Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen
h2-view.com
h2-view.com
As a comparison a Tesla Model 3 got 975km (606 miles) at 40 km/h (25 mph) [1]. I can't seem to find any range tests at a similar speed as the Nexo.
I found an EPA dyno test for the Model 3 at 77 km/h (48mph) for 708 km (440 miles).
The Nexo and Model 3 have similar dimension and weight and price, while the Nexo advertises 380 miles vs 353 miles.
It doesn't seem like current fuels cell have much of a energy density / range advantage even though hydrogen itself is much more energy dense, the fuel cell weight and efficiency and high pressure liquid hydrogen tanks must be accounted for.
Also fuel cell cars seem to use a buffer battery and have lower power output than BEV's as current fuel cells can't output as much burst power and can't store power from regenerative braking with out a battery somewhere.
Pretty skeptical about hydrogen fuel cells compared to the continued advancement in battery tech.
1.https://electrek.co/2018/05/27/tesla-model-3-range-new-hyper...
Edit: very good efficiency comparison of hydrogen vs batteries by Volkswagen, which to me shows the biggest issue with using hydrogen in cars the "well to wheel" efficiency:
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...
Model Y will blow the doors off the Nexo in performance due to much larger electric motors.
By that you must mean Tesla bothers to do the full suite of EPA tests instead of accepting a somewhat penalizing multiplier, like how other manufacturers do?
There's no rigging whatsoever and the same option is available for other manufacturers as well. If they bother to do the longer and more demanding test cycle, that is.
My old 2010 Prius was EPA-rated for 50 MPG. If I drove it with kid gloves over flat terrain, I could hit that mileage. If I drove it in a way that doesn't piss other road users off, I would get closer to 46 MPG.
If I was doing 80+ MPH over the Rockies on the Trans-Canada, I'd be getting a cool 35 MPG, because air resistance is very high at those speeds, and because most of my braking was exceeding the regenerative capacity of the car.
The Tesla numbers are correct and verifiable, actually. The problem is that the EPA "highway" test is designed to capture the "average highway mile" driven by a US vehicle (which makes sense, it was designed to inform purchasers of aggregate fuel use). Here's the driving schedule:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/hwfetdds....
Note that it never goes above 60mph, and spends most of its time between 40 and 50. This isn't wrong, but it corresponds to an urban highway commute (again, which is pretty much the "average highway mile").
The problem is that this does NOT match what typical consumers think of as "highway driving", meaning blasting 75mph+ down an open road. So people get in their Model 3's and measure their consumption at those speeds and it doesn't match.
And it's true that other EV manufacturers (Ford, especially -- the Mach E actually does somewhat better than sticker consumption on the highway) chose not to run the full test and used other methods that put a higher number on their stickers. And in context that's probably more informative.
But nothing was "rigged". In fact Teslas in stop-and-go urban commute traffic really do get close to their sticker mileage. It's just that no one cares because one's battery doesn't run out on an urban commute before you get home to charge it. Ironically, EV owners in this case care LESS about efficiency than gas owners.
There are caveats. The lower end Model 3s hit their estimates pretty reliably. The Performance trim usually misses by a pretty big margin for most people. There are exceptions to every rule, but I owned a P3D and hung out with other P3D owners as well, and this was a commonly shared experience.
IIRC there was some youtube video a year or two back that tested a few variants on a track using what they claimed to be a replica of the EPA highway test, and the cars came out almost dead on.
There have been some independent tests and IIRC the consensus is that the standard range Model 3 was rated pretty accurately, and the Performance trim was rated something like 25-30 miles too high compared to reality.
But again, you're using the words "on the highway" to reflect what I assume to be your driving habits in rural open road conditions and not the test that was actually performed to produce the numbers in the product specs. And that was my point. It's not about advertising fidelity at all, it's about regulation and its mismatch with the expectations of a modern EV driver.
One of the largest producers in the world (CF Industries in Louisiana) has committed to producing it using offshore wind, and renewables in general (and their terminals are located in geographic areas where there is already high penetration of renewables on the local grid).
https://www.cfindustries.com/globalassets/cf-industries/medi...
In practice, some buffering pressurization may be necessary, but the scale of pressurization needs will be a lot lower than is required to store hydrogen long term.
No oil spills beats a few oil spills - but these are not an Exxon Valdez sized event, and they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
That doesn't sound so ... bad?
Hydrogen has a better gravimetric scaling than batteries - as stored energy increases, the fixed weight of the fuel cell is amortised over more energy and the weight of high pressure tanks goes up with their surface area while the energy stores goes up with volume.
So for applications where you want to store a lot of energy and are weight but not volume limited, hydrogen might make enough sense to pay the efficiency penalty required to turn electricity into hydrogen and back again.
That's why it makes more sense for big trucks than it does for passenger cars where volume limitations matter a lot more and where total energy is less.
Nope, tank mass scales with volume because bigger tanks need thicker walls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_vessel#Scaling
In particular, pressurized automotive-size hydrogen tanks aren't made from metal at all, they are typically epoxy/kevlar/carbon fiber composites.
At around 2000 wh/kg you are equivalent to diesel drivetrain energy density both size and weight based on my rough math.
Expensive large hydrogen tanks in a trailer with high pressure lines to tractor seems like it would cause safety and cost issues offsetting much of the benefit.
But I'm always amused to think that posters on HN give more credence to their back-of-the-napkin calculations over opinions of, say, folks at Toshiba, Volvo or Daimler.
You should alway try to understand the math / science and make your own judgements rather to falling for arguments from authority. This isn't always feasible but I think most people can do enough to weed out the snake oil to a much better degree than we seem to be doing as a society now.
Note this will also make you a better engineer / programmer in my experience.
For instance the Semi being announced in 2017 I said no way, but their range numbers where not outlandish, they just conveniently left off weight numbers for the tractor and cost of the battery seemed to high at the time. What I missed was how quickly battery cost are coming down and energy density going up, however they still haven't delivered a tractor yet so...
Tesla has a real tech lead, not sure if they can keep it and they are way over valued stock wise.
Nikola complete BS.
The Emperor and the downtrodden, the Ivey League and the community college, you'll find the same mathematics wherever you go.
Some may have an advantage in innovation or inspiration, but it should he fair trivial for any sufficiently motivated individual to check the numbers.
They also have large resources and are willing to experiment in things (especially if there are incentives around it from government, etc) - and even if it fails entirely they'll likely get useful and actionable data and results that still can help the company.
H2 offered the highest ISP, ie energy per fuel mass, and originally they wanted the Shuttle to be a single stage to orbit vehicle. But Hydrogen also added larger, much heavier tanks and engines didn’t have enough thrust for that. So they had to add large Solid Rocket Boosters to get off the pad. And all they additional dry mass meant the higher ISP of H2 was wasted.
