Hacker News Reader

Comment by RickJWagner | Hacker News Reader

I own 3 Toyota products and a Honda.

I have great confidence in Toyota's vision and engineering excellence. (This coming from a long-time motoring enthusiast.) If they see hydrogen as the future, I take it seriously.

View on HN

I tend to agree - if Toyota wants to develop in hydrogen, why should it matter? And by the way li-on isn’t something you just walk down to Walgreens, buy a palette of a123 batteries and put them in your car. It’s a significant supply chain hurdle that Tesla still has a non trivial cost containment issue despite having a gigafactory or two, giving them an advantage over other manufacturers who don’t have access to the supply chain the way Tesla does. If you look at ev production at scale with numerous parties with at scale products, it’s unlikely that this picture is complete without a significant presence in China. So there you have the real reason why Toyota’s strategy makes sense... what if in ten years, you can’t buy the lithium to make your own batteries? What if you can’t even buy an assembled battery? What if you have to buy the entire vehicle from China to be in the ev space? Not convinced? I present to you as evidence, Tesla gigafactory 3... you guys might want to start thinking about Toyota’s point of view.

Me too (Toyota owner all my life), although I can’t figure out/don’t understand the emissions fight they’re currently in regarding CA standards.

Because Toyota never makes mistakes?

As a fellow Toyota fan and owner I'll take them seriously when they start building industrial scale hydrogen refineries and transportation systems on par with Tesla's supercharger network or better.

Until then these are all compliance cars at best. Doesn't matter how well engineered the implementation is if the design is impractical or of negligible benefit.

The only argument that moves the needle for me on Hydrogen at all is that we have tons of it via seawater, whereas we're not sure if we have enough lithium to produce electric cars for everyone in perpetuity.

Why do they need to be industrial scale? Hydrogen electrolysis is fast, efficient, and can be done on any scale. Centralized production is likely never going to be as efficient as distributed production, simply because there are more losses in distribution than there are in electrolysis.

Hydrogen electrolysys can't be done efficiently at home. And the efficiency even in industrial plants is pretty bad, about 50% to produce hydrogen compressed for car use, and that doesn't include the fuel cell efficiency that brings the total efficiency to about 30%. Batteries have much better efficiency.

I have efficiently done it at an industrial lab with commonly available industrial electricity rates ($.065/kWh). 93% efficiency using a solid oxide cell that was made in 2008. I don't know where you're getting your information but it's wrong. $0.116/kWh after conversion back into electricity.

If I were doing it at home with residential rates, I would be paying $0.125/kWh, which is still feasible, but more expensive than gasoline at the moment. With the way solar prices are dropping, that won't last long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien... "Efficiency of modern hydrogen generators is measured by energy consumed per standard volume of hydrogen (MJ/m3), assuming standard temperature and pressure of the H2. The lower the energy used by a generator, the higher its efficiency would be; a 100%-efficient electrolyser would consume 39.4 kilowatt-hours per kilogram (142 MJ/kg) of hydrogen,[23] 12,749 joules per litre (12.75 MJ/m3). Practical electrolysis (using a rotating electrolyser at 15 bar pressure) may consume 50 kW⋅h/kg (180 MJ/kg), and a further 15 kW⋅h (54 MJ) if the hydrogen is compressed for use in hydrogen cars."

What about your sources for 93% efficiency?

93% is what I got in my own experiments with an used cell I bought that was made in 2008. My cell is a slight materials variant of the NASA BSC cell which was also tested at 93% efficiency.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20090013708

Here is a commercially available cell stack that is getting 88% efficiency, despite being a reversible cell (ie not optimized for electrolysis).

http://www.helmeth.eu/index.php/technologies/high-temperatur...

This research system has already demonstrated 75% efficiency round-trip. That is electricity-to-hydrogen-to-electricity. 97% efficient in electrolysis alone.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0333-2

Even with a 93% efficiency adding the energy needed to compress the hydrogen and the fuel cell efficiency you arrive at an efficiency of 48%, pretty much half as the batteries.

I can dispute those numbers too but that is beside the point. Batteries are probably good enough in energy density for most car users, and they do have an efficiency advantage (not as great as you're trying to portray but still better). For 99% of car buyers, that's a better option.

But fuel cells still have a place where energy density is a major concern. That's likely to be the case for commercial vehicles, where long recharge times and low ranges are unacceptable.

Honda is experimenting in hydrogen too, fwiw.

How do you explain that Toyota supports the Trump administration when they fight California for cleaner energy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com