Batteries would like a word. They’re already storing solar power, getting cheaper, and improving at a pace nuclear construction schedules can only dream of. For longer gaps, pumped hydro and thermal storage can pitch in. Turns out the answer isn’t one magical box, but a bunch of technologies that actually exist.
From what I know, for large scale solar farms, batteries arent there yet. The maintainance and replacement costs cut into the money saved by using solar by quite a lot.
From what I know there are many many many such projects in the permit phase in Germany, all of them run on capitalist interest without state funding. The only thing between now and them getting build is our government which seems to prefer a 180° turn into the fossil age.
Not enough to reduce the benefits to zero and that’s all we need. As improvements come in you can upgrade the batteries over time and get better and better margins. But the system is already good enough for deployment.
It’s not as easy as just replacing the batteries though, each battery needs its own infrastructure and from what I extrapolate it’s not very easy to just swap out.
Batteries for grid storage also don’t need to be compact or lightweight. High voltage infrastructure already has a lot of space where fossil fuel power plants used to be in formerly heavily industrialised places in Europe, we can make batteries the size of villages and not care about land use…
For long term storage most countries will need more than pumping hydro. But green hydrogen can be produced from wind and solar to use in times of need in claasic power plants adapted for hydrogen. This technology also exists. But it is very inefficient, so should and will he used only as a backup.
Difficult? Yes. But it’s a solved engineering problem. There are chemical industries that need hydrogen. It is being transported and stored for decades. There are even small pipelines in operation for a long time by now.
Which is stupid and insanely expensive, since methane itself is an insanely potent greenhouse gas and methane has plenty of fugitive emissions.but, back up a second: isn’t the main reason for banking so much methane in the winter… heating? Because we can easily 10x the efficiency and 100x the cost - efficiency, by skipping the hydrogen - methane crap and storing heat directly.
See, you can store heat trivially in insulated thermal mass. “Thermal mass” is basically just mass, I.e. dirt-cheap materials such as rocks or dirt. You can skip a whole raft of fluid-handling stuff (methane and hydrogen being fluids, and fluids requiring pipes, pumps, leakage handling, inspections etc) by just using electricity from summer solar to resistively heat a 20m-diameter cylinder full of rocks wrapped in 1m of insulation, and when you need heat in winter you can just run air through the vents to extract that heat. It’s based on 1950s technology (probably older tbh) and most of the materials are literally dirt-cheap. Hook it up to district heating and you have an effectively infinite battery to handle your winter heating needs, based on informed summer renewables costs. Sand, insulation, a big cylinder (probably the most expensive part), resistive heating, an air vent. None of it is expensive (except the land, but those 300sqm can be located underground if it helps) and it’ll last for a century because there’s nothing that can even break.
It’s basically just a bunch of sand wrapped in an electric blanket (and an actual blanket). It’s dead simple.
Compare all that to a hydrogen electrolyser on a river, with a chemical plant to transform the hydrogen into methane (with carbon from where, exactly?) then a pipe or tanker or truck to transfer the methane to a big methane storage cavern, which is then piped to an individual furnace to burn. That’s a Rube Goldberg machine.
Yep, it won’t replace batteries - it only solves part of the winter problem. But it solves that part very efficiently, and winter heating is a big part (at least, toward the poles it is).
I like to say that we need a series of half-solutions, instead of trying to create a perfect solution for everything all at once.
Depends on the size of the Thermos. The volume scales by the cube while surface-area (I.e. insulation) scales by square, which means it’s exponentially more efficient the larger it is.
Water (or coffee) might be more energy-dense (thanks to its phase-change to steam) which would make the coffee theoretically more efficient (although you’d ruin the coffee when you boil it) but handling fluids like boiled water is expensive (even just the pressure - water expands 1600x when boiling, that’s why steam engines work) where 500°C sand just isn’t. So the cost massively favours sand/rocks.
Because hydrogen-ready power plants are not the same as natural gas power plants, as hydrogen gas is not a drop-in replacement for natural gas. And right now, when natural gas is still relatively cheap and renewable energy is not yet absolutely dominating the energy mix, politicians are fearing the cost of building the infrastructure for generating, transporting, storing and burning hydrogen gas.
In the future, hydrogen gas plants promise to be the best fit to pair renewable energy with, but right now the cost of it and the availability of fossil fuels do not force the hand of the people responsible for planning the future of the energy grid.