And now the SLS is repeating those mistakes, not because engineers didn’t learn those lessons, but because politicians require them to repeat them.
Engineers recommending Hydrogen for cars are influenced by regulatory requirements and benefits, and politically by company objectives. If your CEO says Hydrogen is important to use because our government and regulators say it is, you as an engineer will find a way to make the best of a bad choice.
Which umm shows you never know who’s posting here.
It's also not inconceivable that if we have more base load power generation (e.g. through more nuclear) then we could generate hydrogen at night with the excess.
Liquid hydrogen at -253c that is more energy intensive to make than high pressure.
Not sure I see that being practical.
For trucks where you need bigger tanks, both autonomy and boil-off rate improve by themselves due to the square-cube-law. And you can use the boil-off to charge the batteries in your hybrid electric powertrain, run auxiliary systems etc.
The LH2 trucks currently under planning have sophisticated fuel management systems where the driver inputs where she will stop and for how long, and the truck will optimize LH2 consumption and battery SoC before arriving at the stop point.
As for LH2 versus compressed: do you actually know how energy demanding a hydrogen compression train is? Compressing a low molecular weight gas to 700 bar is just fundamentally inefficient.
At the scale required for mass adoption of hydrogen fuels, both compression and liquefaction are talking 6-8 kWh/kg. For comparison the energy content in hydrogen itself is 33 kWh/kg. So naturally there is great interest in recovering as much as possible of that work before consumption.
"To stay a liquid, hydrogen must be cooled and maintained at cryogenic temperatures of, at warmest, −253 °C (20.1 K; −423.4 °F). When not using fuel, the Hydrogen 7’s hydrogen tank starts to warm and the hydrogen starts to vaporize. Once the tank’s internal pressure reaches 87 psi, at roughly 17 hours of non-use, the tank will safely vent the building pressure. Over 10–12 days, it will completely lose the contents of the tank because of this"
At that temperature even sloshing around adds enough energy to heat and cause venting much sooner another reason its not great for mobile use.
Looks like Air Liquide made a different one that you are quoting perhaps an improvement, still high vacuum double walled, so you lose all your fuel in a month instead, thats progress.
This shows liquefaction to be about twice as energy intensive as compression (1.3 vs 3.4 kWh/kg theoretical 6 vs 13 kWh/kg actual) [2] So please point me to better info.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7
2. https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/9013_energy_requirement...
Even if it offers 20% better range and some allegedly better refuel experience (H2 people keep handwaving that as "solved"), that wouldn't justify the gigantic infrastructure switchover cost.
Electric vehicles can use the grid. That's a massive advantage for infrastructure readiness and scalability, even if the current grid isn't ready for full EV consumer transportation.
EVs can use home solar as well. Easily scalable, adds redundancy and alleviates load to the grid.
H2 would need a huge buildout of hydrogen generators, transporters, refuelling. EVs are so far ahead of all of that.
By the time any significant H2 infrastructure was out there, it'd be 10 years even if they secured 100s of billions in financing yesterday.
In 10 years, the alternative energy / solar / home solar / grid / battery / storage economic proposition is likely to be 50% cheaper in real dollars, and possibly even better.
It's the same problem nuclear faces.
Sure, throw some money at places like aviation or maritime shipping.
But it's just distraction, because I think the oil industry knows that the hydrogen will come from natural gas for the foreseeable (10-40 years) with some "future switchover" to "green hydrogen".
Green hydrogen smacks of "clean coal". Granted the physics/engineering for it are a lot more realizable.
But everyone should see that for the shell game it is.
Hydrogen was always a distraction. Fuel cells have been 10 years away from practicality since the 80s, and hydrogen production was only ever non-fossil-fuel-based in theory. It's 100% a smokescreen to protect fossil fuels.
Even the greatest H2 car is always just going to be a second class EV with "weird fuel needs".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_internal_combustion_e...
> As a comparison a Tesla Model 3 got 975km (606 miles) at 40 km/h (25 mph) [1]. I can't seem to find any range tests at a similar speed as the Nexo.
> It doesn't seem like current fuels cell have much of a energy density / range advantage even though hydrogen itself is much more energy dense, the fuel cell weight and efficiency and high pressure liquid hydrogen tanks must be accounted for.
I'm curious to know how you come to this conclusion? I don't know much about aerodynamics other than at, as a first order approximation, drag is proportional to the SQUARE of the velocity. Driving 887.5 km at an average speed of 66.9 km/h is, afaict, much more impressive than driving 975 km at 40 km/h.
What is the energy density delta between a HFCV and BEV currently?
>What is the energy density delta between a HFCV and BEV currently?
Depends on what you're counting. Mirai's fuel cell stack, composite overwrapped tank, additional underbody and rear impact crash protection, high pressure filling system, cooling and fan intake system, and lithium battery together masses well over 400kg. Also takes up a lot of cabin and cargo space necessitating a larger vehicle.
Tesla's new 4680 batteries form part of the vehicle's structure and add free torsional rigidity, and will weigh roughly the same as a fuel system for 600km range. I imagine in the compact they'll package it into the unused area under the rear seat in order to drop the floor which should help with CdA.
Being low on joules is a pain when you're going to work in the morning, but it's a royal pain if you have to wait a half hour to charge.
If you have a plug at home though thats much more convient at least to me when going to work.
I am not getting an EV anytime soon unfortunately.
But it is a significant project and it doesn't look like EV charging standards (plugs, power delivery) are set across all manufacturers.
The balance of effort+money vs benefit/risk means we will keep driving what we know for now.
I know the tide will turn sometime, but not anytime soon.
The last time I looked at it, it turned out that hydrogen filling stations need a significant time after fueling each car to get back to transfer pressure. If you want to fill your tank right after someone else, you'll have to wait for a bit.
But overall, filling time is not that big of a deal. Most people don't really drive that much, and the car spends the majority of its time in a parking lot. In practice it turns out that just charging it at home every day is more than enough to keep a battery full.
In addition to that, commercial vehicles often have a driving time limit. As long as the recharge period is shorter than the mandatory break, you are not going to care about the recharge speed.
And both battery capacity and charging speed are quickly improving. There might be a small niche for hydrogen, but it's disappearing rapidly.
Wow, it must have been brutal to drive 1,000km under faux heavy urban conditions.
From the article:
> The Nexo consumed 6.27kg of H2
For comparison with the other production H2 cars:
Toyota Mirai: 5.6kg
Honda Clarity: 5.0kg
Seems like a promising technology. My understanding is that the current blocker is infrastructure. It’s hard to pressurize up to 10,000 PSI, so many facilities are only able to refill to 60-80% capacity.
(I do feel the need to point out that public transport saves much more though, 85% for Hamburg, Germany, so again this heavily depends on the local situation.)
