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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

> You can probably refuel a hydrogen car at home eventually too. The problem with electric cars is that there's not a single thing that fuel cell cars can't replicate.

First. No, we're not going to have home electrolysis. It would be expensive and inefficient.

And that inefficiency is what will make hydro cars also ran. While EVs are heavier, they are less expensive to operate because there is energy loss in every phase of getting power to the wheels. Extracting hydrogen, compressing it, delivering it to the end point, and extracting power from it, each phase is an efficiency loss.

I already have what I need to charge an EV. It will take all night, but I rarely drive more than 300 miles in a day so that's just fine with me. And it's cheaper than hydro will ever be. Particularly if I put up my own solar to charge it.

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Why not? A company called Lavo is selling such a thing right now.

You should realize that weight steals from your efficiency. A fuel cell can be less efficiency, but still gets you a similar distance on the same amount of energy.

If you can accept that a fuel cell car can match a battery powered one on efficiency, then it’s conceivable that it can be as cheap to drive too.

> A company called Lavo is selling such a thing right now.

A link would be nice. The only thing I could find is a home battery from Lavo which costs $26,000 and doesn't say anything about being able to compress and deliver hydrogen safely to a car.

> If you can accept that a fuel cell car can match a battery powered one on efficiency,

This is laughable. Here's some numbers direct from your Lavo home hydrogen battery:

> "But the process of generating hydrogen by electrolysis using a proton exchange membrane is only about 80 percent efficient, so you lose 20 percent straight away. And at the other end, you'll lose somewhere around half of what you've got stored in the process of converting the hydrogen back into energy through a fuel cell."

So ever watt of power you put into it you get 40% of the power back in the for of go-juice. That's not even accounting for carting all of the hydrogen around the country to keep fuel stations supplied. Nor does it account for any drain from compressing it to deliver it to a car at home.

By comparison, you lose about 15% efficiency pushing the extra 500 pounds of Tesla around.

> If you can accept that a fuel cell car can match a battery powered one on efficiency

Efficiency isn't even close. Why would I accept what is clearly something which only exists in the imaginary future in your head? It's not even in the ballpark.

There are a lot of potential future applications for this technology, but large scale adoption of hydrogen in personal vehicles is not going to happen.

If you can electrolyze water at home, the compression step is not a hard problem anymore. This is more trolling than a serious counterargument. Alternatively, you can have hydrogen piped to the house instead of home electrolysis.

You should understand that fuel cells will continue to improve in efficiency. 40% today will mean 50% tomorrow, and likely 60% at some point in the future. Losses for transport and compression of hydrogen is a surprisingly small amount. In fact, its more efficient to pipe hydrogen over long distances than to transmit electricity. In additional, you can always reuse the heat in either CHP or thermal energy recapture.

It's also important to realize that the electric grid is not perfectly efficient, nor is charging a battery. You're likely to lose around 30% to these types of losses. This figure is going to get worse once grid energy storage and long-distance power transfer become necessary. Combined with your 15% loss pushing the extra battery weight and it really does start to add up. Worse if you look at cold weather performance. The notion that fuel cells can never match batteries on efficiency is a very short-term worldview.

Yes, compression is a solved problem... one which adds additional inefficiency to an already terribly inefficient technology.

And of course your reply here we is more nonsense that hydrogen is going to continue progressing at miraculous rates while the rest of the world stands still.

Your quasi-religion about this is getting bad.

EVs are real. They are here now and don’t need future-magic to be viable and interesting. Hydrogen is essentially magic beans at this point being sold on promises and hot air.

Like everything you said in this conversation, you drastically exaggerate the inefficiencies of fuel cells. In practice, batteries and fuel cells are already close enough that it has ceased to be a major roadblock.

Fuel cells getting more efficient and cheaper is pretty much a default assumption. The only thing that's quasi-religious are the supposedly "pro-environment" people that strongly disagree with the idea of a green technology getting better. It's frankly a cult of batteries, and more than anything they're out of touch with reality.

The problem with EVs is that fuel cells are also real, and already viable and interesting. If EV fans actually paid attention, they'd realize we're heading towards a disruption event and prepare according.

Your dogmatism is funny.

I didn’t have to exaggerate the inefficiencies, the company you pointed me to detailed them quite well. I just pointed out your half-solution required some additional energy input to compress the hydrogen. Unless you are assuming Hydrogen will just magically jump from the home battery to the car?

Fuel cells are real. A viable consumer fuel cell infrastructure with competitive fuel costs? Not so much.

As opposed to being a luddite?

These inefficiencies aren't a big deal, and as I said they'll continue to shrink.

People are also totally unaware of just how much progress is being made. There's a global rush to deploy as much hydrogen infrastructure as possible right now. Too bad some pro-EV people still think it's the year 2015.

Sounds like fuel cells would be best for planes or drones.

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