You can also turn water + atmosphere into synthetic fuels, such as methanol or even kerosene. Such fuels can be used without modification to existing ships. Alternatively, you can just electrolyze water and get hydrogen, which can also be used if you can deal with the lower volumetric density.

Militaries will switch to synthetic fuels or hydrogen. It is already doable, and expansion of production will make it cheap in the future.

You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.

If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.

Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.

The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.

You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.

It’s far cheaper to distribute energy via hydrogen than it is to distribute energy via electricity, especially over long-distance: https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf

We will likely make hydrogen where it is cheap, and then distribute via pipelines or other methods to where it is needed.

They are failing at basic editorial controls. This is not a “pretty good fucking job.” It is a sign of real decline.

It’s one of the stages of enshittification. Unless we see hard changes to avoid further decay, Ars will inevitably get worse and and worse until it does become an “internet rot site.”