So long as China is willing to live in a toxic industrial hellzone and make various initially unprofitable moves, their prices for goods and labor will be too good for the free marketeers and slash 'n burn corporate reorg guys to say no to; but the nationalists and nativists will always be jumpy about it...
I've always thought the solution to this was rather simple.
Just require that anything imported into the US for consumption be produced under the same EPA rules as if they had been made here.
Want those cheap Chinese iPads? No problem, but they have to be made in China the same way they would have to be made here, no toxic dumping.
Companies might find it cheaper to bring back production than to ensure clean production overseas.
You assume the growth curve of solar is purely linear and will always be purely linear, and you're already wrong. There are knees in the curve. Those knees are system price points. Above $70,000 for an installation (a decade ago) and you don't get very many new installations. At $50,000 you get more. At $30,000, still more. At today's price of under $10,000 you get many more. Many many more.
Where is this $10K system you speak of? I've priced solar twice, two years ago and again this year. $10K of grid connected solar PV will get you about 2,500 watts of generating power, which does almost nothing to the total power bill.
My home needs a 8kw system to displace 1/2 of my total electrical needs (it was 1/3 of my needs before I replaced my HVAC system this year).
The cost to install that is about $32,000. It would save me about $180 a month in my power bill. That is not a good investment.
If you triple 0.17% for the next 5 years you'll be at 41%.
You left part of your formula off... how often are you tripling?
Once a year? That is what your math says... but the flaw is that while it holds up in the math, it doesn't hold up anywhere else.
Do the math on how many PV panel factories would have to be built, how much land would have to be used, and how much money would have to be spent, to do that.
Coal hasn't even doubled in 20 years, suggesting that solar PV could triple every year for 5 years is just absurd and not a serious point.
More likely, it will triple over 20 years, perhaps reaching half a percentage point of total power produced in the US. And that would be a big jump, and still be almost meaningless in the big picture.
China is closing coal plants and building nuclear power plants like there's no tomorrow.
They are closing old ones and building new ones. That is an improvement in so far as the new ones are cleaner and more efficient.
Let me know when they have 50 new reactors online, I'll be happy.:)
The price for solar has been dropping steadily and the efficiency of solar cells has been increasing steadily.
So what if it takes another 15 years for solar to reach the 'correct' price point?
Once we get there, it'll change the way power is used and distributed across the country.
The problem with solar is that even when it "gets there", it won't get there at scale.
Yes, once the price hits the right point, I think you'll start to see them installed on many more roofs and other buildings, and this will help with peak power demand.
But what it won't do is provide base load. Do some math on how many square miles of land you need to use to replace the power from a single nuclear reactor. You might be shocked.
The short answer is that to provide all our power needs from solar, assuming we could actually get full use from the panels, which you can't, you'd use about 50% of the total land area on Earth that we currently use for crops, to hold all the panels. (I don't know about you, but I'd rather grow more food)
In truth, because of transmission losses, area use, clouds, etc. you'd probably need a land area equal to the total space used by crops, or about 1/3 of the entire land use by humans on Earth.
You may well be replacing one environmental mess with another. What effect will it have to cover a million square miles with solar panels? To my knowledge, no one has done any studies on that much land use for that purpose.
Perhaps we should, before we go and build them. Just thinking ahead.
For what it is worth, I'm totally on board with using all our available rooftops (that are already "man made") to install PV panels. I see this as an obviously clear goal that we'll end up doing and would be fools not to. We're not there yet, still too expensive, but I do agree we will get there.
But it won't power the grid, it will just reduce the total load on it and keep the demand on the grid from rising as fast. You still need huge base load power stations. Solar is nuts for that, for land use reasons alone, if nothing else.
Yes, Walmart is indeed putting them on their roofs.
First, that is a public relations move. It makes the company look good.
Second, businesses tend to pay more for power than homes do, they are rated differently.
If solar made economic sense, we'd all have it installed already. The city I live in has 250,000 people in it, almost 100,000 homes.
Do you know how many homes in my city have solar power on their roof? I do, there is a local solar association that has been pushing this for a few years now.
Ready for it?
50
Yea, out of almost 100,000 homes, 50 have solar on the roof. It makes no sense, it is hugely expensive, even with the 30% federal tax credit, plus additional local utility credits.
The payback on my home is 15 years, after the tax credits, before interest (or the time value of money). I've priced it, I'll do it once the payback hits 8 years.
