Hiringa, with partners fuel supplier Waitomo Group and Australasia’s largest heavy vehicle fleet owner TR Group, on Tuesday opened three green hydrogen stations, with a fourth under way, within the North Island’s economic “golden triangle” of freight movement.
Or, you know, literally any other means of storage. 25% round trip efficiency is absolutely dire.
Besides, they can sell power to neighbouring states.
Where does the 25% figure come from? This article has it at 38% (it’s also an article arguing hard against hydrogen).
One up side is you don’t need the rare materials that are needed for batteries, but in the next 10 or 20 years I’d guess a lot will change with batteries anyway. There are already designs that don’t need them, just no one can scale them yet.
Also if you tack a few thousand dollars of solar panels onto your shipping container sized hydrogen generator, does the efficiency become less important?
The article is only addressing light vehicles. While I agree the equation seems to favour batteries, truck sized batteries are also obscenely expensive so I’m not convinced it’s a clear line. Batteries may currently be winning but that likely comes mostly from scale. All the batteries for electric vehicles plus all the same batteries in our laptops and phones and vapes and other electronics leads to economies of scale. I’d expect hydrogen systems would be a lot cheaper if we built a lot more of them, which would make the cost part of the equation less important.