Have anyone explored the viability of recycling the heat produced in step 7 to provide the heat needed for step 3?

A third barrier is competence. The number of people who truly understand semiconductor manufacturing and are able to build a recipe for a fab is not huge. Even with all the right equipment your fabs performance can be niserable if you are not able to tune the process right.

Doing so will destroy the value of ARM. Semicos are currently tied to ARM, not because they particularly want to but none want to be the first to try to take the hit on making a different platform viable. If a new ARM howner forces the issue by denying licensing then it will take less than 3 years before you get a huge surge of RISCV products with enough capital behind it to ensure a successful transition. Semicos will be vey happy to avoid ARM royalties.

5-15% loss in ac-dc-ac conversions (Batteries are all DC, the grid and most major consumers are AC, including things like EVs. Then a ~10% charge/discharge loss. Modern Li-ion have very high coloumbic efficiency, similar to the numbers you quote, but the do not have that great voltaic efficiency. You need to charge the battery at a higher voltage than the voltage you get out, hence there is a loss. A ~20% loss in a battery storage system is quite reasonable.

The size of your algorithm in code size does not tell me anything as to how expensive it is to implement in hardware. To estimate costs these are the steps you need to take:
First off you need a design team capable of handling the implementation. You need digital design team that can come up with an architecture and a design for your problem. If you are uanble to do any of this work yourself, expect to spend a a few hundredK on a prestudy to get to a rough project plan with estimates for cost.

Once underway in addition to design, you need a DV team to verify the design pre-silicon (Never let designers verify their own code, DV is a completely different job) . you need a back-end team to translate the design into a chip layout complete with power and clock support circuitry, you need test and production engineers to make the device manufacturable and you need a team to build a a verification platform and PCB for the device so you can test it. A real world device will also need some IO which you will likely buy as IP. You also need cell library and memory IPs and likely clock and power as well. I am assuming you will be doing your own software and driver work.

Once the design is done to your chosen process you will get hit by NRE charges to make the recticles. This varies with process. Current day mid range processes (~45nm) will likely cost you 1-2 million US$ for a recticle set. It is good practice to assume you will need at least two sets as mistakes WILL happen. , you also need to pay some NRE for packaging and test boards. This is not too bad and you can get far with a few 100K. If your project calls for very few devices and cost is not important, then you can look for MPW shuttles (Multi Project Wafer). These are common in academia and have multiple design sharing a recticle. This has the impact that your schedules just got very firm, and the yield will be very very low, so the cost pr. chip will be high. You will also have to deal with a smaller max die size. as the recticle needs to be divided into even sized slots.

In general there are very few applications where an ASIC makes sense.

Producing H2 by electrolysis is ~60-80% efficient. The fuel cell to convert it back to electricity is around 40-60% efficient, so the total system efficiency is ~35%*, which is worse than a battery system that has around 80% charging efficiency. We can assume the H2 system is a factor 2 or 3 less efficient than the battery system. 6x is way off.

Hydrogen for transportation is for this reason not really in competition with batteries (Unless we just cannot produce enough batteries which is a real concern). Hydrogen is a potential competitor with diesel and other such fossil fuels where batteries are not applicable due to the weight and cost.

The fundamental difference is that the incremental cost/weight to add energy capacity to the vehicle is much less with hydrogen than with batteries which can enable applications where batteries won't work. Think ships, planes (Still a long way out though), long haul heavy goods road transport.

*) As most FCEVs have buffer batteries a little bit of this will be lost to charging inefficiency, but most will still be used directly from the fuel cell so it is not much, furthermore about half of the charging inefficiency is from rectification which is not needed in the FCEV as the fuel cell produce DC.

Most semiconductor SoC devvices have a single silicon supporting multiple SKUs. This means there is a significant amount of configuration of the device that needs to happen without allowing the customer to interfere. This configuration can be disabling parts of the hardware or limiting performance etc. This is done simply because it is expensive to make and verify a die, and it is better to accept a bit worse margins on the downrated parts than to make actual cost-down dies to meet those markets.

While it would be possible to open the source code for the code performing this configuration. Doing so does not really offer many advantages to the vendor and a lot of disadvantages:

If opened it still would not allow for modification by the customer. The code must be signed and running it must be enforced, otherwise the customer would be able to override the vendor configuration

You have to deal with irate customers complaining they cannot unlock their hardware. (If you can't see the code that locks it you won't readily see the locked hardware either)

You get irate customers that wants to remove or alter your bootloader. (Which is obviously no-go)

The only upside is that you might be able to sell to a few die-hard open source advocates if you can convince them that there isn't actually anything hidden still, and they do not fall into the irate camps listed above (Unlikely IMO)

Whine? I am not complaining. I am quite in favor of subidizing EVs to accellerate their adoption.

Sure, we just happen to have a 60 year head start on raising taxes on cars ;-)

That is not true. The most populous region in Norway is around Oslo. There are about 2M people living within commuting distance to Oslo. This region usually sees a few weeks each winter with temperatures around -10 to -20C throughout the day, with a more common winter temperature of -5 to 0C. Winter is roughly end of december to early/mid march.

Bergen is one of the mildest climates in all of norway. I lived in Bergen for 10 years, it was hardly ever any show in winter. Oslo is colder but still reasonable. In the interior it can get a lot colder, but less people live there as well.

I haven't seen any data that shows reduced life (as in wear-out time, capacity does certainly get reduced) of BEV batteries in norwegian climate. I actually think this is more an issue in really hot climates, heat kills the cells, cold just reduces performance temporarily.

We do tend to see 20-40% less range on BEVs in winter. However the most range degradation comes for short trips as a lot of energy is spent heating the car, so on longer trips where the range is more critical the degradation drops. Still BEVs that can reliably do more than 350km (220 miles) on a charge in winter are few and far between.

Of course Norway isn't as cold as Wisconsin I think. Admittably I have only been there once (A cold experience at -40C, a temperature I never see here). but statistics seems to support that your winters are way colder than norwegian winters (At least on the cost where most people lives) , so your experiences may certanly differ from mine.

Tax exemptions are subsidies in my book. If you want to use different words, that's up to you.

There are carbon taxes on fuel that I did not include in the above list, but avoiding those are certanly an added benefit to BEV buyers. (1l of gasoline costs ~USD 1.5-2 in norway. 80% of that is taxes) . In the larger scheme of things fuel costs are likely among the lesser benefit the BEVs get here. For an average driver this benefit amounts to ~USD 1-2000 annually. Most drivers spend more on tolls than on fuel.

Norway is not a socialist country.

Absolutely, but unless your country starts out with high car taxes it will be very hard for others to replicate these results. It is much more popular to give a tax exemption than to give a tax hike. The reason Norway got here is that we have historically had very very high car taxes, then essentially dropped them all for BEVs.

A history note: The reason that was done was to support Think! a now defunct norwegian BEV startup from a time when there were much less EVs than today.