Ben Facts

My prediction: Hydrogen will be what powers anything larger than a bicycle.

The premise is that a container of hydrogen works like a battery that is endlessly refillable, and can easily be converted into electricity.

The challenges come with the conversion from something else to pure, compressed hydrogen. 

The faulty logic of many people who have written about this is how expensive hydrogen is to convert. If you have a hydrogen creation machine to plug into a wall socket, that arguement is correct. Why burn one energy source to create another? However, if you start looking at other options for creation, hydrogen becomes more plausible.

With wind and solar becomming more and more viable sources of energy, it’s apparent that in most applications, they don’t provide a consistant enough flow of energy not to have an intermediary store. For those who want to go off the grid, they have to use huge batteries to be ready for their energy use when it comes. 

The solution will be hooking up home or neighborhood power generation stations to hydrogen generation stations at the source of creation. The inneficiencies of hydrogen creation will be made up for because the power required to generate it happens right there. There is some amazing power loss over distance of power lines. Removing the distance electricity has to travel makes the creation of hydrogen much more pratical.

Once this happens, people should see a hard cap of how much energy they can use that will only be increased by adding more generation. This should lead to conservation, and if it doesn’t, it will be due to prevelance of a completely clean source of electricity.