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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea why auto companies are still pursuing hydrogen cars when BEV is just better?

Because the power grid and city infrastructure do not allow for enough (fast) charging-points. In some European cities, for government BEV goals to be achieved, over 700 charging points have to be placed, every single day, for 5 years.

Now imagine a charging point using more electricity than your avarage household.

The grid is not ready for this and upgrading it might not be the best option.

Also know that there is up to 50% loss of electricity when transporting over long distances (like from wind-farm to the city).

Last, but not least: charging large vehicles like busses or trucks take a long time (and a lot of energy) time that is paid for by the company.

Now look at hydrogen: Produced and stored at decentralized locations, distributed through existing infrastructure, available at existing gas stations: Less stress on the grid, shorter charging times. Produce it where and when is most beneficial, store and transport it to when and where it is required.

I could go on. And probably somebody could go on with a lot of counter points.

However, this just states that 'BEV are just better', as you stated, is just not as simple as just that.

We are in a mobility and energy transition: Nothing about this is going to be easy.

Full disclosure: I operate both a corridor of electric car chargers and a hydrogen fueling station in Europe.

Hydrogen is less efficient than batteries and we already have a the infrastructure for normal overnight charging for battery electric vehicles where the vehicle can be parked of the road.

The only time I need to use a fast charger is when I am on a long trip. Normal commuting, shopping, day trips, works perfectly well charging at home on a 230 V, 16 A circuit (Tesla S 70D).

I agree that there must be more fast chargers but municipalities should concentrate on making it practical for people who live in blocks of flats to charge overnight. Just put a couple of normal Schuko sockets on every lamppost with a simple network controlled contactor. Insist that all parking spaces have such a connector.

Also:

> Also know that there is up to 50% loss of electricity when transporting over long distances (like from wind-farm to the city).

This affects the cost of production of hydrogen just as much as it does the charging of batteries so what is the relevance?

Yes, I agree that you describe a use case that works and is solved for you and many other early adopters. Which is great for the overall acceptance of BEV driving.

Also great to hear you live in a home where you can actually park your car close enough to the building to have the luxury of charging it through your own infrastructure.

I too have these benefits, and, probably like you, I too drive a Tesla vehicle cheaply, thanks to tax incentives and company benefits.

Now let's look at the other 99% of the world:

If you look at the totals, the situation you describe won't hold up in a full electric future. The sum of the energy requirement for all miles driven, against the opportunity to upgrade the network to meet demand, especially in zones where cars usage is dense (cities) and room for net-expansion is difficult or extremely costly (cities).. there is a huge deficiency.

The transportable and storable nature of hydrogen might come as a solution.

Also, I mention the electricity loss on the network because this actually is not well known. This discussion would likely have started with 'with hydrogen, 50% is lost' if I hadn't mentioned it. That's a go-to counter argument for hydrogen, but one that we should not be focusing on.

Seems like both hydrogen and electric charging at large enough scale require infrastructure upgrades. However, there's a huge difference: there are zero hydrogen stations I can find in my state, which makes early adoption impossible. Whereas BEV charging infrastructure exists today at my house: this means there's an easy on-ramp for millions of early adopters, and the future infrastructure upgrades are understood because we've been dealing with industrial-scale electric deployment for decades. Hydrogen cars can't even get to "early adoption" for most people until the infrastructure has been massively built out, but this probably won't happen once BEVs cruise past a certain threshold.

Can you explain how you can say "up to 50% loss of electricity when transporting over long distances"? That seems very high, and in my opinion disinformation.

The first search result I found [1] says an average of 6% among US states, broken down as 2% loss in high voltage transmission and 4% loss in local distribution. The spread among states is from 2.2% total loss to 13%, so even given that wind farms may not be sited as close or optimally as fossil fuel plants, your figure of 50% seems implausible.

[1] http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...

I think the actual number will fall somewhere in the middle. In parallel, we have a shift ongoing to renewable energy sources which deliver their output less steadily than coal/gas/nuclear. So the grid will not only need to adapt for increased car battery charging, it will also need to add grid-level storage to meet demands when wind turbines and solar panels are not supplying enough at the moment. Storing energy in grid-level batteries will incur some additional loss. Most certainly not 50% though.

neals clearly said "50% loss of electricity when transporting" which has nothing to do with intermittent generation and need for storage. He claims to be an operator of electric charging and hydrogen fueling networks, and I was hoping to learn something from his experience, but that unqualified statement undermines his position entirely.

Auto companies that do this are essentialy motor engine companies. At their core, the structure is aligned to the R&D and supply chain required to build a complex machine with thousands of small parts. BEVs threaten this model, as the components are much simpler and require a different organizational structure. Hydrogen engines, in contrast, do not (or to a much lesser extend) so the relevant actors are more inclined to push this idea.

You can use hydrogen as fuel for an ICE. Given that the knowledge of German carmakers is in ICE, transmission and assembly, the have a problem with battery cars, which have no ICE and no (complex) transmission. They would be reduced to their assembly lines.

Hard to say. Their hydrogen efforts seem half-assed at best; so maybe it is just management not yet convinced BEV will work, and assume hydrogen at some point will be good enough so they want to have some experience with it.

Most likely there is internal company politics in many of these car companies which makes it hard to convert to BEV development, it will mean many people losing their jobs, factories closing, etc.

There's the dream of powering ICE cars, with their ease of traversing long ranges, with solar panels thanks to water electrolysis.

That ease only comes from the infrastructure that has already been built over the last few decades. Petrol fueling stations can more easily be converted to electric charging stations than hydrogen filling stations.

If you take a closer look at the complete lifecycle of BEVs they turn out to be not as eco friendly yet- especially those with bigger batteries. hydrogen mighty be reasonable for a while but eventually bevs will come down in price and fcevs will have a hard time to compete. it is hard to say how long this transition will take.

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