In the distant future, I see purely renewables backed by hydrogen, and nothing else. But not in our lifetime. Over produce with renewables everywhere, and store the excess by using it to produce hydrogen, then store the hydrogen to power anything when renewables isn’t viable. The development and build out of renewables has started, but it’ll be a long time time will over produce, and the build out and development of hydrogen hasn’t really started yet.
Of cause it has started. Germany has plans of what is to be its hydrogen backbone. Electricity is set to be about 80 % renewables in 2030. So slowly starting to build up the hydrogen infrastructure starts now.
No, it’s different with hydrogen. If you want green hydrogen, you’ll waste at least 50% of energy. Then there are storage and flammability etc. We have everything we need for using hydrogen today, but somehow it is not used besides minor experiments.
Yeah, but does energy waste matter if the other option is that you turn wind or solar input off? It should not run during high peak, of course, but if there is more energy in the grid than it uses? Turn it into hydrogen.
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage.
True, if we have huge surplus of renewables, then the cost doesn’t matter that much.
As per storage. Nuclear is far less problematic to handle in many aspects. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to store and if we go at scale, there would be massive amounts of hydrogen stored everywhere. A tiny spark away of a huge bomb.
Solar was rapidly getting cheaper, hydrogen isn’t. Sooner or later, batteries will be more energy-dense than hydrogen - I don’t think you understand just how dogshit hydrogen truly is.
Hydrogen is, IIRC, ~30% efficient roundtrip (multiply the efficiency of the electrolyser (70%?) with the efficiency of the fuel cell (50%?)), where batteries are 90%. And batteries are waaay cheaper per cycle. That’s why BEVs are selling like hotcakes whereas surplus hydrogen cars from failed hydrogen car initiatives can’t be sold (that’s not entirely true - they’re being bought up and converted into BEVs).
So batteries are cheaper, their power source is cheaper (because they’re ~3x the efficiency of hydrogen - and BTW that basically won’t change due to thermodynamics, hydrogen is just fundamentally rather inefficient), and you need a ridiculously absurdly expensive pressurized pumping system just to refill your hydrogen tank (which BTW has huge problems of its own because when you pump hydrogen into an empty tank it expands, and when hydrogen or helium expands it heats up, which then needs cooling which takes a bunch of power and engineering work), what’s the advantage of hydrogen?
Well theoretically hydrogen is more energy-dense. Except there are two types of “energy density” (the term is often used loosely/wrong) - there’s power per weight (specific energy), and there’s power per volume (energy density). And hydrogen is literally the least dense substance in the universe, that’s why we filled airships with it, and it’s why we need pressurised tanks in hydrogen cars. Pressurizing the tanks helps, but not by much. It still sucks unless you’re using it as rocket fuel (which cares a lot about weight, not so much for volume)
So, hydrogen needs pressurized tanks. Pressurised tanks weigh a lot, and they weigh more the smaller the tank! (the weight overhead follows the cube-square law). And car fuel tanks are much smaller than rockets.
What’s worse is that unlike fuel tanks, hydrogen tanks need to be cylindrical (or theoretically spherical) to efficiently contain the pressure. Which means they’re a pain in the ass to fit onto a car, because they can’t be flat. They’re in practice way worse than batteries, volumetrically, because batteries can be low and flat on the bottom of the car, in the middle between the axles for a nice clean centre of gravity. You can sort of flatten the hydrogen tank by having two cylinders side by side, but that’s inefficient and adds a ton of weight, which undercuts the point of using hydrogen in the first place.
Hydrogen refills quickly… But so do batteries nowadays. And of course if you really care them you can just make batteries swappable (check out Janus trucks, they have swappable batteries that take less than 5 minutes to swap with a forklift, and they’re actually commercially used in the real world on public roads, unlike hydrogen trucks).
By the way, you know how BEVs can literally be charged with a $20 power cord plugged into a standard wall outlet? Guess how much a hydrogen refuelling station costs (keep in mind the entire thing has to be pressurised). Are you ready?
$3million.
LOL
(Even a DC fast-charger is sub-$100k (might be closer to $10k I forget)
All that to pay more than petrol costs (even post-Hormuz, hydrogen is still 10x more expensive IIRC). But still, if you ignore the practical range limitations, you still have more range than a BEV though right?
