Top all-time · #19655
Michael Liebreich
Personal blog · liebreich.comeconomicsscience
Michael Liebreich writes liebreich, a personal blog at liebreich.com about economics and science. Since 2023, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Michael Liebreich's Clean Hydrogen Ladder, which ranks hydrogen uses from unavoidable to uncompetitive, to argue hydrogen is usually a worse choice than other clean technologies.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Michael is an acknowledged thought leader on clean energy, mobility, technology, climate, sustainability and finance. He is the founder and senior contributor of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a member of numerous industry and governmental and multilateral advisory boards, an angel investor and forme
Most-linked posts?
- /hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-19
- /the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-to-v4-1/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-26
What Hacker News says?
There is a very to-the-point diagram called the Hydrogen Ladder [0] that classifies the usefulness of hydrogen by domain. The author makes a good case that, despite its versatility, hydrogen is almost always worse than some other clean technology for any use case. It’s hard to make, store, and use in a scalable/cheap way, and even generous estimates of future progress show a cost curve that requires subsidies basica…
Comment linking /hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/
on “Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check”I agree with most of what you’ve said, but there are some niche uses. https://www.liebreich.com/hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/
Comment linking /hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/
on “Troubled electric truck maker Nikola files for bankruptcy”This is one of the "unavoidable" uses of clean hydrogen, in the Clean Hydrogen Ladder. At the other end of the spectrum ("uncompetitive") you get things like fuel-cell cars. https://liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-...
Comment linking /the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-to-v4-1/
on “Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer”It's not impossible, of course. It's just not a very smart use of hydrogen, classed at "D" in the clean hydrogen ladder (that goes from "A" = unavoidable to "G" = uncompetitive). > Somewhere between half and three quarters of the input power is wasted, and this is not going to change much – there are fundamental thermodynamic constraints. https://www.liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-upda...
Comment linking /the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-to-v4-1/
on “Walmart first major retailer in North America to deploy hydrogen semi truck”Not at the moment. IMO the prospects aren't good, due to the low efficiency (high energy cost) and high equipment cost. There are start-ups working on it (ex: Prometheus Fuels [0], Twelve [1], Synhelion [2], honorable mention to Terraform Industries [3] which is targeting methane). Everything that can be electrified, will be electrified, because it's more efficient. It seems like shipping & aviation are probably the…
Comment linking /the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-to-v4-1/
on “Wind and Solar Will Be 25% of Total U.S. Generating Capacity Within Three Years”