Letter of the week

YOUR VIEWS

Fuel of the future

In the 15 May Letter of the Week, in which he says there’s no hope for hydrogen, Michael Appleyard seems very fond of referring to elephants in the room. However, he hasn’t mentioned a fourth elephant that changes the impact of the three he’s considering: the increasing amount of electricity being generated from renewable sources with the aim of reducing gas power to nothing.

The main sources of renewable energy have one major flaw: if the sun isn’t shining, solar panels don’t generate, and if the wind isn’t blowing, wind turbines don’t generate, and those are often periods of high energy demand – but they do generate when there is low demand for electricity. Green hydrogen production is an effective solution for using that excess energy, which can then be stored for when the renewable sources don’t generate, and it can also be used for other purposes – such as powering vehicles.

It’s cheaper to use hydrogen to store excess electricity than it is to use batteries, and it doesn’t have the same catastrophic impacts on the world that the mining and refining of the rare-earth materials required for batteries do.

A fifth elephant could well be how much more suitable hydrogen is for heavy goods vehicles.

There is much hope and a great future for hydrogen.

Andy Sherratt

Pontefract, West Yorkshire

Unfit for purpose

Michael Appleyard’s appraisal of the viability of hydrogen as a car fuel isn’t entirely even-handed.

First, the efficiency figures he quotes take no account of the generation and transmission of the electricity being used for hydrogen-generating electrolysis or battery charging. The vast majority of proposed hydrogen production facilities use renewable energy generated on-site. Charging an EV for most of us uses electricity that has been generated a long way away, and even if it has been generated renewably, it has been subject to transmission losses that make a nonsense of the claim that it’s a 90%-efficient process.

Second, efficiency itself isn’t the issue – cost is. If hydrogen can be made cheaply enough, it doesn’t matter how much green electricity it takes to do it. The cost of electricity at the point of use for BEVs can’t be compared with the cost of that used in a hydrogen production facility.

Cost is thus also the issue when considering hydrogen-combustion engines. No one cares if they’re 15% efficient if they don’t kill t