Frankly, if solar ever becomes "cheap", great, I think you'll quickly see it on many roofs, just like you now see "everyone" with a smart phone. (ok, not everyone, but more than half the population).
In such a case, I'm all for it, no worries, totally on board.
Texas does make wind power, but not as much as you think, the use of the word "huge" is misleading. It is huge in terms of other state's wind production, but it is tiny in terms of total power produced.
Is this counting only energy company production or people/companies reducing their consumption from the grid by augmenting it with solar? If so, how?
According to Wikipedia, it is the whole country's production, depends on how much you trust the source.
It could be higher, like I said, it could be triple that, would make no difference.
When solar has the chance to become 20% of our power generation then it will be worth serious conversation. Anything in the 1-2% range is just nuts for a serious debate about replacing fossil fuels.
There can be only one?
For now, yes, because the other three on the list are fossil fuels. Fusion is the long term goal, beyond that is anti-matter (which isn't sci-fi, we make it today, at huge cost of course)
For now, for large scale major power sources, there exist 4 choices...
Coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Those are the primary base load power sources for the whole planet, nothing else comes remotely close to those 4.
If your stated goal is to replace fossil fuels in the next 20 years, the only option is nuclear.
Solar isn't evil, it can help, I'm not against it. I'm just doing the math, and the math says that it will be a peak demand power source used in the single digit percentages for a long time to come.
A new solar panel is installed every four minutes? Really?
How many new coal plants were built last year?
Solar accounts for 0.17% of our electric production in this country, tripling it won't make any difference.
The numbers are not on solar's side. Electric production from fossil fuels is up more than 30% in the past 20 years, it isn't being replace by solar, demand is growing faster than solar panels are being installed.
I agree that pollution is bad, I agree that releasing tons of CO2 is probably bad (we don't know for sure, but I don't want to find out the hard way, better to play it safe and not burn it all)
My primary complaint is that people who talk about renewables simply are working from emotion and not from numbers and math. The math is not on renewables side, I'm sorry to say.
A billion people in the world are going to get access to AC and clean water over the next 50 years. It matters not what the USA and Europe do, our populations will be overwhelmed by China and India's use of coal in that time.
We need large scale power sources. Right now, the options are coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.
The sooner environmentalists get off the solar kick and focus on reality, the sooner we can replace fossil fuels with something else. (Which in this case is nuclear, since it is the only option left)
That's a shame, because I happen to think that saving the planet is an important goal.
I just also think that the ways environmentalists go about saying we have to do it will never work.
Look, you'll never get the majority of people to agree to bike instead of drive, to turn the AC off, to live in small houses, etc.
What you can get them to do is to fund projects that allow them to keep their way of life in a greener way.
I would be ok paying more in my electric bill to have cleaner energy solutions. Nuclear reactors do cost more per unit of power than coal and natural gas, so perhaps a carbon tax is in order. That would make nuclear and solar and wind all "cheaper" by comparison and allow capitalism to work by finding the best clean solution.
And that's pretty much a product of the car, that people don't build communities that are liveable with public transport.
In fairness, such communities do exist, both high and low rent versions, so if this is a personal priority, there are places we can move to that allow it.
But you give something else up... Right now, where we live, population density is fairly low. Not too many apartments around here, lots of green space and large houses makes for a nice town. The roads are new and high quality, not too full of cars, and going outside we have multiple parks within walking distance to enjoy.
The shops are put further away on purpose, both so we don't have to see and hear them, and to keep the less affluent away. Yes, that isn't PC to say, but it is the truth.
Sure, but there is a reason we don't have mass transit.
It keeps the riff raff out. By having everything spread out, thus making owning cars a requirement, then only having large houses here, plus no mass transit (they city buss system stops a few miles south of my area), it keeps poor people away.
That isn't very PC to say, but it is the truth of why the city bus system skips this area, even if it runs both east and west of here.
But when we try to convince other people to at least try to do something, people think we are idiots.
That is because if your stated goal is to "save the planet" then you are indeed idiots.
If your goal is to feel good about yourself and do something that is important to you, then you are not an idiot, you're just you, and there is nothing wrong with that.
There simply aren't enough of "you" and way too many of "me" for your efforts to amount to anything.
It is a simple numbers game, one that you will lose... if your goal of course is to "save the planet".
