this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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Critics of hydrogen cars are repeating the same criticisms of EVs just before they took off. Same can be said of wind power or solar power. In reality, it's just the same anti-green and anti-progress BS you hear about any new green technology. It's all the same story.
Take it easy, it's a bit more complex than that. Slow as it might be, everyone understands you can charge an EV even with just a regular 15A 120V plug. Stuck at your father in laws out in the country? They've still got a plug.
Generally, people are uncomfortable with high pressure explosive gases. I think overall, hydrogen gas a better shot in industrial/heavy trucking markets than consumer transport.
No it isn’t. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s much harder to wire up millions of charging stations with the necessary amount of power, than to deal with high pressure gas. We’ve just normalized the danger of high-voltage electricity. In reality, this is just as safe if not more so, and a lot easier to pull off.
Erm, no buddy. Everyone's entitled to their incorrect opinion, and this one's a doozy.
How much big of a tank of H2 do you need to effectively equal the energy capacity of a lithium ion pack? If the tank needs to be reasonably sized, how high is the pressure? How do you ensure hydrogen embrittlement isn't a problem on both the tanks and the transport pipes/storage tanks? How does pressure correlate with exfiltration?
Flying wires is a walk in the park, especially competitively.
A 700 bar tank will store more than energy than a similarly sized li-ion battery.
As an energy storage system for cars, the problem is already solved. People are just repeating the same anti-progress rhetoric that was used against battery cars.
700 bar?? 10000 pounds/in^2??
No, you've unfortunately lost your grip.
We've been doing it for over a decade now. It is shown to be safe.
No thanks. I'd much prefer electrified mass transit. I'm saying this as a former manufacturing engineer, there's quite a bit that can go wrong with cyclically pressurized vessels in subtle ways that are difficult to non-destructively evaluate.
This is not the path forward for anyone but heavy industry.
Then you are just being old and outdated. It is totally safe.
I understand your point, and disagree. Are you qualified to really understand this issue, or an opinionated enthusiast?
You can plug an EV into an outlet in your garage. No way could hydrogen be easier than that.
You have to have a garage to begin with. People have created a distorted grasp of what infrastructure even is.
Two thirds of Americans have a garage. Roughly zero can refuel hydrogen cells at home.
2/3 is still not 100%. And you can refuel at home if you really wanted. In fact, you can even refuel a gasoline car at home. But in reality this was never a major selling point. It's just the crutch BEV fans are relying on. The refueling infrastructure is the only thing that really matters.
Most EV users charge at home, this is absolutely a major selling point, and they would all lose this ability if they switched to hydrogen. Which is why they aren't switching to hydrogen.
And a lot of people can't charge at home. You will still need public stations.
In the end, this is just the whining of a handful of rich people. If it is more straightforward to get everyone to refuel at public stations, it is the better solution.
You will need public stations with hydrogen, too. But with BEV, you need a lot fewer stations. Which is why switching to BEVs is a lot more straightforward.
You will need millions of charging stations everywhere. Both AC and DC charging stations. It is actually less straightforward once you go beyond home recharging.
That's ridiculous, there aren't anywhere near a million gas stations in the US, and you will need a lot fewer charging stations than gas stations.
That's the point: If you can refuel instead of recharge, you don't need that many stations. The number of hydrogen stations would be the same as the number of gas stations. And you have it backwards: You need vastly more charging stations than refueling stations. The US has something like 150k stations, and it's not even close to being enough.
EV users charge at home. That means they make far fewer trips to charging stations than do hydrogen or gasoline users. In fact, many EV users never go to a charging station and only charge at home. Which means you need far fewer charging stations than refuelling stations.
Again, not everyone can do this. You will have to have public chargers. Plus fast charging for long distance driving. This will still require millions of charging stations, far more than any technology that allows you to refuel.
If there is less demand for charging stations than refuelling stations, then it is impossible that you will need more charging stations than refuelling stations.
One refueling station can serve thousands of customers, but a charging station needs multiple hours to charge each car. So you need far fewer gas stations. This is why the economics of gas stations worked out in the first place. Before, people bought tanks of gasoline and refueled at home. The gas station model was cheaper.
It takes 20 minutes to charge at a Tesla Supercharger. And their economics are working great, in fact Supercharger stations are more profitable than gas stations.
You mean from 20% to 80% charge? Which is realistically only 150 miles of gained range, and that's assuming everything is working at full power. The alternative gives you 0-100% in 5 minutes consistently. And best of all, it can be scaled up to trucks and above without suddenly realizing you need megawatts of power per station.
In reality, the charging solution is much harder. We've just normalized the idea of using electricity to charge things when it is actually a bigger challenge than dealing with fuels.
"Hydrogen will never work, there are no hydrogen gas stations in my city"
Lordy.
LOL
Meanwhile EVs have taken up a significant share of the market while hydrogen is still niche.
BEVs were a niche for about 100 years.
BEVs were around early on, but petrol vehicles overtook them. Battery technology is finally practical for automobiles and it's mainly a matter of increasing energy density/range. Hydrogen, on the other hand, has a lot more obstacles to clear if it wants to get anywhere near the adoption level of even current BEVs.
