Thread by @MarcoCraveiro

1/ After many years of thinking that hydrogen was a waste of time, it suddenly hit me: in the absence of a *major* breakthrough to allows us to create cheap batteries at will, hydrogen is going to be _the battery_.

2/ The growth of the solar and wind capacity will be much, much faster than the battery capacity and soon - as it always happens with capitalism - it will overshoot demand. Then it'll overshoot battery capacity. At that point you need to store energy by any means - even if lossy.

3/ That's where hydrogen comes in. It may be wildly inefficient when compared to lithium batteries, but if energy has a marginal cost close to zero, hey who cares? Better to store the energy in hydrogen than to throw it away.

4/ Once we start producing sufficient hydrogen, suddenly it will make sense to support both. So instead of thinking Japan is completely mad, I am now thinking these people are amazing visionaries.

5/ The only thing stopping hydrogen in mass scale now is electrolysis using sea water. That will be available soon (due to the forcing function). The north sea in Europe will become a massive powerhouse in hydrogen generation. Sahara nations and the middle east will also win.

6/ This also means that I now start to diverge from Elon Musk's electric vision of the future. It seems to me that, given sufficient time, we will have very cheap hydrogen. At that point, vehicles will be segmented into cheap hydrogen cars and "expensive" battery EVs.

7/ The reason why hydrogen cars will be cheap it's because they are EVs minus the battery and the battery is the most expensive component of an EV. Absent any major revolution in battery chemistry, it will remain so due to supply constraints.

8/ Hydrogen will have no such constraint so therefore he price of hydrogen will, over time, plummet. That is because anyone with access to energy will convert excess energy to hydrogen. Note that, on all scenarios oil will be essentially worthless (if not have negative value).

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