Of course, at some deeper level, there are multiple truths. Most people are not just good or bad. Keeping a dog is fun, but not just fun, it also has disadvantages (my own experience). It might even be difficult to measure whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The dog can’t help that either. But I still like to believe on a metaphysical level in truths, in certainties. That dog, it really does exist. Or am I just being old-fashioned?

For instance, questions are often asked about hydrogen-powered driving. I will try to explain the pros and cons of hydrogen. First, a hydrogen car is also an electric car. Only the energy is not stored in batteries, but in hydrogen tanks. The big advantage is that hydrogen refuelling is faster than ‘fuelling’ electricity. The big problem is that to make hydrogen ánd convert it back to electricity there are two possibilities:

The first option is to convert fossil fuel to hydrogen. This is called “grey” hydrogen and is actually an economic as well as an environmental offence. Because it is extremely expensive and very inefficient. You can then drive cheaper and cleaner on ordinary diesel or petrol. But this is the ype of hydrogen that is currently available.

The second option is to extract hydrogen from electricity, such as from solar panels or offshore wind turbines. This is called “green” hydrogen. This hydrogen is virtually non-existent today. But this too is a particularly bad idea. This is because you need 2-4x as many wind turbines to make a car travel the same distance as a battery-electric car. See the chart below. You can see that the hydrogen-powered car travels less than half the distance with the same amount of energy. Even for trucks, this idea has long since gone. Hydrogen might be of interest to companies like Tata-steel that need a very large amount of energy. Particularly unfortunate that the Dutch government is putting so much “energy” into this.

And the argument that it is quicker to “refuel” also starts to become less and less important. ‘Refuelling’ with a battery-electric car is faster and faster. Besides, there are more than 600,000 electric charging stations in Europe and only 250 hydrogen refuelling stations.

The conclusion you can draw is that hydrogen is now sometimes used as an argument for not having to switch to an electric car. So then you are either ill-informed or deliberately spreading disinformation. So now that you have read this column, that is no longer necessary..