139 Is waterstof dood? Of komt het toch weer teug?

• See customer examples: https://www.energie-transitie.info/kl... • Download the tips & tricks on home batteries: https://www.energie-transitie.info/ti... • For more information about our home batteries: https://www.energie-transitie.info/th... Is hydrogen dead? Or is it making a comeback? About five years ago, hydrogen seemed like the ultimate solution for our energy supply. Almost every car manufacturer was working on it. Entire hydrogen neighborhoods were announced, and even hydrogen-powered central heating boilers were supposed to be the future. But if you look around you now, you actually hear very little about it. Electric cars are running on batteries en masse. Heat pumps have largely displaced hydrogen central heating. And various hydrogen projects have been postponed or even halted. So... is hydrogen dead? Or is it making a comeback? Let's dive into that. You see, hydrogen has a major advantage. Per kilogram, it contains about three times as much energy as diesel. That sounds fantastic. From a physics perspective, 1 kg of hydrogen contains no less than 39 kWh of energy. Just for comparison: an LPF battery contains only 160 watt-hours in 1 kg. But hydrogen has one major drawback. Hydrogen has to be produced first. For example, via electrolysis. And that is precisely where the energy loss begins. Theoretically, producing one kilogram of hydrogen requires at least about 39 kWh of electricity. In practice, most current electrolysers use about 52 to 55 kWh. So, even before the hydrogen is stored, you have already lost about a quarter of the energy. But you are not done yet. The hydrogen must be compressed, stored, transported, and ultimately converted back into electricity. Energy is lost again at every step. In the end, you are often left with only about 30 to 40 percent of the originally generated electricity. Just compare that to a battery. Suppose your solar panels generate 100 kWh on a beautiful summer day. If you store it directly in a battery, you can often still use 80 to 90 kWh later. If you first convert that same 100 kWh into hydrogen and then back into electricity, often only 30 to 40 kWh remains. And that is precisely why batteries have prevailed in homes and passenger cars. Not because hydrogen doesn't work, but because a battery is much more efficient for these applications. However, something interesting is happening behind the scenes. The Australian company Hysata has developed a new way to produce hydrogen. In traditional electrolysers, many small gas bubbles form during the splitting of water. These cause extra electrical resistance and thus energy loss. Hysata approaches this differently. With a so-called capillary-fed electrolyser, the water is guided to the electrodes in a different way, causing those gas bubbles to virtually disappear. As a result, efficiency increases significantly. According to Hysata, approximately 41.5 kWh of electricity is still needed to produce one kilogram of hydrogen. Moreover, scarce metals such as iridium or platinum are no longer needed. That sounds promising. But as with any new technology, we naturally still have to wait and see how this proves itself on a large scale. Does this mean, then, that hydrogen will become the future after all? I don't think so... at least not for homes or, in the short term, for passenger cars. In my expectation, batteries will remain simpler, cheaper, and more efficient for those applications. But for heavy trucks that cover enormous distances daily, the steel industry, the chemical industry, international shipping, and perhaps even aviation, hydrogen could actually play a very important role. You have to imagine that, in terms of storage weight, hydrogen is more than 100 times as energy-rich as a battery. Perhaps that is why we should stop asking the question: "Will hydrogen be the future?" A much more interesting question might well be: "Where is hydrogen the best solution right now?" And the more I delve into this, the more I think that batteries and hydrogen are not competitors, but complement each other perfectly. So... is hydrogen dead? No, certainly not. It just seems more and more like hydrogen is finally starting to find its real field of application. And perhaps that is ultimately much more interesting than the original story that hydrogen would become the solution to everything. Did you find this vlog interesting? Give a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel. Until next time.