THE CHEESE OF THE FUTURE

Hydrogen fuel cells make electricity by causing a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, of which the only by-product is water.

However, to make hydrogen without using fossil fuels, you have to do the reverse, and that takes a lot of electricity. Ideally, that electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind, otherwise the point of FCEVS is lost.

The BEV argument is that you save a lot of energy by putting that clean electricity straight into a battery. The FCEV counterargument is that there might not be enough batteries to store renewable energy when it’s being generated; for example, on a windy night.

“Hydrogen will play a similar role to cheese,” Sae Hoon Kim, head of Hyundai’s fuel cell centre, memorably claimed in a speech last September.

His analogy recalled nomads who preserved leftover milk as cheese to use over the winter.

“Hydrogen can convert excess electricity generated from wind or solar power into [energydense] hydrogen that can be stored in huge quantities,” he said. “Electricity is like milk, hydrogen is like cheese.”