Yes, you do. I forget the numbers but it’s not that much better (like 20% or 30% maybe?) and absolutely not worth almost literally everything else being worse than batteries.
But I forgot the worst part of hydrogen: it can’t be produced by unfirmed solar panels. It’s not a flexible chemical process, so realistically you need batteries to firm the solar panels while they electrolyze. Chuck that onto the giant “technical breakthroughs required to make hydrogen fuel a thing” pile, I suppose.
We’ll still need green hydrogen as a chemical input, it just doesn’t make sense as a fuel.
Seriously, why adopt the world’s most explosively flammable gas that’s also a chemical Houdini when you could just… Not handle fluid transfers in the first place and just transfer electricity normally, with a wire?
Why would anyone consider mass-adopting a 30%-efficient battery?
Hydrogen electrolysis currently requires an iridium catalyst for practical long-term durable efficient electrolysis, and might always require one. Iridium is stupidly expensive and a major reason why hydrogen can’t currently scale. Chuck it onto the “technical breakthroughs required” pile, I suppose.
I do think hydrogen-based energy has a future, funnily enough - I have high hopes for the TABQ “proton batteries” (AKA hydrogen-ion, which is like lithium-ion but a positive hydrogen ion is literally just a proton. It should be theoretically more efficient - hydrogen is lighter than lithium, after all). It’s a cool tech, if very new, and I hope it succeeds. It’s just a normal battery, one made from an organic molecule (TABQ) with no need for rare materials.
I used to be on the hydrogen hype train myself, but it took me an embarassingly long while to realise that hydrogen was motivated by hype and wrong thinking more than any technical merit. Especially said thinking by chemical and car companies. Hydrogen is a fuel, like hydrocarbons, and if you can’t imagine a world without fuel - a world where you don’t take your car to the fuel station and fill it up - then hydrogen is the only alternative. BEVs charge slower because they don’t need to charge quickly at home - in other words, they’re different and we have to think of them differently. Hydrogen is in basically every way the type of round-peg square-hole thinking that’s preventing adaptation to climate change; it’s this absolute turd that people are nonetheless actually considering adopting.
Seriously, why would you want to reinvent fuels? To paraphrase Technology Connections, the problem with fuel is that you have to literally light it on fire and replace it every time you use it. CATL’s latest Sodium-ion batteries claim a cycle-life of 15000 cycles, whereas hydrogen fuel has a cycle life of 1. Battery cycle life is only getting better, hydrogen will always be single-use, just like diesel.
We have commercially-viable battery-electric planes (namely the Heart X1, a 30-seat regional airliner - not just a wimpy Cessna replacement, although we have an electric Cessna knockoff too) before we have commercially viable hydrogen planes. Because batteries let airlines save money on fuel. If there’s one place where hydrogen’s better energy-weight ratio should dominate, it’s aerospace, but hydrogen has nothing.
I guess what I’m saying is: if you were wrong and hydrogen is indeed a pipedream, what would look different to our current situation?
Hydrogen EVs are not the topic, that might only make sense to replace diesel locomotives, if that. I am talking about standard store and use instead of coal or gas powerplants.
For one you need special alloys to store hydrogen, to avoid corrosion.
And solar and wind alno have not the same security problems of hydrogen, I am sure you understand that a tank of hydrogen that for some incident detonate is pretty bad (to use an euphemism)
Now we just need a cheap sustainable storage medium for all that solar power and were golden. Anyone?
Batteries would like a word. They’re already storing solar power, getting cheaper, and improving at a pace nuclear construction schedules can only dream of. For longer gaps, pumped hydro and thermal storage can pitch in. Turns out the answer isn’t one magical box, but a bunch of technologies that actually exist.
From what I know, for large scale solar farms, batteries arent there yet. The maintainance and replacement costs cut into the money saved by using solar by quite a lot.
That’s outdated information, solar + batteries already reached parity in cost with nuclear and continue to get cheaper
Could you please point me to a place which talks about this new kind of system? Id like to read up on it.
From what I know there are many many many such projects in the permit phase in Germany, all of them run on capitalist interest without state funding. The only thing between now and them getting build is our government which seems to prefer a 180° turn into the fossil age.