I gave up driving 10 years ago, my wife and I each have a bike. We ride or take the public transit, set a quota on our own diet, watch closely our AC and heater to just have a minimum of comfort.
That's nice, shame it wouldn't work here... there is no mass transit here and things are too far to walk/bike. It is 105 in the summer and 20 in the winter and everything from the kid's school to the stores are all beyond walking/biking distance.
But more power to you.:) I would never dare to tell you to stop, I only ask that you return the favor.:)
Nuclear isn't perfect and it should just be a stop-gap solution until we figure out fusion anyway, it isn't meant to solve all our problems forever.
Do keep in mind that I'm not against solar, but frankly, solar is a tiny fraction of our power generation and even if we increase it by a factor of 10, it will remain a tiny fraction of our power generation.
Wind is fine, water is fine, great... but if you actually want to replace and shut down large coal plants, the only option that we actually have... today... is nuclear... everything else is just pandering to people's emotions, wind, water, and solar are just fringe items that will remain fringe for some time.
If you really want to do solar, you'd put up a very large space based solar array, perhaps at the L1 point between the Earth and the Sun and transmit the power via microwaves back to Earth. Probably via a series of Geostationary sats so they can always be pointed down to Earth and the array can simply switch to whichever geo sat is within visual sight as the Earth rotates.
Sound extreme? It is, but putting PV panels on our roofs doesn't solve our baseline power generation problem and putting a few out in the desert doesn't either.
The only way to replace hundreds of gigawatts of power generation today is with nuclear.
But of course no one wants to hear that, so we have coal plants instead. If solar was so wonderful, we'd have those already.
Musk might even be correct, but one must always be careful around government types, they'll use your own tax dollars to smack you down and have nothing better to do.
Sometimes you have to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, and know when to walk away.
What do you think I'm overlooking? So some big companies are tossing around the idea, that doesn't mean much, either they are just pandering, or hoping for tax dollars to pay for it, or perhaps they are stupid, it has happened before.
There is nothing green about taking hydrogen out of natural gas, it would be greener to just burn the natural gas in our cars, and much easier and cheaper.
Taking it out of water isn't green if we build another coal power plant to do it, but that might fool some people I suppose, who won't notice.
Electrical transmission from plant to home: 98% efficient
Not in the US it isn't... It is about 93% efficient overall, but this of course varies from place to place.
Regardless, the whole point is being missed. Why go to hydrogen in the first place? What are we trying to accomplish?
Is it to just replace gas? If so, why do we want to do that? Is it to be "green"? Frankly, hydrogen isn't green unless you use completely green energy to crack water to get it.
Since we already don't have green energy for our basic needs, what makes everyone think we're going to have green energy for this? Even if we suddenly gained 20 gigawatts of green energy tomorrow, that would be best used to power our general electrical grid and replace coal power plants.
This entire idea is insane, either it is just a PR stunt by Toyota trying to appear "green" or someone is trying to pull a fast one.
The power grid as a whole loses about 7% to transmission losses. Not ideal, but not terrible either.
There is a world of difference between proof of concept and scaling something up for everyone.
Solar is a great proof of concept, but scale is hard to get. Doesn't really matter if you want to power the grid, charge batteries, or produce hydrogen, the amount of power you get for your dollar with solar is just terrible.
Where solar makes the most sense is on roof-tops, providing power during the peak time of day when it is hottest and all the AC units are running.
The real benefit there is it takes some of the peak load off the power grid and this is why so many power companies are providing rebates and credits for the installation of solar panels. It doesn't really make all that much sense, but it does save some stress on the grid during peak demand times.
For cars? Pure electric is clearly the future there, hydrogen is simply not a solution. It is hard to store, hard to ship, explosive, and expensive to produce in volume.
Yes, the expensive part will get a bit cheaper if you do volume, but the only way to do real volume is to take it out of natural gas. That isn't exactly clean, so what is the point?
To take it out of water, at a scale that would matter, would require a power grid far larger than the one we have. We'd have to build hundreds of new power plants to crack all that water to make hydrogen for the millions of cars.
The whole idea is insane, clearly this is just marketing being done by Toyota to appear "green", I can't imagine they actually believe this will be the future, it takes 30 seconds of critical thinking to see all the problems with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: You'll pay to install PV panels, then you'll pay again in your monthly transmission bill.
So you'll end up spending more money to get less power.
