Green hydrogen is a way to ship solar power elsewhere that doesn't have it, similar to a battery, but with the advantage of being able to be piped/pumped/liquified etc.
For that purpose and for long-term storage of energy and for aircraft/spacecraft, synthetic hydrocarbons are much better.
Making synthetic hydrocarbons was already done at large scale during WWII, but it was later abandoned due to the availability of very cheap extracted oil.
So when oil was not available, the economy could still be based on synthetic hydrocarbons even with the inefficient methods of that time (it is true however that at that time they captured CO2 from burning coal or wood, not directly from the air, where it is diluted).
Today one could develop much more efficient methods for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, but the level of investment for such technologies has been negligible in comparison with the money wasted for research in non-viable technologies, like using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, or with the money spent in things like AI datacenters.
A BTU of hydrogen requires more energy to compress to a given pressure than a BTU of natural gas, but hydrogen also has lower viscosity, so less recompression is needed. The point you raise does not rule out hydrogen pipelines.
If it does, then it also rules out long distance transmission of electrical power, as that is even more expensive. And the hydrogen advantage is even greater when one considers one can piggyback storage onto this system, as is done in natural gas pipelines. The electrical system would need additional batteries which are much more expensive per unit of storage capacity.
The PDF you shared actually agrees with my point if you care you to read it. It models the cost for a specific HVDC implementation, but the HVDC line selected is more expensive when transporting just 3% of the energy of the pipeline.
The same capex and opex can support 100x more Wh-km via HVDC, making HVDC at least an order of magnitude cheaper then the H2 pipeline.
What's interesting to me is that this is completely uncontroversial and incontrovertible, so I wonder where your insistence otherwise is?
I'm sorry but you appear to be completely deranged. The paper says nothing of the sort. Let me give the abstract:
"This paper compares the relative cost of long-distance, large-scale energy transmission by electricity, gaseous, and liquid carriers (e-fuels). The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines. These differences generally hold for shorter distances as well. The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels. The differences in the cost of transmission are important but often unrecognized and should be considered as a significant cost component in the analysis of various renewable energy production, distribution, and utilization scenarios."
I'm to read this as supporting your assertion that electrical transmission is several times cheaper??
Green hydrogen makes sense as a way to ship solar power to places that don't have it.
Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.
Shipping hydrogen is literally one of the dumbest things you can ever do.
Its pure and utter nonsense that is only getting pushed for political reasons. It has 0 actual viability.
Even if you were willing to pay 5-10x more for hydrogen, shipping doesn't make sense.
The only way we are ever moving any quantity of hydrogen anywhere is with pipelines. Literally everything about hydrogen makes it a complete nightmare to ship.
And nobody is likely ever going to build these hydrogen pipelines.
Hydrogen is completely idiotic as a 'energy move' medium.
> Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
No it doesn't and it never did. Only such a tiny amount were ever sold, and those were only sold because of massive subsidies and sold below value by car companies who wanted to push the concept (and farm subsidies).
EV by 2008 already outsold hydrogen vehicles and have grown every year, hydrogen vehicles never became more then marketing gimick and were never sold in numbers that even approach relevance.
Using the actual tools built in to git directly removes steps in the process, which is always a good thing, it's documented as part of the git documentation, so you don't have to create a wiki page explaining why there is a ".gitkeep" file that git doesn't recognize itself.
Saying "It's not that hard..." is fine for projects with a few contributors but does not scale.
If someone doesn't know what .gitkeep is they should be able to derive from the name that it's some special file intended for git.
If they then google it they will immediately find out what it's for.
Yes, git itself has no concept of it but it's common enough that there's plenty documentation on the internet.
Yes, because relying on google-fu is the way to ensure your build environment is consistent. /s
.gitkeep is explicitly not intended for git, because git doesn't recognize it at all.
Having the .gitignore, which is actually recognized by the git tools, means you can rely on the .gitignore functionality, including ensuring that things other than the .gitignore cannot be added to the repo.
Except that is not happening with the current generations. The move from fiscal liberty to conservatism happened with previous generations because they accumulated assets like housing etc that they want to protect.
The current millenial/GenZ generations are dealing with multiple economic crises during their career development, as well as property and other asset bubbles keeping them from accumulating the same assets as their parents.
Cameras are only "cheap" because of mobile phone camera development, radar/lidar is going through the same process with car and mobile robotics.
So the "we can train cheaply because of lots of cameras" falls down when, for example, BYD has all of its cars with lidar for ADAS but can collect the data for training as well as the vision from cameras and whatever other sensors like tyre pressures and suspension readings and all the other sensors that are on a modern car.
The argument that we can make the cars cheaper in the future by not collecting the additional data now has been proven wrong by the CN and KR manufacturers.
That's also independent of the whole EV side of things.
I agree that each would be made slightly better with a more integrated system. But you could handle all of them in my hundred year old house with the form factor it was designed for: a humanoid. Probably pretty soon here for cheaper than each could be handled separately by more integrated systems.
For new builds, a laundry/utility room that includes the dishwashing and other "housekeeping" facilities is a no-brainer when there is a custom robot built to use those facilities as well as maneuver around the rest of the house.
For old/retrofit renovations it also makes sense, but otherwise, yes, a human-form robot makes sense.
The question is which is a better investment for any robot manufacturer in 2026?
The drop in demand for Tesla's clapped out model range would have meant embarrassing factory closures, so now they're being closed to start manufacturing a completely different product. Bait and switch for Tesla investors.
I wonder how long they'll be closed for "modifications" and whether the Optimus Prime robot factories will go into production before the "Trump Kennedy Center" is reopened after its "renovations".
Maybe they were focusing on a real world use that basically requires AI, but not LLMs.
Tesla claimed that all their "real world" recording would give them a moat on FSD.
Waymo is showing that a) you need to be able to incorporate stuff that isn't "real" when training, and b) you get a lot more information from alternate sensors to visible spectrum only.
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