Looking forward to the upcoming Toyota announcement that they believe in the future of hydrogen more than ever

Toyota, and Japan as a whole, are in a tricky situation with their electric grid. It’s been developed separately by nine different companies in each region; the southern regions use 60 Hz supply cycles, where-as the northern regions (including Tokyo Electric) use 50 Hz. Add to this the populations reluctance for nuclear power after Fukushima, and you get a very fragile supply grid with limited capacity. Toyota is gunning hard for Hydrogen because Japan itself can’t support EVs and for some reason it doesn’t want to/can’t manufacture both.

Okay, but if they don’t have the electricity for EVs they definitely don’t have enough electricity to waste 2/3 of it turning it into hydrogen and back.

I mean yeah, but on the other hand with hydrogen you have much more control over when and where you use the electricity as you can choose to manufacture most of it during off-peak periods and when renewables create excess energy. Then you can transport it by pipes or by trucks/ships without overwhelming the electric grid.

You can do off-peak charging with EVs too, that’s not a magical hydrogen thing. My hot water system is on its own circuit which can be turned off by the power company whenever they need to cut demand, providers have been doing that sort of thing for decades.

You can’t store the power in EVs for weeks and weeks and also you can’t move it around on a whim, without loosing that stored energy.

What? Of course you can store power for weeks. It doesn’t just dribble out onto the floor. Go away for a month and come home, your EV is still sitting there with the battery charge whatever you left it on.

Yes, EVs use their stored energy for driving… I’m not sure what your point was there. Do you think transporting hydrogen is free and doesn’t cost energy?

No, it doesn’t dribble on the floored, but to keep the battery conditioned takes a lot of energy. There are countless post around all sorts of forums where the battery was empty after 2 weeks, because cooking the battery in the summer heat took a lot of energy. And you can’t leave an EV plugged in at the Airport.

Transporting hydrogen is cheaper than having to rebuild a whole power grid.

You don’t need to rebuild the whole grid. The power over night goes up, but that’s OK because night is currently very low usage. Sometimes that has meant turning off renewables as there is no where to put the power. In fact, this can cause negative power costs were they will pay you to take power! So next is where you need it, say a charging forecourt. But that is only during the day, so put in some huge batteries you charge over night. Top up with day time renewables if you can. All this already happens.

That’s the case for Germany or the UK, not Japan. Bit different there.