Toyota wants hydrogen to power entire cities in Japan. Its subsidiary Woven Planet broke ground last February on a "Woven City" near Susono, which will act as a futuristic testbed for all sorts of urban planning ideas and technologies, including an expanded use of hydrogen fuel throughout the area.
Now, Toyota and Woven have presented a working prototype of a portable hydrogen cartridge that seeks to provide green energy for "a range of daily life activities in and outside of the home."
The cartridges are cylinders, 400 mm (16 in) long and 180 mm (7 in) in diameter, with a target weight of 5 kg (11 lb) when full. They'll carry around 3.3 kWh of useful energy, depending on the efficiency of the external fuel cell used to convert the hydrogen back into electricity. They've got little grab handles on the top, and they're designed to be slotted and twist-locked into place wherever they're used.
They could be used as swappable hydrogen batteries for electric cars, motorcycles and drones. They could be slotted into the walls of homes that aren't connected to a power grid, to provide electricity for the whole house through a fuel cell. They could be used to power heaters, or provide electricity in remote places. With a small fuel cell on top, they could be treated as large backup power banks for device charging.
Commercially, it seems they'll work a bit like BBQ gas bottles; you'll swap them out as needed and they'll be refilled at service stations. But the two companies seem to expect they'll be running a delivery service as well, getting hydrogen canisters out to wherever they're needed. Check out a video below.
Source: Woven Planet
Sorry, but if Toyota (and others) don't stop wasting their time and effort on this silliness, they will not exist in the next decade.
Bing it On.
since it is highly explosive! Seriously thinking there will be never any leak/ruptures/mishandling to trigger massive explosions?
Not to mention there is no need to use hydrogen for anything!
All light vehicles are already becoming electric & all heavy/big land/sea/air (diesel) vehicles
(like trucks & trains & construction/mining/agriculture/military vehicles & ships & aircraft)
just need us to start producing biodiesel at large scales from all possible industrial/agricultural/forestry waste/biomass & even trash & sewage!
For storing energy, there are already grid-size battery solutions!
For heating homes, just produce electricity from solar & wind & nuclear!
(But also upgrade electric grids of all cities/towns, so that they can handle the full load,
even if everybody uses electricity (at the same time) for heating & cooking & charging electric vehicles!)
And that video narrator doesn’t sound dystopian at all. /s
it is burned intentionally. if the container leaks hydrogen in an enclosed space, such as a home? dangerous!
Thats a total joke. Offer any cell phone, electric car, or laptop with 2x the battery life of its competitors and you will own that space until the rest catch up.
Then we can get into reuseability where li-ion requires expensive replacement on a regular basis and most h2 systems don't. So with that we would be looking at huge infrastructure savings at all levels as well.
This approach intrigues me, however. A practically sized container system (yes, much like the propane cylinders we here in the Midwest are quite used to!) can be a practical workaround for many "lightweight" uses. Leakage won't be a problem, with HDPE containers. If done properly, H2 could (that's a big "IF") be an energy backup for the otherwise useless "renewables" always being touted.
I don't know if this qualifies as "out of the box" thinking, but it is much more useful than most of the other silliness on the Green Side.