This bears out what many here had been predicting for a long time. AndyH may well be right about a future in which cars are refueled at home by total home solar energy stations producing both electricity and hydrogen. But here's what $100M of California taxpayer money buys today with hydrogen.
48 stations now plus 20 expected, 68 stations at an average cost of $1.5M each.
Leave aside the H2 reliability issues, because remember the early days of QC with only Blink stations that were down more than they were up? Let's assume eventual perfect reliability.
An H2 station can fill a car much faster than QC can charge a car, but then it takes a long time for the station to produce and/or pressurize enough H2 to fill the next car, so these stations can only handle 2 cars per hour. With perfect utilization, no queueing and no idle stations, at 16 hours operation per day these 68 stations can do 2,176 fill-ups per day.
Assume a range of 300 miles per fill-up, with the car always pulling up completely empty and leaving completely full. Assume an average of 40 miles driven per day, and 100% of all fueling done at public stations, and that means those stations could support a population of 16,320 H2 cars.
What might $100M have bought instead? A CHAdeMO QC station costs about $40K installed, so that's 2,500 additional QC stations.
QC sessions might take as much as 30 minutes, with probably more 20 minutes or 10 minutes for a quick top up. Assume each station can handle 3 cars per hour, so in 16 hours of perfect utilization these 2,500 stations can do 120,000 charging sessions per day.
EV's do, conservatively, 10% of their charging at public QC stations, with most charging at home. So that's enough charging sessions to support an additional 1,200,000 cars.
So the net effect of spending $100M on H2 stations is to keep an additional 1,184,000 gasoline cars on the road. Not quite the green dividend hydrogen backers had in mind.
I still believe we'll someday get to a future where H2 is an important factor in transportation, and I believe it's proper for the government to spend money to help move towards that future for hydrogen, just as it did for battery electric. But this was the wrong way to spend it. The $100M should have gone to build H2 fueling infrastructure for long distance trucks and intra-city delivery trucks, where fuel cells make more sense today and where the fleet operators could move quickly to self sustaining infrastructure. Then tomorrow's consumer automobiles powered by H2 could start out by leveraging the existing truck fueling infrastructure, as the consumer infrastructure was developed.