The goal is to eventually produce hydrogen from water, through electrolysis. We have tech for this, but it's very expensive compared to our methane methods. Current electrolyzers are used for industrial applications. Spain is currently planning a huge deployment of electrolyzers to make ammonia, mostly for fertilizer.
And honestly, electrolyzed hydrogen will mostly be used in industry, and maybe some long-haul transport, but almost certainly will never make sense for cars. We will probably see hydrogen converted to methanol or ammonia or something else that's easier to handle than hydrogen. Though I do hear that hydrogen could be used with current ocean freighters with only a 10% loss of capacity, so there's some potential there.
Electrolysis is expensive and energy inefficient. It is unlikely to be a primary source of hydrogen unless there is some breakthrough.
If the limiting factor is clean electricity production, it makes sense to use it more efficiently with a BEV than it does to use it inefficiently with a HFCV.
Hydrogen is an essential industrial input and feedstock for many processes, including production of fertilizer in the form of ammonia. So we will be producing hydrogen for that, without a doubt.
It is estimated that by 2030 or so that electrolyzers will be as cheap as steam methane reformation (SMR), with or without carbon capture on the SMR. We will see if that prediction pans out! The IEA has put approximately 850GW of hydrogen production as a feasibly goal by 2030 as part of their plan for keeping climate warming at 1.5C, with half of that from electrolyzers. This may be fairly plausible, as Europe has mandated 40GW of electrolyzers by 2030, and there are currently 154GW of hydrogen electrolyzers in the pipeline:
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/growing-ambit...
https://www.fuelcellstore.com/hydrogen-equipment/hydrogen-st...
In the Toyota Mirai, for example, the tank is located under the passenger's seats, in a nice little 'braced' area. Likely chosen because it's the least likely location for the tank to get damaged in a collision. Also the challenge of either having to 'choose' between a 'swap' tank and a 'fill' tank, or a more complex tank that does both.
I don't know. I haven't done a lot of research since it will be at least another decade until a decent vehicle suiting my criteria comes out (electric or hydrogen). No point in me even looking at it now.
Building a system to plumb stuff from A to B at a pressure nobody uses is expensive. Calling up a sales rep and asking for slightly modifications on an existing product line so it can be used with your product is pennies by comparison.
Both are explosive, so I think (I'm no authority on this) we can compare those values directly, without taking into account the storage pressure.
Source: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleFung.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml
A 10k PSI H2 tank is a straight up bomb. A gasoline tank can start a nasty fire but nobody is going to be torn apart by shrapnel or killed by the overpressure wave in an accident. Gasoline cars don't explode like they do in the movies. It must also be noted that the large batteries in EVs are also a fire hazard and in some ways worse than gasoline. For gasoline to act like a bomb it has to be aerosolized first and then ignited. In an accident there's not much that could achieve that. With a high pressure H2 tank something that cracked it open and allowed all of the H2 to be released at once would instantly create the conditions for a massive explosion. All it would need is a single spark.
That's why it can flame out when pierced but not explode.
Instead, liquid flammables can leak around and then ignite.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2852323/heres-why-hydr...
https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...
The spark (ignition) energy is very important safety wise. Nothing will light without an ignition source. In fact hydrogen is more dangerous wrt to gasoline than gasoline is wrt to flour (yes, flour can explode). That is:
Flour:gasoline < gasoline:hydrogen
Hydrogen is dangerous. And that’s fine.
“More than a gasoline bomb, hopefully. Gasoline is more dangerous.”
Citation needed. How is gasoline more dangerous? While gasoline is very dangerous, gasoline is a liquid and will not burn until vaporized; Gasoline is dangerous because it vaporizes quickly. H2 is already a gas and has a ridiculously low spark energy. Furthermore H2 is under pressure.
Gas does have a lower auto-ignition T than H2, that’s no fun, but overall H2 scores worse than gasoline.
“Do you ride on a CNG city bus?”
CNG stands for Compressed Natural Gas; i.e. methane. Methane is a lot easier and safer to use than H2 because it:
- Packs a lot more energy vs. P so the tanks don’t have to be as strong - Doesn’t embrittle the container - Much higher spark energy (in fact, CH4 is kinda hard to light) - Smaller flammability range (i.e. mixture with air that will ignite) - lower auto-ignition T
https://www.busnews.com.au/industry-news/1201/gas-bus-explos...
https://www.ctif.org/news/cause-stockholm-cng-bus-explosion-...
https://hal-ineris.archives-ouvertes.fr/ineris-00976180/docu...
Gas compressed things EXPLODE, or things that become gas on de-pressure. 10,000 psi is an insane pressure to have in a tank. Gas transmission pipelines operate at 1450 psi...
It's not an apples and oranges comparison. In the O&G industry we default to hydrotesting over pneumatic testing in basically all situations.
"Make it bigger" doesn't really work in cars, otherwise range anxiety wouldn't exist as a concept.
The record still makes sense because the Hyundai Nexo is commercially available and it's not a prototype with a comically-large just for the record tank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas-Centaur
I don’t know what you’d consider the max range here to be, but it’s definitely better than 887km.
Tank capacity only helps so much. You may have to fill up half as often, but having to go out of your way for a special station is annoying. ICE vehicles could easily have 40 gallon tanks, and eventually FCVs won't have these incredibly high ranges.
I went back from a Tesla to a diesel car. I hate going out of my way to special stations to fill up my car with diesel. I much preferred unplugging in the morning and plugging back in in the evening.
My first vehicle had a 33 gallon tank. Not much room for anything bigger; of course mileage was awful. My most efficient car can do about 600 miles on a 14 gallon tank; if it had room for a 33 gallon tank, it could go halfway across the country on one tank.
Sure it does. Just look at Tesla, at the time EVs had 24kwh or smaller batteries and they more than doubled that to give reasonable ranges.
At some point you’ll have more drawbacks than it’s worth it (size, price, weight, efficiency, safety).
That worked for this one: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1124478_world-s-largest...
1. Significantly different tank sizes - 53L to 70L on regular cars.
2. Different prices of gas (suburbs vs downtown, 87 vs 91 octane, etc)
3. Different habits - some refuel at 1/3 left, 1/4 left, 50km left, yellow light on, needle at the end of the gauge, etc
It drives me absolutely bonkers banana berserk, but... nothing I've been able to do so far :-/
Quoted out of context like that, that's probably the best compliment on living life right that I've had in a long time! :->
Which is why once electric cars passed a certain point they become effectively infinite mileage as far as people are concerned (as they never have to think about charging as it's always charged overnight).
Similar for how for most people there are only two speeds of computers - I have to wait for it vs I don't have to wait for it.
