Green hydrogen could counter energy crisis, says British firm

ITM Power, which makes electrolyser machines, says splitting water using renewable energy has become more cost-effective than gas

Now, of course, that’s a company touting their own products so take with the appropriate amount of salt.

But if true - if true - then that solves the entire problem. We don’t have to rebuild the grid to charge electric vehicles, we don’t have to insulate every house in the country - trying to put cavity wall insulation in a house with no cavity walls is difficult - and we can stop worrying about aviation entirely.

Not because hydrogen can or even should be used in all of those sectors. But because if we’ve got cheap and green hydrogen then we already have the technology - have had for a century - to formulate that up into the sort of liquid fuels that all those extant technologies can use. Cheap green hydrogen - again, if it’s true - plus Fischer Tropsch gives us cheap, carbon neutral, hydrocarbons. Which we can then feed into our extant networks of fueling stations and into our extant technologies of cars, ‘planes and, if we prefer methane, into the gas network.

We’re then done.

Which is why it’s so lucky that we dealt with the problems of climate change in the right way. We didn’t go out trying to pick technologies. No bans on anything, we just set the incentives - anything carbon neutral works that is - and allowed the market to get on with sorting it out.

We did do that, right?