One thing is to build them, another thing is if once built they deliver
Not enough to reduce the benefits to zero and that’s all we need. As improvements come in you can upgrade the batteries over time and get better and better margins. But the system is already good enough for deployment.
It’s not as easy as just replacing the batteries though, each battery needs its own infrastructure and from what I extrapolate it’s not very easy to just swap out.
Batteries for grid storage also don’t need to be compact or lightweight. High voltage infrastructure already has a lot of space where fossil fuel power plants used to be in formerly heavily industrialised places in Europe, we can make batteries the size of villages and not care about land use…
For long term storage most countries will need more than pumping hydro. But green hydrogen can be produced from wind and solar to use in times of need in claasic power plants adapted for hydrogen. This technology also exists. But it is very inefficient, so should and will he used only as a backup.
Hydrogen is also a huge pain to store. It’s really hard to keep it from leaking.
Difficult? Yes. But it’s a solved engineering problem. There are chemical industries that need hydrogen. It is being transported and stored for decades. There are even small pipelines in operation for a long time by now.
But it can be stored as Methane in exactly those containers that many countries already have at a large scale for their winters.
Which is stupid and insanely expensive, since methane itself is an insanely potent greenhouse gas and methane has plenty of fugitive emissions.but, back up a second: isn’t the main reason for banking so much methane in the winter… heating? Because we can easily 10x the efficiency and 100x the cost - efficiency, by skipping the hydrogen - methane crap and storing heat directly.
See, you can store heat trivially in insulated thermal mass. “Thermal mass” is basically just mass, I.e. dirt-cheap materials such as rocks or dirt. You can skip a whole raft of fluid-handling stuff (methane and hydrogen being fluids, and fluids requiring pipes, pumps, leakage handling, inspections etc) by just using electricity from summer solar to resistively heat a 20m-diameter cylinder full of rocks wrapped in 1m of insulation, and when you need heat in winter you can just run air through the vents to extract that heat. It’s based on 1950s technology (probably older tbh) and most of the materials are literally dirt-cheap. Hook it up to district heating and you have an effectively infinite battery to handle your winter heating needs, based on informed summer renewables costs. Sand, insulation, a big cylinder (probably the most expensive part), resistive heating, an air vent. None of it is expensive (except the land, but those 300sqm can be located underground if it helps) and it’ll last for a century because there’s nothing that can even break.
It’s basically just a bunch of sand wrapped in an electric blanket (and an actual blanket). It’s dead simple.
Compare all that to a hydrogen electrolyser on a river, with a chemical plant to transform the hydrogen into methane (with carbon from where, exactly?) then a pipe or tanker or truck to transfer the methane to a big methane storage cavern, which is then piped to an individual furnace to burn. That’s a Rube Goldberg machine.
Sounds great. Let’s do that. We’ll need electricity in winter too, though.
Yep, it won’t replace batteries - it only solves part of the winter problem. But it solves that part very efficiently, and winter heating is a big part (at least, toward the poles it is).
I like to say that we need a series of half-solutions, instead of trying to create a perfect solution for everything all at once.
Is that more or less efficient than filling a giant thermos with coffee?
Depends on the size of the Thermos. The volume scales by the cube while surface-area (I.e. insulation) scales by square, which means it’s exponentially more efficient the larger it is.
Water (or coffee) might be more energy-dense (thanks to its phase-change to steam) which would make the coffee theoretically more efficient (although you’d ruin the coffee when you boil it) but handling fluids like boiled water is expensive (even just the pressure - water expands 1600x when boiling, that’s why steam engines work) where 500°C sand just isn’t. So the cost massively favours sand/rocks.
Gravity batteries in abandoned mineshafts. Put a bunch of rocks in an elevator and use them to spin a generator as they fall.
That’s an argument from 2017. Today the Technologies are there, and we can build it on scale. Battery for short term, green gas for the longer term.
It doesn’t really matter what we have if it’s not commercially viable, or we are missing something from the supply chain.
It is commercially viable
Adding to the other answer, for longer lulls in energy generation, the power can be used to create hydrogen gas that can be burnt in gas plants.
So, why isn’t everybody building hydrogen burning generators?
Right, because hydrogen is not working. It’s expensive to produce but most importantly incredibly hard to store and very dangerous if it catches fire.
I propose we use antimatter energy storage instead. No risk of it catching fire if you use anti-hydrogen!
