this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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They've been using it for stuff like buses increasingly https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1132385/beijing-2022-hydrogen-buses
Another good use is in combination with wind and solar where you can produce hydrogen when there's energy available, and then use it to provide a steady energy supply. This addresses one of the main issues with renewables.
It's also just a good idea to try out a lot of things and see what sticks. We never know what might turn out to have an unexpected application in one niche. Global warming requires "all of the above" strategy. That will mean some efforts fail to produce results, but that's okay. We don't have the time to dawdle.
They don't have many buses like that yet and buses are always near population centers where using food waste to make biogas is simply much better in almost every way.
As for storing excess energy sure if we're talking solar generation but they use a lot of hydrogen too for this project and in that case pumping water up to the dam is a much easier and probably more efficient than generating hydrogen and either using it to run an engine or store in fuel cells. Fuel cells aren't all that efficient. Overall a lot of money spent that will not at all pay for itself for that use case.
I really struggle with why they've gone so heavily into generating hydrogen when there is a big lack of viable use cases. Though they're far from alone in overestimating hydrogen, BMW and Toyota both invested heavily in fuel cell research (and BMW experimented with direct hydrogen use) and neither came out the other end a winner.
China is pursuing lots of different energy alternatives to fossil fuels. That's the correct approach in my opinion. We don't know what particular approach or combination of thereof will be most efficient in the long term, the only way to find out is to try different things and see where you get. Thinking of it purely in terms of profits is a bit myopic.
The irony of your myopia, lol
You keep thinking about the long term but have you considered that these brand new technologies aren't widely implemented yet? I bet you would think that it's a good idea to get a job working with computers but in the 1970s there weren't many about. If you need some help to work all this out, I can tell you a story about this guy called Robert Wayne or something.
This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it's hard to predict when it's going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they're going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.
Spot on.
Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don't like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn't tackle the key contradiction.
The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do 'knowledge exchange' work. It's all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.
But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of 'transparently' and 'rigourously' giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it's too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won't even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)
If you're interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.
Right, pretty much all the basic research is publicly funded everywhere because it's the only way it can work. Of course, thanks to decades of brainwashing, a lot of people in the west now think that real innovation comes from the private sector.
I think another aspect we can look at is the type of technological we see happening in the west with it being mostly around software, and frivolous things like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, in China, a lot of the technological development is very practical like bullet trains, nuclear power, and so on. It's just another example of how state directed research ends up producing more meaningful results than the private sector.
And yeah sure, send a link that sounds like a fun read.