Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery.

After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been slow but steady. It's not really clear to me what advantages H has over Li as an electron donor, at this point.

If your strategy involves massive investment in nuclear you don’t need hydrogen in Japan.

Northern Europe and Canada have very seasonally-dependant energy demand that inversely correlates with solar availability. Japan has hot humid summers that require the use of air conditioners, so energy demand doesn’t vary nearly as much over the year. In most of the country you also don’t get cold enough to worry about heat pumps becoming inefficient, either.

Given that, nuclear, short term storage, a bit of hydro would do the job just fine, without the round-trip losses of hydrogen.

You still might well want hydrogen for other purposes (fertiliser, steel making, clean shipping, possibly long range trucks etc).

I would imagine somebody has floated this idea before, but I wonder if the distraction of hydrogen rather than electric cars was a ploy by Japanese automakers to give them time to build up the cars / supply chain etc to switch to electric. Typically cars (at least in the US) take around 4-5 years of development to get to market, so rather than assuming the Japanese policy makers just made a dumb decision, it could be that they wanted to wait until domestic electric cars were widely available before pushing heavily on the transition.

I’m not sure I understand this. If you want to build up electric cars you invest in building electric cars. Investing in some other third technology does not get you to electric cars faster.

On the context of the report which this whole piece is about, skybrian linked to it, here's the english partial translation:

https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_Japa...

I was wondering what this "renewable energy institute" was, and it's founded and chaired by Masayoshi Son, who's latest notable investments includes huge solar projects here and there.

Perhaps there's a lot of valid ideas in it...and I'm all for more renewable energies, but I'd take a lot of this with a shovel of salt.