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29 points

Hydrogen never really made sense for cars, the infrastructure and storage is too expensive. But I wonder if it’d work for trains that haven’t been fully electrified with overhead cables yet. You’d need much less infrastructure at just a few locations.

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1 point

Other than ideas like synfuels, it is the only thing that makes sense for cars. People are just falling prey to BEV propaganda. You don’t want unsustainable mining and a >400kg battery pack in every car. It is the big act of greenwashing today, and green transportation won’t happen until BEVs are abandoned or scaled way back.

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1 point

Unsustainable from a co2 standpoint, ecological damage, or human rights and damage standpoint? I think we’re probably thinking about different sorts of sustainability.

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1 point
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If you mean the cost of battery mining/production, it’s all three. We currently can’t even make batteries without vast amounts of fossil fuels. And due to many factors like long-duration energy storage problems, BEVs can’t reach net zero without hydrogen anyways.

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10 points

On the other hand, my city is trying hydrogen bus.
There is a single refilling station needed.

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2 points

Oh that’s a good idea too. If the hydrogen and electricity is green, it’d have less of an environmental than batteries.

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3 points
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Today, green hydrogen is essentially an expensive, low-efficiency battery.

That could change with future work on making more efficient hydrolysis, but today, the numbers really don’t work out on green hydrogen vs alternatives like lithium ion or overhead wires for busses.

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9 points

It isn’t. The amount of green hydrogen is a fraction of a fraction a percent of all hydrogen. The rest is all made from natural gas and the CO2 is released into the air. It’s a green washed fossil fuel.

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8 points

Nope. They tried hydrogen trains in Germany and are not buying more of them.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/hydrogen-train-germany/

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1 point

How do battery operated work? Are they short rage trains? Or do they have like a car full of batteries? And how do recharge times work? Can they recharge just in the stations? If it works for them, great. And it sounds like it is. It just seemed like there were several problems.

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3 points
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Battery locomotives don’t have enough range to be useful solo, but they’re a handy to add on to an existing train to give it regenerative braking and improve it’s efficiency.

You want practically zero emissions train, you build overhead catenary wires. But that’s decades old tech that just works, it’s not sexy futuristic stuff.

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8 points

Irish Rail is trying this. There was an article posted about it yesterday!

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