Those are all big ifs. As far as I can tell, Nikola is bringing nothing to the table but hot air. No breakthrough in hydrogen production nor batteries nor engines, nothing that existing car makers do not already have.
An apples to apples comparison to BEV is storing that power in stationary batteries and then charging vehicle batteries from those.
I don't know if hydrogen wins that match up, but I don't think it's clear that it doesn't.
Until then, having a system that end to end is only half as efficient is crazy.
And if in the 10-20 years electricity is actually that cheap, in the years we will have batteries that are WAY better then what we have now and the single advantage of hydrogen will have been reduced by a huge amount.
From all the research on batteries I have done this is complete nonsense. Its the opposite actually, the amount of research and commercial opportunity is exploding.
You now have many university, governments and commercial all investing in batteries. And its not just startups, but its massive investment by starups and large companies.
There is the Battery 500 consortium that is lots of universities working together and some of those labs are commercially sponsors by Tesla and so on. They are focused on doubling the density with amazing lifetime and safer. This is mostly incremental work.
There is the Li-Sulfer program that the DoD has, its specifically at super high density that is another huge effort.
You have large scale improvements moving into current Lithium Ion, Single Cristal Cathodes, Dry Battery Electrode Technology, Tabless Cells, Lithium Doping, synthetic graphite anodes, silicon anodes are in the early stages of development. I could go on.
But on every level from incremental engineering and production improvements all the way to breakthrew chemistry is being worked on massively.
The amount of work on batteries is probably 100x or maybe 1000x higher then on fuel cells.
Scientists are making the mistake of chasing hype, not practical gains in energy storage. Fuel cells are on the "S" part of the cost reduction curve. Despite the difference in funding, we will see extremely fast forward movement in fuel cell technology due to this.
If you look at cost and performance you will see massive improvements year over year. Those improvements will continue.
> Scientists are making the mistake of chasing hype, not practical gains in energy storage.
Actually they are working together very tightly with industry. The Battery 500 consortium consists of research where many of them have a commercial partner and their research directly influences next generation batteries. You literally couldn't be more wrong.
For the Li-Sulfer they are targeting batteries for DoD and NASA that will be very useful and practical for lots of use-cases.
> Fuel cells are on the "S" part of the cost reduction curve. Despite the difference in funding, we will see extremely fast forward movement in fuel cell technology due to this.
Many technologies don't get adopted. I have not seen a falling cost curve anywhere in fuel cells. The fuel cell cars are still incredibly expensive, 100% not competitive and not getting rapidly cheaper. Fuel cells get pushed by China, Korea and Japan governments funds far, far more then any intrinsic cost curve that is happening in the market. Even after decades of constant investment by Japan, they have barley made a blip in the market and when they appear at all they are heavily subsidized all the way from research to the fuel stations.
> Many technologies don't get adopted. I have not seen a falling cost curve anywhere in fuel cells. The fuel cell cars are still incredibly expensive, 100% not competitive and not getting rapidly cheaper. Fuel cells get pushed by China, Korea and Japan governments funds far, far more then any intrinsic cost curve that is happening in the market. Even after decades of constant investment by Japan, they have barley made a blip in the market and when they appear at all they are heavily subsidized all the way from research to the fuel stations.
You suffer from the "not paying attention" disease. In the last few years, the biggest story in cleantech is the rapid reduction in fuel cell, hydrogen production, distribution and storage costs. Basically everything you said is obsolete already.
Nothing is ever going to seem reasonable so long as we keep comically underpaying for gas at the pump.