Where the hell do you live
Rather, if you ask them casually in an informal setting "Does your car get good milleage", they'll say things like "Yeah, it only costs me $50 to fill it up!" or my personal favourite, "Yeah, I only have to fill it once per week" --> the amount of unspoken variables in that one just boggles the mind, but goes to another commenter's point of "practical perspective". "How often I need to fill it up" is probably a sane, pragmatical way to think of milleage. It may in fact cut to the point faster than saying "it does 11L / 100km", because while it answers some questions in abstract, it doesn't actually answer the practical considerations of how often I need to refuel / how far can I get on a tank.
As mentioned in my another reply, for me at least, it hasn't been a factor of where I live but variety of company I keep -- on average I'd say my Comsci/Sci-major friends don't do it.
But I'm currently in Canada, where we do indeed as per stereotype, measure distance in units of time ("How far is your work?" "About 20 minutes" ComSciMajor response: "GAAACK!")
But basically for many of my non-science-major friends, it's money per tank or at best kilometers per refueling. Re another (for some reason dead?) comment, there may indeed be a correlation between cash flow and tendency to use "money per tank", haven't thought about it that extensively. And then whether education is a confounding or causal variable to either of those axis, it gets complex.
Location wise: Toronto Canada, Winnipeg Canada, and Fairmont Minnesota is where I've observed it, FWIW.
Also the infrastructure for electricity basically is there, mostly needed are plain outlets at all long-term parking spots. And of course, one can charge an electric car from your own solar.
Not a small order.
Honestly, this sounds just as bad as setting up bitcoin mines in places with high rates of renewables, to avoid directly throwing tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if you have loads of clean energy, that's no reason to waste it when there are more efficient ways of using it (lithium batteries, PoS).
Not to mention the fact that every watt of wasted green energy can't used to replace a watt of coal energy.
No need if the Icelink DC link gets built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelink
EVs are well suited to light loads and short distances, rapid acceleration and altitude change but are not well suited to long range hauling of heavy loads due to the enormous energy required.
The only open question is: can you put enough batteries into a battery electric semi? If you can't, then of course the question about efficiency is moot. But if you can, everything speaks for battery electric vehicles. That is where the Tesla Semi comes into play. It promises ranges that are just enough for most applications, for those applications it has basically "won" right from the start. What remains to be seen is how large exactly the sector is which isn't served by the Semi. But in any case, with every improvement of the battery technology, that sector shrinks a bit further.
I grew up in the UK with electric milk floats, a practical use of EV's for short, quiet urban delivery. There's a reason electric heavy trucks, which were marketed in the 20's and 30's lost out to diesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Electric_Truck
Also for an 18 wheeler just the amount of tires on the road requires tremendous torque to create a rolling load and sustain it. Freightliner are working hard to make E trucks viable but the acid test is fleet buyers and maintenance, it's a ruthlessly efficiency first market. https://freightliner.com/electric-trucks/
If I wanted to do this with my hydrogen car, I would need to get some expensive electrolysis station next to my house and I would get maybe 50% of stored energy back after electrolysis. I would also need to get the compressor etc maintained regularly.
Also, if you mean storage for actual driving, as in possible range, there's hardly a need for more range than a Tesla can already deliver... For most people. The biggest change to make it more feasible for pretty much all people is charging speed and that keeps improving too.
For displacing existing grey hydrogen from the chemical industry, a possible reducing agent in steel making, and other high temperature industrial processes it's pretty clear that the answer will be yes.
I happen to think that it is really unlikely that the answer for cars and vans will ever be yes, even if hydrogen could be made cheaply.
Whether it will have a role in other applications depends on a few things:
First, the structure of the future electricity mix. In order to ensure that there is enough electricity at every moment, we have to do a mix of things: -"over" build variable output renewables so that the troughs in production are higher -Intra-day demand side response -Intra-day storage (almost certainly batteries) -Dispatchable renewables like hydro -Dispatchable sort-of renewables based on biomass -Dispatchable fossil fuels (with CCS) -Load-following nuclear
The reason why people think about hydrogen and other exotic technologies is that many of the technologies on that list either have limited available scope (hydro, biomass), are probably not really carbon-neutral (biomass, CCS), rely on unproven tech at scale (CCS, new nuclear designs), or have exceptionally high capital costs (any new nuclear but especially when at low load factors, CCS especially at low load factors).
So what most simulations show you're left with as a low-cost mix for most days is a combination of the first five. That still leaves you with two problems: -What do you do if the average output net of load is very different between seasons? -How do you provision for a 1:20 yr weather system without making your system vastly more expensive?
and one opportunity (which is also a challenge): -variable renewables are cheap and getting cheaper so cost-optimal generation mixes build a lot more than needed for the average day in order to keep use of expensive biomass and limited hydro capacity to a minimum. As a result, electricity has low/no marginal value a lot of the time.
Second, the future cost of electrolysers. At current capex levels, they need to be run at max load all the time and still produce expensive hydrogen. Genuinely low costs like what BNEF thinks might be possible ($100/kW) allow you to run for only 20% or less of the hours in the year and scoop all the excess electricity up.
Third, the cost of alternative solutions in the areas where hydrogen is currently being considered as this reduces the value of any hydrogen produced.
I do agree that for passenger cars it's just not going to happen.
- hydrogen embrittlement
- leakage from whatever container you plan to use
- very low activation energy -> always danger of explosion
So it's a great thing in the lab and to get subsidy for but it sucks for large scale deployment, and deploying it in devices that have a long projected lifespan has its own special class of problems.
Plenty of manufacturers have already had hydrogen test fleets and as far as I'm aware all but a few have been abandoned.
It's definitely not ideal, but it's still a fair bit better than the hydrogen options which generally just kind of suck. (3000PSI vs 5000PSI for CNG vs H2) If you can source something to dissolve it in you can also store it as LNG. Busses have been using it for ages now. Although I've seen what happens when an CNG tank goes on those busses and it is scary as heck. I can't imagine a similar issue with hydrogen. That stuff is scary.
As for that bus:
I saw that here when it happened. Note the vehicles passing by when the bus is already on fire, I really wonder what was so urgent they felt they had to take that risk.
People already manage to start fires and cause disaster at gas stations doing something as simple as putting a nozzle into their car and filling it with 87 octane gasoline.
There was a time a couple of decades ago when it might have made sense for cars when battery power wasn't good enough but that time has passed.
Imho I cannot afford to be a market leaders in this field. Until H2 is available everywhere, including at remote locations during Canadian winters, I'll have to stick to gas stations. (I have yet to see any electric car that can handle -50*c.)
The problem with electrics in -50 is keeping them plugged in when not in use. -50 is very extreme though, you’re talking far north or Edmonton.
http://www.helmeth.eu/index.php/technologies/high-temperatur...
On its face, the claim doesn't make much sense anyway. If you could convert water to 2 H2 + O2 at zero energy cost, you could make a perpetual motion machine by taking advantage of the exothermic reaction 2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O.