Also, last I checked, hydrogen vehicles end up using a battery anyway which is charged by the hydrogen, then the battery is what powers the motor. You might as well just use a petrol plug-in hybrid, especially since more energy-dense batteries will mean more and more trips can be covered by the battery alone. In fact, that's my situation right now. I have a plug-in hybrid petrol vehicle and it covers the vast majority of my trips on battery alone.
The only reason why we see BEVs today is the obsession to be green. If that wasn't there, BEVs would still be dead. It has not come close to solving the fundamental limitations of batteries. One of which is that you need a huge charge infrastructure, something that will be more expensive than its backers think.
Hydrogen cars do not necessary need a battery, and only use it for regen power. This is the equivalent of a hybrid car. A hydrogen car is also 100% zero emissions unlike a petrol car. The main point is that a hydrogen car fully replicates the experience of an ICE car. For millions of people, that is an absolute necessity.
BEVs have their advantages beyond being green. I wake up with a full "tank" every morning, I can use the heater or air conditioner without emitting carbon monoxide so I can do this in my enclosed garage, the electricity is cheaper than gasoline (plus I can get free charging at work), and if you have a BEV then the vehicle is a lot simpler to implement which means more companies can make vehicles since the barrier to entry is lower and thus increased competition should drive down prices (look out for China, provided governments don't make tariffs too high).
Not everyone can recharge at home. Hydrogen have all of the same advantages except recharging at home (and even this is a "kinda", because home refueling is possible, and plug-in cars exist).
The problem is that we are hitting the limits of the BEV, and no amount of handwaving is going to make the problems go away. This mirrors the push for ethanol powered cars, and sudden realization that we cannot grow enough corn to make it happen. And fantasies about how China or whatever solving the problems is just a repeat of cellulosic ethanol, which was suppose to magically solve the problems of ethanol production.
Storage and transportation of hydrogen continue to be the limiting factor for hydrogen and those hurdles don't seem like they can be cleared easily. Only Toyota has really given it much of a try and the hydrogen stations are available in very limited areas. Plus with how complicated the stations are and the problems they can encounter, I've heard they go out of order pretty frequently. Plus the number of vehicles that can fuel at the same time is limited. Given how the hydrogen has to be pressurized or liquefied or whatever, I'm struggling to understand how a home setup would work.
The cool thing about batteries is that there are all sorts of materials to choose from. For example, sodium-ion batteries are hitting the scene now. There are trade-offs, but options are there. Yes, not everyone can recharge at home, but it's a lot easier to set up a charging station than a hydrogen fuel station (or a gas station, for that matter). I think the best option at this point is a plug-in hybrid petrol vehicle, though the downside is the complexity of the drivetrain.
Those are wildly exaggerated. The main limitation is that society hasn't invested enough in hydrogen infrastructure. At least not yet. The problems would quickly go away if we did.
You also forget that we've poured many billions of dollars into electrification and battery production. That amount of investment would have solved a lot of those limitations.
As green hydrogen is made from water, there is basically no battery chemistry that can rival it in terms of availability. It is basically the best energy storage mechanism of this type already. Saying that batteries can get better is just misdirection. Also, you can have plug-in hydrogen cars too. The natural path is probably hybrids -> PHEVs -> plug-in FCEVs. Pure BEVs are in many ways a side-trip.
You're downplaying the efforts involved in making hydrogen mainstream. Hydrogen infrastructure would be more costly to build out because you need specialized tanks and mechanisms to pressurize/liquefy hydrogen to make it easier to store. You'd also need to convert gas stations to hydrogen stations which is very costly. Hydrogen fuel stations can't serve as many vehicles as a petrol station at a time and hydrogen being less dense means needing a much bigger tank to serve a day's worth of vehicles. Then there's the matter of generating hydrogen. Most productive processes now not are green.
The money poured into improved batteries has many applications other than vehicles. Hydrogen doesn't have as many consumer applications. It's not necessarily true that more investment in hydrogen would solve its problems because there may be roadblocks you're not anticipating. Battery tech is improving all the time, but you're calling it misdirection even though hydrogen isn't anywhere near as viable. Water is more available than petrol, but that doesn't mean hydrogen is more practical than petrol.
At the end of the day, you are just turning sunlight/wind and water into a fuel. The marginal cost is nearly zero. Which is why the development trajectory will be the same as the rise of wind and solar energy. Both of those ideas also had nearly zero marginal cost. As a result, you can expect hydrogen fuel to be extreme cheap and basically inexhaustible. That is a major advantage and there is nothing batteries can ever do to match that.
I wonder if you are projecting here: Hydrogen, not batteries, have many more applications. You can't even make the steel used to make a car without a reducing agent like hydrogen. Same is true of the metals in the battery itself. So if we want to hit zero emissions for real, hydrogen is mandatory, but batteries are not. In fact, BEVs are totally dependent on green hydrogen to real reach zero emissions. Everything from industry to long-duration energy storage all requires hydrogen. You can skip BEVs altogether but you cannot avoid hydrogen.
There's not really a ready supply of green hydrogen though?
That's only one of many problems. Storage and transportation are other major problems.
Difficulties with storage and transportation are manageable. The only reason there's no supply is because there's no consumption.