less CO2 to just have diesel engine cars. Why are they doing this? Because the stupid politicians expect the price of hydrogen to drop as time goes on. They expect that because they subsidised photovoltaic panels and now the panels are much cheaper - because local production stopped and they now come from China, which has both much lower labour costs and much lower electricity costs, from burning coal. They think some sort of magic will make the cost of hydrogen drop. They haven't realised that to get energy from combining hydrogen with oxygen, you first have to supply energy to separate it - and that energy must always be greater than what you get back, so the price can't drop.
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