this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Because now you have to build an electrified track infrastructure in instead of using an already built railway track.
cough overhead lines cough
Jeez if only smart people thought of that.
Real answer: it’s actually a lot of logistics and technical challenge to bring overhead lines to the whole of eve a small country like England. A lot of these tracks are in regions where there’s no power lines nearby. You still want the trains to go to and through these places.
That's logic comparing the economic costs of diesel to electric. If you compare the economics with hydrogen, it makes much more sense to run the wire with the track, independent of the availability of electricity.
Hydrogen could be used as a bridge gap measure. It’s relatively easy to move diesel engines to hydrogen. And hydrogen production, even when using gas, is still better than diesel engines.
Sometimes building infrastructure is more expensive than a hydrogen-powered train. I guess.
Maybe at the train track end. But creating the hydrogen and the needed infrastructure for both the creation and distribution, plus the enormous amounts of energy wasted in the production, is unlikely to be more cost effective than the investment in electrifying existing railroads.
Speaking about Germany in particular: We need hydrogen infrastructure anyway, if nothing else then as chemical feedstock and for steel smelting. And the pipeline network is already half-way in place, more and more parts are getting switched over from natural gas (the network started out as a coal gas network (hydrogen content of often over 50%) before natural gas became a thing, it's built to the necessary standard). Bonus: The pipeline network can store three months of total (not just electricity) of energy usage between minimum and maximum operating pressure.
Wind farms and electrolysing plants as well as conversion to ammonia (because transport) is getting built in Namibia and Canada, scheduled to be our main energy partners in the future.
It never is, and won't be until we essentially have free energy. Any serious economic study has concluded as much.