Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,...
Hydrogen is completely unsuitable for land based transportation because building the infrastructure and actually making the stuff is pretty hard to do at scale. The electricity grid, on the other hand, already exists. And once you’ve built the charger, you don’t need to send a truck to refill it on a regular basis.
H2 is way better for trucks and planes than batteries, because even with the reinforced tanks it doesn’t weigh much, and the refueling does not take long.
I agree that battery electric is probably the way to go for consumer passenger vehicles, though.
/owns a hydrogen car
*if we can find a clean way of producing H2 at scale
Electrolysis works, though as with everything, nuclear is the best option.
Like I said the problem is the infrastructure. Building this out at scale would require a massive effort that nobody will want to pay for. And rightly so because electric trucks are already a thing and will get a lot more popular in the next few years.
To piggyback off this though, there are areas where the infrastructure would make sense, like long distance shipping trucks and busses that have pretty well defined areas that they could regularly dock and refuel at, and those are the exact situations where electric is struggling the most.
All to say, the research into hydrogen powered vehicles isn’t useless, even if it’s not going to offer anything at the consumer level.
Electric trucks are lugging around their batteries moreso than their payload.