Anti-hidrogen can still burn in the presence of anti-oxygen, but that’s way safer than being in the presence of regular oxygen
Because hydrogen-ready power plants are not the same as natural gas power plants, as hydrogen gas is not a drop-in replacement for natural gas. And right now, when natural gas is still relatively cheap and renewable energy is not yet absolutely dominating the energy mix, politicians are fearing the cost of building the infrastructure for generating, transporting, storing and burning hydrogen gas.
In the future, hydrogen gas plants promise to be the best fit to pair renewable energy with, but right now the cost of it and the availability of fossil fuels do not force the hand of the people responsible for planning the future of the energy grid.
In the distant future, I see purely renewables backed by hydrogen, and nothing else. But not in our lifetime. Over produce with renewables everywhere, and store the excess by using it to produce hydrogen, then store the hydrogen to power anything when renewables isn’t viable. The development and build out of renewables has started, but it’ll be a long time time will over produce, and the build out and development of hydrogen hasn’t really started yet.
Of cause it has started. Germany has plans of what is to be its hydrogen backbone. Electricity is set to be about 80 % renewables in 2030. So slowly starting to build up the hydrogen infrastructure starts now.
Hydrogen works, as do pump-storage plants.
No, it does
doesnot. If it did, we’d have it everywhere.Yeah, yeah, same arguments as with solar, too expensive, not feasible, yadda yadda. Always the same.
No, it’s different with hydrogen. If you want green hydrogen, you’ll waste at least 50% of energy. Then there are storage and flammability etc. We have everything we need for using hydrogen today, but somehow it is not used besides minor experiments.
Yeah, but does energy waste matter if the other option is that you turn wind or solar input off? It should not run during high peak, of course, but if there is more energy in the grid than it uses? Turn it into hydrogen.
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage.
We can safely store nuclear waste. What do you think happens to all the radioactive waste produced by hospitals ?
Shoved into tanks or old mines and hope nothing happens?
True, if we have huge surplus of renewables, then the cost doesn’t matter that much.
As per storage. Nuclear is far less problematic to handle in many aspects. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to store and if we go at scale, there would be massive amounts of hydrogen stored everywhere. A tiny spark away of a huge bomb.
They’re facing entirely different problems.
Solar was rapidly getting cheaper, hydrogen isn’t. Sooner or later, batteries will be more energy-dense than hydrogen - I don’t think you understand just how dogshit hydrogen truly is.
Hydrogen is, IIRC, ~30% efficient roundtrip (multiply the efficiency of the electrolyser (70%?) with the efficiency of the fuel cell (50%?)), where batteries are 90%. And batteries are waaay cheaper per cycle. That’s why BEVs are selling like hotcakes whereas surplus hydrogen cars from failed hydrogen car initiatives can’t be sold (that’s not entirely true - they’re being bought up and converted into BEVs).
So batteries are cheaper, their power source is cheaper (because they’re ~3x the efficiency of hydrogen - and BTW that basically won’t change due to thermodynamics, hydrogen is just fundamentally rather inefficient), and you need a ridiculously absurdly expensive pressurized pumping system just to refill your hydrogen tank (which BTW has huge problems of its own because when you pump hydrogen into an empty tank it expands, and when hydrogen or helium expands it heats up, which then needs cooling which takes a bunch of power and engineering work), what’s the advantage of hydrogen?
Well theoretically hydrogen is more energy-dense. Except there are two types of “energy density” (the term is often used loosely/wrong) - there’s power per weight (specific energy), and there’s power per volume (energy density). And hydrogen is literally the least dense substance in the universe, that’s why we filled airships with it, and it’s why we need pressurised tanks in hydrogen cars. Pressurizing the tanks helps, but not by much. It still sucks unless you’re using it as rocket fuel (which cares a lot about weight, not so much for volume)
So, hydrogen needs pressurized tanks. Pressurised tanks weigh a lot, and they weigh more the smaller the tank! (the weight overhead follows the cube-square law). And car fuel tanks are much smaller than rockets.
What’s worse is that unlike fuel tanks, hydrogen tanks need to be cylindrical (or theoretically spherical) to efficiently contain the pressure. Which means they’re a pain in the ass to fit onto a car, because they can’t be flat. They’re in practice way worse than batteries, volumetrically, because batteries can be low and flat on the bottom of the car, in the middle between the axles for a nice clean centre of gravity. You can sort of flatten the hydrogen tank by having two cylinders side by side, but that’s inefficient and adds a ton of weight, which undercuts the point of using hydrogen in the first place.
