Hydrogen power is an exciting form of clean energy. But hydrogen typically needed to be produced in a lab using energy-intensive methods. White hydrogen, a newly identified hydrogen source, could eliminate the need for lab production.
Hydrogen power is an exciting form of clean energy. But hydrogen typically needed to be produced in a lab using energy-intensive methods. White hydrogen, a newly identified hydrogen source, could eliminate the need for lab production.
I mean yeah, it’s really interesting from a scientific standpoint, although the article didn’t seem to indicate anything about hydrogen being produced. I had assumed this was some kind of natural inclusion, maybe something left over from the initial formation of the planet or some super rare chemical reaction, not an ongoing process. It would have been nice to see more details about that.
My complaint was that the article is presenting this not as an interesting scientific discovery, but as some kind of energy production breakthrough that’s poised to solve climate change. What we need to be doing is massively expanding our nuclear power generation as well as continuing to expand our solar, wind, and hydro power generation while decommissioning coal and gas plants.
I agree with you, the author of this article sucks, and I agree with your plan to expand cleaner energy production, including nuclear. But I would add that energy transmission is itself an infrastructure liability, and creating hydrogen distribution pathways will contribute to the progress.
Yes, the centralized nature of our energy grids are a problem. It’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s far easier to manage and makes investing in very expensive but very scalable energy generation systems feasible, but comes with the considerable downside that long distance power transmission includes all kinds of headaches and doesn’t respond well to large shifts in demand. A very distributed system, say with some sort of neighborhood level power distribution/sharing system and per-house solar or wind power and storage would remove the need for long distance power transmission, but would be massively more complicated to manage, and still wouldn’t solve all issues around large swings in demand, while introducing expensive ongoing maintenance (mostly in power storage). Ideally some kind of hybrid system where most power needs are met at the local level, with a few large systems to handle excess demand would probably be ideal, although then you’re double paying for maintenance as you have to maintain both the local system and the large centralized one, but in theory the load on both would be more manageable. Unfortunately the current system is very much NOT setup to allow for local power generation and distribution and overhauling it to support something like that would be non-trivial.