Great idea! :)
So long as China is willing to live in a toxic industrial hellzone and make various initially unprofitable moves, their prices for goods and labor will be too good for the free marketeers and slash 'n burn corporate reorg guys to say no to; but the nationalists and nativists will always be jumpy about it...
I've always thought the solution to this was rather simple.
Just require that anything imported into the US for consumption be produced under the same EPA rules as if they had been made here.
Want those cheap Chinese iPads? No problem, but they have to be made in China the same way they would have to be made here, no toxic dumping.
Companies might find it cheaper to bring back production than to ensure clean production overseas.
As for price, solar panel prices have gotten to a point where it becomes a "why not?" as opposed to a "why bother?"
You must have access to super secret PV panel prices.
It still makes no sense, the payback is running about 15 years.
Maybe our power bills are just too cheap, but it currently makes no economic sense.
There are almost 100,000 homes in my city.
50 of them have solar on their roofs.
Why? Because it makes no sense to install them, it costs more than it pays back in a reasonable period of time.
And that is after tax credits, a $5K rebate from the utility company, and net metering with no fees.
You assume the growth curve of solar is purely linear and will always be purely linear, and you're already wrong. There are knees in the curve. Those knees are system price points. Above $70,000 for an installation (a decade ago) and you don't get very many new installations. At $50,000 you get more. At $30,000, still more. At today's price of under $10,000 you get many more. Many many more.
Where is this $10K system you speak of? I've priced solar twice, two years ago and again this year. $10K of grid connected solar PV will get you about 2,500 watts of generating power, which does almost nothing to the total power bill.
My home needs a 8kw system to displace 1/2 of my total electrical needs (it was 1/3 of my needs before I replaced my HVAC system this year).
The cost to install that is about $32,000. It would save me about $180 a month in my power bill. That is not a good investment.
If you triple 0.17% for the next 5 years you'll be at 41%.
You left part of your formula off... how often are you tripling?
Once a year? That is what your math says... but the flaw is that while it holds up in the math, it doesn't hold up anywhere else.
Do the math on how many PV panel factories would have to be built, how much land would have to be used, and how much money would have to be spent, to do that.
Coal hasn't even doubled in 20 years, suggesting that solar PV could triple every year for 5 years is just absurd and not a serious point.
More likely, it will triple over 20 years, perhaps reaching half a percentage point of total power produced in the US. And that would be a big jump, and still be almost meaningless in the big picture.
China is closing coal plants and building nuclear power plants like there's no tomorrow.
They are closing old ones and building new ones. That is an improvement in so far as the new ones are cleaner and more efficient.
Let me know when they have 50 new reactors online, I'll be happy. :)
The price for solar has been dropping steadily and the efficiency of solar cells has been increasing steadily.
So what if it takes another 15 years for solar to reach the 'correct' price point?
Once we get there, it'll change the way power is used and distributed across the country.
The problem with solar is that even when it "gets there", it won't get there at scale.
Yes, once the price hits the right point, I think you'll start to see them installed on many more roofs and other buildings, and this will help with peak power demand.
But what it won't do is provide base load. Do some math on how many square miles of land you need to use to replace the power from a single nuclear reactor. You might be shocked.
The short answer is that to provide all our power needs from solar, assuming we could actually get full use from the panels, which you can't, you'd use about 50% of the total land area on Earth that we currently use for crops, to hold all the panels. (I don't know about you, but I'd rather grow more food)
In truth, because of transmission losses, area use, clouds, etc. you'd probably need a land area equal to the total space used by crops, or about 1/3 of the entire land use by humans on Earth.
You may well be replacing one environmental mess with another. What effect will it have to cover a million square miles with solar panels? To my knowledge, no one has done any studies on that much land use for that purpose.
Perhaps we should, before we go and build them. Just thinking ahead.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20006361-54.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/solar/report-counts-up-solar-power-land-use-needs
For what it is worth, I'm totally on board with using all our available rooftops (that are already "man made") to install PV panels. I see this as an obviously clear goal that we'll end up doing and would be fools not to. We're not there yet, still too expensive, but I do agree we will get there.
But it won't power the grid, it will just reduce the total load on it and keep the demand on the grid from rising as fast. You still need huge base load power stations. Solar is nuts for that, for land use reasons alone, if nothing else.
First, that is a public relations move. It makes the company look good.