1. Counting only the electrical energy input. But you also need to supply heat at the same time. That's the whole point of this product--use heat ~~instead of~~ (edit: in addition to) electricity to split water.
Critically, they are assuming you get "free" (as in beer) waste heat at 800C... which is fairly silly. 800C heat is high-grade energy, not waste heat. Exhaust gas from a combined-cycle NG power plant, for example, is more like 250-300C. Thermal steam plants operate with a Th of ~550C (so the waste heat is much, much cooler).
2. Ignoring the fact that you need to heat the reactant (water) to 800C before you can have the discussion in #1. Now, the problem is that the heat capacity of water is much higher than an equal mass of H2 and O2. So, you can't even use the hot as-produced gas to heat the incoming water to anywhere near the operating temperature of the electrolyzer.
The efficiency in a practical application is probably half to two-thirds of what they are claiming.
How inefficient? That number matters. If it takes 500 kWh to make a tank that stores 100 kWh, you'd be a fool to use that energy directly, as that tank is going to store hundreds of times that much (at least) over its lifetime.
Frankly it just sounds like he's confusing actual temperature with wind chill "temperature". Which unfortunately seems like something more and more Canadians do, probably on account of crappy weather reporting.
I grew up in Edmonton area. People were already in the habit of plugging their (ICE) vehicles overnight on those kinds of evenings so they could start in the morning without hassle. I see no reason why an EV wouldn't be treated the same.
(FWIW I live in southern Ontario now, it doesn't really get colder than -28C. But my Chevy Volt has no problem with it.)
It doesn't get to -50C, except as severe outlier. -40C in overnights for short periods of time in the winter.
Average temps: https://images.climate-data.org/location/4623/climate-graph....
All of this is better with EVs. Yeah, you basically will end up going from plugin to plugin so that the battery doesn't freeze up hard, but in those conditions you do anyway. The level of comfort and drivability provided by a Tesla Model Y will easily exceed any gas car or truck today. Why? Because the car will always be warm and ready. The traction control is 10x better. The car can pre-melt the ice. If you're lucky enough to have a garage, well you can pre-heat while the car is inside the garage. The list goes on and on. The main problem for the Model Y is the frameless door means the window has to be defrosted before you can get in. But you will, of course, do that from the comfort of wherever you are.
Frankly, Cybertruck is going to absolutely crush this. The range really meets the needs of the far north. Tesla already has a supercharger in Edmonton, and they have deployments planned for Prince George and some locations on hwy 16. This is really going to open up a lot of territory. EVs are made for the north, excepting the range.
Gas cars in the north actually suck pretty bad, except that they can handle those day-long commutes. That clock is seriously ticking, and for many cases, is already up.
It would simply have a small heater and insulation around the battery. A 3 inch thick layer of insulation around the battery should keep the heating power to 10 watts or so to keep the battery at -10*c. A 70kwh battery will last 7000 hours supplying 10 watts, or about a year. Longer if it isn't -50 every day.
The car can use battery power to heat itself and its battery when it's that cold, right? It'll consume more energy but it'll still work.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-cold-is-too-cold...
"Do not expose Model S to ambient temperatures above 140° F (60° C) or below -22° F (-30° C) for more than 24 hours at a time."
In contrast, the most optimistic estimates I have seen say that we are at least a decade from electrolyzed hydrogen that is as cheap as carbon-spewing current steam methane reformation. And in the interim, hydrogen boosters are pushing a nonexistent large-scale carbon capture and sequestration of steam methane reformation, something that doesn't exist on an industrial scale, with several failed projects over the past decade.
So I would say that hydrogen cars today are like EVs in the mid 90s. The tech chain has a long ways to go.
You take natural gas, split it in a process called steam reforming, you get hydrogen and CO2 emissions.
Green hydrogen only exists in very small quantities these days and for many years to come it'll be needed to first replace existing natural gas based hydrogen and to decarbonize industries like steel. There's basically a consensus among energy experts these days that hydrogen in cars is a dead end.
Um, "taken by storm" is a bit of an overstatement. 500 out of 14 million? https://www.statista.com/statistics/196010/total-number-of-r...
Does anyone know what this means: "It purified 449,100 litres of air on the journey – enough for 33 adults to breathe in a day."
Why is the car purifying air while driving? Is this a side effect of hydrogen powered cars?
https://www.altenergymag.com/story/2021/03/can-fuel-cell-tec...
That's also why it's so light, since in H2O, 90% of the weight is the oxygen.
which also makes it unsuitable for moon cars.
Anyway, energy density is comparable to gasoline.
(I'm not an expert, but this is how I understood the process.)
6.3kg of hydrogen consumed means 50 kg of atmospheric oxygen consumed, which is 170 000 liters of air. So it purified 450 000 liters but it also removed oxygen from that same air, around 38% of it. I would not breathe that exhaust air, it may not be CO2 rich, but it sure is oxygen depleted.
Anyone have some insights on this? The efficient driving tips that is?
https://electrek.co/2018/07/16/tesla-model-3-autopilot-unman...
Economical driving is an important factor when taking the test eventually after the courses too. It is one of the 5 big factors you need to pass.
As it is mentioned above, you need to look far and plan ahead, do engine braking, let it roll on its own if it is redlights etc etc.
This might mean slowing down while anticipating stoplight changes, curves or congestion behavior so you can just keep rolling, not accelerating over the top of a hill or entering a decline with excess speed, leaving a good distance to the car in front and so on.
Also knowing the efficiency characteristics of your vehicle. For ICE cars, generally running in high gear/low RPM. Not going fast. Engine braking is also braking, clutch in or shift to neutral while rolling downhill might help. But obviously use engine braking on very long declines, so you don’t burn out your brakes. Prefer regenerative braking rather than mechanical braking in battery vehicles with this feature. This is generally done by changing speed slowly, which requires that you think a few seconds ahead. Don’t accelerate hard if your engine/motor burns more energy than if accelerating slowly.
Just think of this. You see some kid in a red sports car at a stop sign. They blast off quickly, then after one block they brake hard for the next stop sign. That's wasting gas, brake pads, and creating more emissions in that area too.
Other than that, accelerate slowly, watch your RPMs, stay around 60 mph, take it easy on hills, there's a lot to it, even without a Prius Regen style battery.
Basically drive like you have no brakes.
That feedback can help a lot.
Of course we then need to burn it in power plants to convert back to electricity. But which is more efficient?
Electricity -> H2 -> electricity -> electrical motor with 80% efficiency
vs
Electricity -> H2 -> hydrogen motor with 30% efficiency
My guess is that "H2 -> electricity" is a bit more efficient than "H2 -> hydrogen motor". So using H2 as excess power storage for hydrogen engines is only marginally better than doing the same for electrical engines.
