this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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As we move into green energy we're going to have an excess of power at times that we don't need it, and there's going to be many use cases where stuff like electrolysis, even though it's wasteful, is ultimately well worth it because power will be cheap to free during those times of day.
Not in my lifetime, that's for sure. We currently supply nearly all agricultural hydrogen from oil cracking, for example. There may be a future where wastefully using hydrogen makes sense, but it's not anytime soon. An actual solution is electrifying the train lines.
California literally already has the problem of excess energy on occasion, and it's only going to get worse and worse as time passes until we create some sort of magical low cost energy storage solution.
Hydrogen is created from fracking now because we live in a fossil fuel world right now, but eventually as we're forced to move away from it you're going to have to have high energy density systems, and hydrogen is one of the few fairly reliable ways to do that.