Second, businesses tend to pay more for power than homes do, they are rated differently.
If solar made economic sense, we'd all have it installed already. The city I live in has 250,000 people in it, almost 100,000 homes.
Do you know how many homes in my city have solar power on their roof? I do, there is a local solar association that has been pushing this for a few years now.
Ready for it?
50
Yea, out of almost 100,000 homes, 50 have solar on the roof. It makes no sense, it is hugely expensive, even with the 30% federal tax credit, plus additional local utility credits.
The payback on my home is 15 years, after the tax credits, before interest (or the time value of money). I've priced it, I'll do it once the payback hits 8 years.
Frankly, if solar ever becomes "cheap", great, I think you'll quickly see it on many roofs, just like you now see "everyone" with a smart phone. (ok, not everyone, but more than half the population).
In such a case, I'm all for it, no worries, totally on board.
Texas does make wind power, but not as much as you think, the use of the word "huge" is misleading. It is huge in terms of other state's wind production, but it is tiny in terms of total power produced.
Is this counting only energy company production or people/companies reducing their consumption from the grid by augmenting it with solar? If so, how?
According to Wikipedia, it is the whole country's production, depends on how much you trust the source.
It could be higher, like I said, it could be triple that, would make no difference.
When solar has the chance to become 20% of our power generation then it will be worth serious conversation. Anything in the 1-2% range is just nuts for a serious debate about replacing fossil fuels.
There can be only one?
For now, yes, because the other three on the list are fossil fuels. Fusion is the long term goal, beyond that is anti-matter (which isn't sci-fi, we make it today, at huge cost of course)
For now, for large scale major power sources, there exist 4 choices...
Coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Those are the primary base load power sources for the whole planet, nothing else comes remotely close to those 4.
If your stated goal is to replace fossil fuels in the next 20 years, the only option is nuclear.
Solar isn't evil, it can help, I'm not against it. I'm just doing the math, and the math says that it will be a peak demand power source used in the single digit percentages for a long time to come.
How many new coal plants were built last year?
Solar accounts for 0.17% of our electric production in this country, tripling it won't make any difference.
The numbers are not on solar's side. Electric production from fossil fuels is up more than 30% in the past 20 years, it isn't being replace by solar, demand is growing faster than solar panels are being installed.
I agree that pollution is bad, I agree that releasing tons of CO2 is probably bad (we don't know for sure, but I don't want to find out the hard way, better to play it safe and not burn it all)
My primary complaint is that people who talk about renewables simply are working from emotion and not from numbers and math. The math is not on renewables side, I'm sorry to say.
A billion people in the world are going to get access to AC and clean water over the next 50 years. It matters not what the USA and Europe do, our populations will be overwhelmed by China and India's use of coal in that time.
We need large scale power sources. Right now, the options are coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.
The sooner environmentalists get off the solar kick and focus on reality, the sooner we can replace fossil fuels with something else. (Which in this case is nuclear, since it is the only option left)
Those greedy capitalists and bankers just want to make money, they don't care how, makes no difference to them.
I just also think that the ways environmentalists go about saying we have to do it will never work.
Look, you'll never get the majority of people to agree to bike instead of drive, to turn the AC off, to live in small houses, etc.
What you can get them to do is to fund projects that allow them to keep their way of life in a greener way.
I would be ok paying more in my electric bill to have cleaner energy solutions. Nuclear reactors do cost more per unit of power than coal and natural gas, so perhaps a carbon tax is in order. That would make nuclear and solar and wind all "cheaper" by comparison and allow capitalism to work by finding the best clean solution.
Every time you try to hurt the rich, you may well succeed, but you'll hurt the poor far more.
And that's pretty much a product of the car, that people don't build communities that are liveable with public transport.
In fairness, such communities do exist, both high and low rent versions, so if this is a personal priority, there are places we can move to that allow it.
But you give something else up... Right now, where we live, population density is fairly low. Not too many apartments around here, lots of green space and large houses makes for a nice town. The roads are new and high quality, not too full of cars, and going outside we have multiple parks within walking distance to enjoy.
The shops are put further away on purpose, both so we don't have to see and hear them, and to keep the less affluent away. Yes, that isn't PC to say, but it is the truth.
It keeps the riff raff out. By having everything spread out, thus making owning cars a requirement, then only having large houses here, plus no mass transit (they city buss system stops a few miles south of my area), it keeps poor people away.