And that's for excess power storage. For "normal" production/consumption the electrical engine is way more efficient.
Even overnight charging at say 10MW per km of road would mean the complete energy infrastructure of the complete town would have to be changed.
Edit: Inserted a line break before the last sentence because apparantly almost every replier overread that one :)
I think your numbers are off by at least two orders of magnitude.
Let's say an average BEV travels 20000 miles per year and that it consumes 400 Wh/mile. Traveling 20k miles per year takes about 21 days assuming 40 mph average speed.
If we assume the car is charging the rest of the time, average power required is (400 Wh/mile * 20000 miles) / (1 year - 21 days) = 0.968 kW average charging power!
That's quite a bit less than 250 kW per car (well, 1 MW per 4 cars) you suggested! It'd still be below 2 kW, even if the car is charging just 50% of the time it's not in use.
Other way to think about is charging from empty to full battery with 11 kW of power: (80 kWh) / (11 kW) = 7.27 hours.
Please also remember charging the battery full would be a rather rare scenario. I'd be surprised if you need even 10 kW power allocation for each 4 cars being charged — 1% of what you suggested. Simply because the batteries in most of the cars are full most of the time!
My personal experience of driving electric cars for many years is that home charging from a Level-1 (120V, 8A ~= 1kW) plug is completely sufficient for all of my in-town driving needs.
This is massively overestimated. 250kW per car is great for fast charging on road trips but for overnight charging it would be enough to charge a car 30+ times in a single night. 3 to 7kW is more than enough. The grid for that is already there and the chargers can even coordinate to not exceed maximum power if everyone plugs in at the same time and draws the maximum. Almost no infrastructure in the town will need to be changed, the existing grid that supplies all the houses will be enough. After all those cars are owned by people that have electricity at home and are practically not using it while they sleep.
10 kW per 4 cars is plenty enough.
I charge overnight a 24 kWh Nissan Leaf (< 10 hours a couple of times a week), and just use a 2.1 kW EVSE to charge at a standard socket on a 16 A circuit breaker.
If those were available at all parking spots in the city (say from city lamps), everybody could have electric cars.
This is 'batteries pollute the environment too" FUD all over again.
I'm very much for EVs instead of fossil cars, but the argument that you don't need fast charging because you can charge it while at work or while shopping doesn't stand.
Increasing cost of a parking space 1000 times for extra convenience is not economically feasible. The environmental implications are obious, it simply can't scale, no need to show any math (you made up your numbers first, I don't have anything to compare it to).
But ultimately you can't please everyone. Hydrogen would have similar issues as you can't deploy it everywhere at once, it would take years.
The future of transportation seems likely to be a mix of electric, hydrogen, and diesel, depending on the use case for a long time to come.
Fast 'charging' seems to be the big one. Also for larger engines (like trucks) you should get lower total weight compared to batteries.
When the 4860 cells are used in the structural battery pack, I recken electric semis will have a good power to weight ratio too.
On the other hand a Tesla Model 3 requires a lot of energy to stay warm in the winter - some reports from the dead of winter of it taking 2000 watts just to stay warm. Under extreme conditions you can't leave it unplugged for a week or possibly even a weekend without concern over the battery charge and health.
There's better ways to insulate the battery of course, but there's always going to be some tradeoffs to maintain a safe battery temperature at rest and in use.
If that were the case there would be a lot of dead Teslas here in Norway. And even more dead Nissan Leafs which do not have active battery temperature management.
I often leave my Model S disconnected over the weekend or longer in -15C in the winter without any noticeable effect on the battery health.
It has an effect on range of course because as you say the car does prevent the battery getting too cold. Perhaps I'll try to measure how much energy is required next winter.
Here is a first hand anecdote about using a Model S in the Arctic: https://electrek.co/2020/02/11/tesla-model-3-arctic-circle-w...
In any case, the only difference between the two models is the amount of time it takes before the car exhausts itself maintaining the battery.
(Also, governments have nothing to levy special taxes on if cars run on your wall plug.)
Of course, this is all conspiracy theories and speculation. I have nothing to back this up.
Trickle charging a battery with a small solar panel is what no-infrastructure places are moving towards for charging phones and other electronics. That's not enough energy for cooking or transportation, yet, but I can see it moving towards that.
Another option is synthetic fuel. Currently horribly expensive because it is energy intensive and still experimental, it may become viable if solar energy prices continue to drop. It's much less efficient than an EV, but it works with existing gas/diesel/kerosene infrastructure.
Now, do we have cheap appliances that consume hydrogen and produce work/heat ? Not yet.
That isn’t how things work but that’s the logic behind pushing Hydrogen.
Big companies such as Shell are pushing Hydrogen via something called the "EU green deal". This while Shell (and similar) do not expect hydrogen to be produced via green methods for 15+ years. They push the EU to "subsidize" hydrogen (and other things), to basically get loads of money from people in an indirect way.
This was e.g. reported via the journalists at ftm.nl. They're probably unknown to most people here, but loads of their findings resulted in loads of issues for the government (scandals, fraud, etc).
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/toyotas-chief-says-electric...
Japan heavily subsidises research into Hydrogen. This over anything else, e.g. electric. Quoting a Japanese car manufacturer is therefore a bit biased. Japan has two different energy grids btw, one runs at 50 Hz, the other at 60 Hz. Japan made some really strange decisions regarding their electric grid. That makes Japan unique, it isn't common to have such problems.
For most countries the additional electric requirements aren't that significant. Though there will need to be some behavioural change (possibly helped by some technology). E.g. don't charge everything immediately at once, but align the supply and demand. Meaning, don't charge everything at once, charge more when there's an over supply (e.g. windy day/hour).
But I still doubt is hydrogen for cars (not trucks) practical. Maybe this is just a demo rather than serious competitor to EV.
Tesla's and similar cars have great acceleration because they support massive currents at high voltages. They need this to support fast charging, the incremental cost of adding a high torque motor is small.
Hydrogen cars have tiny batteries that don't need to support fast charging. Like a Prius.
Because that's what they think consumers want, not because of technological limitations. Size is not a requirement for high power batteries. The Porsche 918 has a 6.8 kWh battery that can do 210 kW. That's ~31 kW per kWh, compared to a top-end Model S at ~6 kW/kWh.
It's not challenging to make a cheap, small battery that can provide 200 kW. It just happens that it hasn't been prioritized.
A provable example: 1,826 Sony VTC4 18650 cells will push 200 kW continuously. That's only 14 kWh of storage and weighs <100 kg. It's a 28.5"/72 cm square 3"/7.5 cm thick. I could personally build that battery for <10k USD. A full scale automaker should be able to do it for half that.