Hydrogen refills quickly… But so do batteries nowadays. And of course if you really care them you can just make batteries swappable (check out Janus trucks, they have swappable batteries that take less than 5 minutes to swap with a forklift, and they’re actually commercially used in the real world on public roads, unlike hydrogen trucks).
By the way, you know how BEVs can literally be charged with a $20 power cord plugged into a standard wall outlet? Guess how much a hydrogen refuelling station costs (keep in mind the entire thing has to be pressurised). Are you ready?
$3million.
LOL
(Even a DC fast-charger is sub-$100k (might be closer to $10k I forget)
All that to pay more than petrol costs (even post-Hormuz, hydrogen is still 10x more expensive IIRC). But still, if you ignore the practical range limitations, you still have more range than a BEV though right?
Yes, you do. I forget the numbers but it’s not that much better (like 20% or 30% maybe?) and absolutely not worth almost literally everything else being worse than batteries.
But I forgot the worst part of hydrogen: it can’t be produced by unfirmed solar panels. It’s not a flexible chemical process, so realistically you need batteries to firm the solar panels while they electrolyze. Chuck that onto the giant “technical breakthroughs required to make hydrogen fuel a thing” pile, I suppose.
We’ll still need green hydrogen as a chemical input, it just doesn’t make sense as a fuel.
Seriously, why adopt the world’s most explosively flammable gas that’s also a chemical Houdini when you could just… Not handle fluid transfers in the first place and just transfer electricity normally, with a wire?
Why would anyone consider mass-adopting a 30%-efficient battery?
Hydrogen electrolysis currently requires an iridium catalyst for practical long-term durable efficient electrolysis, and might always require one. Iridium is stupidly expensive and a major reason why hydrogen can’t currently scale. Chuck it onto the “technical breakthroughs required” pile, I suppose.
I do think hydrogen-based energy has a future, funnily enough - I have high hopes for the TABQ “proton batteries” (AKA hydrogen-ion, which is like lithium-ion but a positive hydrogen ion is literally just a proton. It should be theoretically more efficient - hydrogen is lighter than lithium, after all). It’s a cool tech, if very new, and I hope it succeeds. It’s just a normal battery, one made from an organic molecule (TABQ) with no need for rare materials.
I used to be on the hydrogen hype train myself, but it took me an embarassingly long while to realise that hydrogen was motivated by hype and wrong thinking more than any technical merit. Especially said thinking by chemical and car companies. Hydrogen is a fuel, like hydrocarbons, and if you can’t imagine a world without fuel - a world where you don’t take your car to the fuel station and fill it up - then hydrogen is the only alternative. BEVs charge slower because they don’t need to charge quickly at home - in other words, they’re different and we have to think of them differently. Hydrogen is in basically every way the type of round-peg square-hole thinking that’s preventing adaptation to climate change; it’s this absolute turd that people are nonetheless actually considering adopting.
Seriously, why would you want to reinvent fuels? To paraphrase Technology Connections, the problem with fuel is that you have to literally light it on fire and replace it every time you use it. CATL’s latest Sodium-ion batteries claim a cycle-life of 15000 cycles, whereas hydrogen fuel has a cycle life of 1. Battery cycle life is only getting better, hydrogen will always be single-use, just like diesel.
We have commercially-viable battery-electric planes (namely the Heart X1, a 30-seat regional airliner - not just a wimpy Cessna replacement, although we have an electric Cessna knockoff too) before we have commercially viable hydrogen planes. Because batteries let airlines save money on fuel. If there’s one place where hydrogen’s better energy-weight ratio should dominate, it’s aerospace, but hydrogen has nothing.
I guess what I’m saying is: if you were wrong and hydrogen is indeed a pipedream, what would look different to our current situation?
Hydrogen EVs are not the topic, that might only make sense to replace diesel locomotives, if that. I am talking about standard store and use instead of coal or gas powerplants.
For one you need special alloys to store hydrogen, to avoid corrosion.
And solar and wind alno have not the same security problems of hydrogen, I am sure you understand that a tank of hydrogen that for some incident detonate is pretty bad (to use an euphemism)