That isn't very PC to say, but it is the truth of why the city bus system skips this area, even if it runs both east and west of here.
Yes, of course, that is obvious. I wonder how many environmentalists would welcome that?
But when we try to convince other people to at least try to do something, people think we are idiots.
That is because if your stated goal is to "save the planet" then you are indeed idiots.
If your goal is to feel good about yourself and do something that is important to you, then you are not an idiot, you're just you, and there is nothing wrong with that.
There simply aren't enough of "you" and way too many of "me" for your efforts to amount to anything.
It is a simple numbers game, one that you will lose... if your goal of course is to "save the planet".
I gave up driving 10 years ago, my wife and I each have a bike. We ride or take the public transit, set a quota on our own diet, watch closely our AC and heater to just have a minimum of comfort.
That's nice, shame it wouldn't work here... there is no mass transit here and things are too far to walk/bike. It is 105 in the summer and 20 in the winter and everything from the kid's school to the stores are all beyond walking/biking distance.
But more power to you. :) I would never dare to tell you to stop, I only ask that you return the favor. :)
Maybe just on Monday...
Regardless if he is correct or not, poking the bear is not usually a wise course of action.
Do keep in mind that I'm not against solar, but frankly, solar is a tiny fraction of our power generation and even if we increase it by a factor of 10, it will remain a tiny fraction of our power generation.
Wind is fine, water is fine, great... but if you actually want to replace and shut down large coal plants, the only option that we actually have... today... is nuclear... everything else is just pandering to people's emotions, wind, water, and solar are just fringe items that will remain fringe for some time.
If you really want to do solar, you'd put up a very large space based solar array, perhaps at the L1 point between the Earth and the Sun and transmit the power via microwaves back to Earth. Probably via a series of Geostationary sats so they can always be pointed down to Earth and the array can simply switch to whichever geo sat is within visual sight as the Earth rotates.
Sound extreme? It is, but putting PV panels on our roofs doesn't solve our baseline power generation problem and putting a few out in the desert doesn't either.
The only way to replace hundreds of gigawatts of power generation today is with nuclear.
But of course no one wants to hear that, so we have coal plants instead. If solar was so wonderful, we'd have those already.
Sometimes you have to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, and know when to walk away.
Please let me know where I'm missing it.
Taking it out of water isn't green if we build another coal power plant to do it, but that might fool some people I suppose, who won't notice.
Electrical transmission from plant to home: 98% efficient
Not in the US it isn't... It is about 93% efficient overall, but this of course varies from place to place.
Regardless, the whole point is being missed. Why go to hydrogen in the first place? What are we trying to accomplish?
Is it to just replace gas? If so, why do we want to do that? Is it to be "green"? Frankly, hydrogen isn't green unless you use completely green energy to crack water to get it.
Since we already don't have green energy for our basic needs, what makes everyone think we're going to have green energy for this? Even if we suddenly gained 20 gigawatts of green energy tomorrow, that would be best used to power our general electrical grid and replace coal power plants.
This entire idea is insane, either it is just a PR stunt by Toyota trying to appear "green" or someone is trying to pull a fast one.
There is a world of difference between proof of concept and scaling something up for everyone.
Solar is a great proof of concept, but scale is hard to get. Doesn't really matter if you want to power the grid, charge batteries, or produce hydrogen, the amount of power you get for your dollar with solar is just terrible.
Where solar makes the most sense is on roof-tops, providing power during the peak time of day when it is hottest and all the AC units are running.
The real benefit there is it takes some of the peak load off the power grid and this is why so many power companies are providing rebates and credits for the installation of solar panels. It doesn't really make all that much sense, but it does save some stress on the grid during peak demand times.
For cars? Pure electric is clearly the future there, hydrogen is simply not a solution. It is hard to store, hard to ship, explosive, and expensive to produce in volume.
Yes, the expensive part will get a bit cheaper if you do volume, but the only way to do real volume is to take it out of natural gas. That isn't exactly clean, so what is the point?
To take it out of water, at a scale that would matter, would require a power grid far larger than the one we have. We'd have to build hundreds of new power plants to crack all that water to make hydrogen for the millions of cars.
The whole idea is insane, clearly this is just marketing being done by Toyota to appear "green", I can't imagine they actually believe this will be the future, it takes 30 seconds of critical thinking to see all the problems with it.