Hydrogen

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A community about hydrogen and its use as a way to fight climate change.

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Hydrogen had a breakout year. Why are some VCs still skeptical? (pitchbook.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hydrogen startups are on pace to raise more VC funding in 2023 than in the prior two years combined, according to PitchBook's 2024 Industrial Technology Outlook.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The "issues" you list is something companies like Toyota has already dealt with and even if it's small, there is still a growing hydrogen infrastructure in some places in the world like california with people driving these cars.

Yes they are challenging, but we have already overcome and have vehicles and infrastructure in production.

I see many hydrogen critics list how hydrogen is "very volatile, able to ignite, cold as heck, extreme temperature" and etc, well yes, there are challenges, but despite that there are companies out there that have dealt with them and already have products running on the same hydrogen you are talking about.

Not trying to blindly support hydrogen or anything, but in my opinion we are past the point where we debate and claim hydrogen is not possible and has many issues - many of them are no longer an "issue" when its already out there for consumers in some parts of the world, and if these issues were a huge barrier, we won't have vehicles like Toyota mirai selling at all, so these issues are not issues but maybe "tricky", "expensive" and "slow development" would be the right words.

[–] inclementimmigrant 2 points 1 year ago

I'll grant you that storage has gotten better since the decade now when I last worked on a hydrogen ICE project and yeah Toyota has made some good advances with their carbon fiber tanks now, heck of a lot better than the carbon fiber tanks that I had the pleasure of working with.

Last I read, the temperature changes were still issues with refilling station where they tended to ice up and with fatigue on the point of connection to the inlet due to temperature changes. If that's been fixed or a solution has been found that's great.

I think the biggest hurdles is still the transport, generation, and infrastructure and yeah, I can agree that tricky, expensive, slow development are all valid here.

And while I still don't think the tech is there yet, I'm glad that progress is still being made and hopefully it'll actually be viable in the future.