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.

So, let’s say I leave an EV at the airport, with 60% charge, battery in reasonable health, and return 2 months later and head home, having lost maybe 3%. You are telling me that’s…not doing exactly what you’re saying I can’t and didn’t just do?

You don’t also immediately lose all the stored energy either. In a (hypothetical, future tyme) properly kitted out scenario, I leave my EV plugged in at the airport and it’s battery contributes to local grid storage while I’m away. So the 60% I arrived with might drop down during high load, but since my utility company has a handy app I can schedule when I need to unplug and ask for the charge percentage to be topped up in time.

I might even not have to pay to park my car in that scenario, or potentially even earn credits back…

You will not have lost 3%. You will have lost 30-40% - because no Airport has (and probably never will have) Parking, where you can leave your EV plugged in.