That would almost triple (136 -> 336) the Mirai's power and put it (2050 kg @curb) in spitting distance of the 550i (390 kW, 2020 kg @curb). The BMW's MSRP starts 27k USD higher.
Of course you would need to change the suspension and geometry completely, make the interior far nicer, and add even more power to be able to actually compete with the 550i, but the point stands. A small, powerful battery is cheap and easy to add to a FCV.
NB that I'm an electrical engineer and have built many batteries before, including from 18650s. First off, it is absolutely not necessary to have so many controllers; cell-level controllers are only used in the cheapest batteries. High-quality batteries will match cells individually and switch them in groups, which reduces the losses from running a bunch of parallel circuitry. This is not really different from simply using larger cells, as long as you can match them sufficiently well.
Cell-level BMS is very cheap as a result, for example this single cell chip that costs 7 cents each: https://lcsc.com/product-detail/PMIC-Battery-Management_HY22...
> Plus the hassle and cost of using bus bars instead of wires.
Only if you're using 18650s; if you are using prismatic cells you just solder or crimp the tabs to the HV supply. If you're using small-format cells, you would typically used stamped sheet current carriers rather than busbars.
> And it means that the battery module output is 3.6V at an insane amperage and needs a massive transformer for a reasonable voltage.
It certainly does not, because batteries are DC and you do not use transformers to convert their voltage. Transformers require you to convert to AC and back, but you can use an inductor ~100x smaller by using one of the many "boost" topologies. The basic idea is that you only need to convert to AC, and you don't need to rectify back to DC. You chop the high-current DC up very finely, then store 1-3 cycles in a very small inductor. If the inductor is sized just right, it will drain out current that is very close to DC.
Naturally though you would really want to operate between the 245 volts of the Mirai's battery or the 650 volts of the Mirai's fuel stack. That would be something between a 68s27p pack and a 180s10p pack. That's far more efficient. You can still have cell-level BMS for every single cell- that IC I linked above is daisy-chainable, meaning it does not need a real 0v ground reference. It's perfectly happy working at whatever voltages on the two ends of the particular cell its connected to. In this case I'd opt for something closer to 68s- the more cells you have in series, the more susceptible your design is to degraded performance over time.
Hydrogen is more energy-dense than gasoline, but it's much more of a pain in the ass. Gasoline is far denser than air but hydrogen is far less dense, so normal injection displaces a ton (30%) of oxygen from the cylinders. You need to use direct injection to get any kind of power out of hydrogen, and a very high-flow fuel pump.
Combustion is also much hotter than normal, so you produce a ton of NOx compounds; that's why there's a huge catalytic converter on the back of the Toyota.
Without the efficiency of a fuel cell there's quite a lot of loss of range. The potential for increased power+lower weight in high performance vehicles could do a lot to combat the halo effect of gasoline... or at least I hope so.
Only if the gas station has enough hydrogen at the right pressure. After a few cars it'll need 45+min to build up pressure again. The gas stations are really expensive due to the problems, plus there are more restrictions on where they can be placed.
Hydrogen for cars is great for companies such as Shell. For the foreseeable future they expect most of the Hydrogen to be created using non-green methods. Even if it's green, you'll need way more green energy (e.g. wind / solar). Way more profit to be had.
Note that due to increase of EVs the safety requirements for garages have been increased (in NL). E.g. more monitoring is needed, automatic link to fire department, plus changes in construction requirements. Construction bit is due to an EV burning for longer. They basically demand thicker concrete walls and so on. This from memory and it's only what I've been reading (interested in safety; I don't work in construction).
But the problem is there will never be an equivalent hydrogen network as there is gasoline network because hydrogen fueling stations are far more expensive to install and maintain. Either the station overhead ends up much higher than gasoline or hydrogen is used much more rarely.
Electric car distance records as of 2018 are 1178km in a Model S and 1001km in a Model 3. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-model-3-hypermile-wo...
Model S Plaid+ next year is supposed to have ~50% greater range than the Model S used in that 2018 record. And has a nationwide charging network (and access to other EV charging networks, which themselves are becoming impressive... Lucid Air’s offering is also impressive).
I just don’t see the attraction of hydrogen any more besides niche applications.
The vehicles are much more expensive (Model 3 way cheaper than equivalent range Toyota Mirai), the charging is far less convenient and totally unavailable outside California, they’re slower, and the fuel is vastly more expensive, and they’re fundamentally less energy efficient. Heck, the Model 3 LR actually weighs less and has more range than the Toyota Mirai.
Hydrogen cars are a bonfire of money.
Conventional carmakers insistent on fast fueling capability ought to do plug-in hybrid. Even if you use synthesized fuel for the few trips that go beyond the electric range, the cost per mile (and cost per vehicle) would be way lower than hydrogen and you could use existing gas stations (although we’d need a lot fewer of them), and you still get the logistical benefit of home/work charging for commutes.
You could switch everyone’s car for a plug in hybrid version today and they wouldn’t even know except it’d sound different. We could ban new vehicles without a plug and it wouldn’t ruin anyone’s corner case commute and a lot of people wouldn’t even realize it at first (just like many don’t realize they drive a mild hybrid). This is a far better argument than hydrogen cars’ “liquid fueling like experience! But only in a handful of stations in California at enormous expense...”
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/progress18/tahi_lohse-b...
Cold weather isn’t a major problem, either, you just will want to get a heat pump option. Electric cars are insanely popular in Norway, and it doesn’t seem to be a significant problem.
Hydrogen itself doesn't. But the fuel cells do. I can imagine there will be problems with the plumbing as well, as hydrogen has a tendency to make materials it comes into contact with brittle.
> If one lives in a cold weather climate, owning a Tesla isn't as advantageous.
Eh, it's fine. Norway is the EV capital of the world. Range is decreased, but it's not really a problem in day-to-day driving. We have an older 30kWh EV, with less than 100km range in winter. It's almost never an issue. Even driving 2 hours to a cabin is fine with a fast-charge that takes less time than buying groceries next to the fast charge station.
In colder climates, it's more common for people to have garages where they can charge at home. There are even colder areas, and remote areas where the range really is a big issue, but then we're talking about areas with very small populations. If all of them continue to drive diesel cars, it'll be a microscopic blip in terms of global CO2 emissions.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/inside-teslas-supercharger...
1: https://www.wardsauto.com/technology/costs-check-growth-fuel...
However the downsides and required infrastructure is massive. Overall it’s simply a poor fit vs modern EV’s but just close enough to viable to get significant investments.
(No affiliation, just a happy user)
Taking a Tesla Model 3 for example, I typically get a 15-20 minute stop every 2-3 hours (standard or long range trim).
There was a test done in Germany. Driving from Hamburg to Munich. Instead of 8 hours, it took over 11. Either a queue at the charger, or you have to adapt the route to get to the charger, or the app says fast charge available but no fast charge was available, or the charger is broken...
