Elon Musk trolls Bill Gates over ‘green hydrogen’ claim with laughing emoji tweet responding to user comparing a breakthrough on the challenging energy source to the tooth fairy and Santa Claus
Elon Musk seemed to be trolling Bill Gates on Thursday about the concept of green hydrogen with a smiling emoji on Twitter†
The whole Mars Catalog tweeted a screenshot of a tweet promoted by Bill Gates stating that “cheap, clean hydrogen would be a huge energy breakthrough” with the phrase “Bill Gates promoting hydrogen” and an emoji in the face palm.
In response to that tweet, another user wrote: “Cheap clean hydrogen would be a major breakthrough that we can tap into. And if we could bottle the tooth fairy and clone Santa, and replace public transportation with unicorns, we’d all be good.”
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Longtime solar proponent Elon Musk responded to a tweet about Bill Gates’ advocacy for clean hydrogen with a smiling emoji
Musk responded with a laughing emoji to a Twitter user who likened Gates’ essay on “clean hydrogen” to bottling the tooth fairy and cloning Santa Claus.
Musk – a long-time supporter of solar energy – responded to that tweet with a laughing emoji.
On Gates’s blog, the billionaire tycoon, after noting that most of the 70 million tons of hydrogen the world currently uses is produced from fossil fuels, writes that “cleaning” hydrogen would save 1.6 percent. of the global emissions for which it is responsible.
Electrolysis is the process of using solar, wind or nuclear energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
“Four different electrolysis technologies are being developed, and the price of each has to come down to make the cost of electrolyzed hydrogen competitive,” Gates writes in his book. blog†
According to the Department of Energy, hydrogen currently costs $5 per kilogram when produced via electrolysis. Pictured above is the first tweet that elicited a response from Musk
“Up to four times more storage infrastructure will need to be built at $637 billion by 2050 to provide the same amount of energy as fossil fuels,” reports Earth.org. Pictured above is a response to another user’s tweet on the platform
However, this type of technology is currently not commercially viable.
Emanuele Taibi, head of Power Sector Transformation Strategies at the International Renewable Energy Agency, told the World Economic Forum that “renewable energy technologies [have] reached a level of maturity… that today enables competitive renewable electricity generation around the world, [which is] a precondition for competitive production of green hydrogen energy.
‘However, electrolyzers are still used in’ [a] very small scale, needing to scale up three orders of magnitude over the next three decades to triple their costs.’
According to the Department of Energy, hydrogen currently costs $5 per kilogram when produced via electrolysis.
The agency’s Hydrogen Shot aims to cut that cost by 80 percent to $1 per kilogram by 2031.
A secondary option Gates points out is to make green hydrogen using existing fossil fuel methods, but then capture the CO2 produced before it enters the atmosphere – yet he writes that it “may never be economical to Capturing 100 percent of the released carbon’ using existing technologies.’
Another major hurdle to scaling up the use of hydrogen as a green energy source is storage.
“Up to four times more storage infrastructure will need to be built by 2050 at a cost of $637 billion to provide the same amount of energy as fossil fuels,” reports Earth.org
The Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures supports a number of companies – including one called Electric hydrogen which recently announced a $198 million round of funding – to realize clean hydrogen.