Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s practically paying people to buy the Mirai | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com
Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.

Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.

  • profdc9@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    9 months ago

    I think the hydrogen is intended to be sourced from natural gas, which is not a great thing. The only way I see this working in an environmentally sustainable way is an efficient means of solar hydrolysis (much more efficient than photosynthesis).

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      9 months ago

      It’s important to see where the hydrogen is being sourced from. Grey Hydrogen comes from natural gas and is not ideal as you point out.

      Green hydrogen is promising however, and comes from electrolyzers. The key there is where the electricity to operate them comes from, but that’s true for electric vehicles as well. It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.

      In any case, I think we do want to build out hydrogen infrastructure (and I’m biased since I work in hydrogen energy). The future we’re envisioning is one where solar and wind provide us excesses fairly often. That’s where it’s perfect to run electrolyzers to store the energy as hydrogen.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        41·
        9 months ago

        It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.

        Well the idea is that BEV is more efficient with the energy that it gets…

        Which I understand…

        But what I don’t understand is what part of our usage is actually “efficient” from the get go? Also that ‘extra’ energy we lose to the electrolysis process could easily be made up with extra solar/wind/renewables… and Nuclear without much issue.

        Further, desalination mechanisms are desperately needed for our water problem too… Guess what process can help with that… cough totally not electrolysis cough. It’s almost like it’s a win all around… Yet everyone is super against it for one nebulous reason or another… and none of those reasons ever make sense to me.

    • BestBouclettes@jlai.luEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      Yeah one of the big downsides of hydrogen is that you need massive amounts of clean energy to make it worthwhile.