Sorry, I don’t believe in electric cars but I hold my fingers crossed for h2. Fortunately the hydrogen port built in Antwerpen gives some hope.
It’s quite funny looking at all these people in their expensive Taycans on the Autobahn. Either limping 110kph or standing on the hard shoulder with hazards on waiting for adac to turn up.
DCFC infra today is way better than the H2 infrastructure, and by quite a lot. Good luck holding your fingers.
Much smarter to compare total cost of ownership, and then the ociture is very different
As I understand, If you make a hole in hydrogen tank and set it on fire, it will just burn (don't try to do this at home).
Right, the issue is though that in a collision you won't always just have a nice small controlled hole and burn.
I've worked around Hydrogen before, and storage was always a tricky issue. I remember the regulations stating something like needing to store the tank with either Argon or Nitrogen beside it. Not really something I'd want in the back, or any part for that matter, of my car.
A study on CNG in busses says: "One can therefore conclude that CNG buses are more prone to fire fatality risk by 2.5 times that of diesel buses, with the bus passengers being more at risk by over two orders of magnitude."
source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15876211/#:~:text=One%20can%....
These are not compelling numbers. Ideally you'd want something safer, not a few times more dangerous.
It can be refueled in minutes, like gas cars.
And the economy is based on using "waste" renewable energy. The problem is that solar panels and wind turbines don't produce energy when we need it the most (see: duck curve). The idea is to store that energy as hydrogen and use it in vehicles.
For commuters with a garage and a charging spot, batteries are more convenient but I think big trucks can benefit more from hydrogen.
Now the big question is, can we modify these hydrogen trucks to "roll steam" at these pesky Teslas.
For reference, here is a quote from the Ignition! book about Chlorine trifluoride. It is an oxidizer, not a fuel but you get the idea.
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
I've seem this statement loads of times before. But actually, Hydrogen production is not economical if you do not produce it continuously. Meaning, it does not make economical sense to only use excess energy capacity. Further, Hydrogen for cars is highly inefficient if you take all of the steps into account.
For the foreseeable future the common expectation is that Hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels (e.g. read forecasts from analysts or companies such as Shell). This while at the same time they pretend it'll make this more green.
Hydrogen is already produced in huge quantities btw, but it's somewhat hidden as it's used by industry. Meaning, most people wouldn't even notice it. Unlike e.g. seeing a new hydrogen gas station.
Per kg, but its energy density per litre is very poor. Every modern rocket uses RP1 (kerosene) or Methane (natural gas) for their first stages now.
> It can be refueled in minutes, like gas cars.
If your hydrogen station has 10,000 PSI hydrogen available. A typical station can fill 3 cars per hour quickly. More than that and you have to wait for it to get back up to 10,000 PSI.
> And the economy is based on using "waste" renewable energy. The problem is that solar panels and wind turbines don't produce energy when we need it the most (see: duck curve). The idea is to store that energy as hydrogen and use it in vehicles.
You can also store "waste" renewable energy in EV batteries.
Yes you can, but the time when solar energy is the most abundant is in the the middle of the day, typically when people are away from home and not charging their cars.
Hydrogen can be stored for years in huge tanks so it is really "on demand". Unlike batteries, tank benefit from the square cube law and therefore makes large scale storage cheaper.
And BTW, personally, I am not convinced by hydrogen cars, but it doesn't look completely stupid either.
However hydrogen needs high pressure tanks and fuels cells to store and use it properly so there is basically no energy density advantage right now in a car, both fuel cells and batteries are increasing in energy density due to R&D not sure which will win out it the end. My current opinion is batteries are simpler in every way and have good enough energy density.
All the current cars also need a lithium buffer battery because the fuel cell can not put out enough burst power nor do regenerative braking.
It also ties the consumer to that fuel system with no other options. You can’t, in other words, fill up at home in your parking spot.
The potential for auto parts profits is high because hydrogen, being the smallest molecule, is notoriously corrosive as it is able to leak through almost any material. And able to bond with many molecules, causing corrosion. So I would expect a lot of degradation over time.
So I guess that’s why Toyota loves this: ongoing parts sales. As a former Toyota owner, I loved the reliability at first, but it was not absolute, and the parts cost for repairs started approaching the cost of car payments as the car got older.
I do worry about
>Natural gas pipelines can transport large volumes of hydrogen without any hardware changes.
as hydrogen exposure makes metal brittle.
There are other moderately serious problems--hydrogen flame, unlike that of almost any hydrocarbon, is invisible.
Imagine you are driving and you have several cartridges of magnesium hydride and when you pass by a refueling station a drone catches up with you and swaps nearly-depleted cartridges one by one all while you continue going! How cool is that! B-)
And then you can refuel by stuff that you produce yourself using photo catalyst solar panels in your back yard.
I still think that batteries are a slower, more complicated (and therefore expensive), heavier and less environmentally friendly tech. Hydrogen just seems more “elegant” somehow. Again, offering potential for much faster refueling. Once you come up with a good way to safely store it in a vehicle or a device.
It is called "hypermiling", you can do that with gas cars as well, by driving on a level road, minimal breaking and accelerating, plus driving in the engine's optimal RPM period in the highest gear possible. In short, the ideal conditions for the car.
Really difficult to be excited or impressed by these "records". Both Tesla and H2
The record is not the autonomy by itself, but is about getting the same autonomy for 35-70x less money and potentially 0Co2e emission.
You can make hydrogen from solar panels and store it until you need a refill vs. to charge your Tesla with solar, you'll need to surrender it in the middle of the day and wait for a full charge.
> As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas, partial oxidation of methane, and coal gasification. [1]
Granted, their cars use methanol "fuel" to bind hydrogen, but the car is all electric and uses fuel cells to produce electricity.
For anyone asking whether this is legit: Gumpert was the inventor of AWD/quattro and a long time the Audi Sport engineering lead.
Would be interested to know what makes nexo different to be able to break the record.
https://jalopnik.com/this-is-what-toyotas-hydrogen-combustio...
The problem is that we can't easily make gasoline with solar panels and water.
Making synthetic gasoline was already possible before WWII and that was used a lot by Germany.
It is true that making hydrogen is easier, because making gasoline requires additional steps and equipment, but due to the large disadvantages of storing and handling hydrogen, making gasoline is nonetheless preferable and it does not require any infrastructure change.
While hydrogen is preferred currently for room-temperature fuel cells, for the moment that seems like a dead end, because the current catalysts are much too expensive.
High-temperature fuel cells can use gasoline, so hydrogen no longer has advantages.
Even if one would not choose gasoline, there are still other much better ways to chemically store solar energy than hydrogen, e.g. ammonia or methanol.
For long-term storage, the battery auto-discharges, so the efficiency drops quickly with the storage time, until it becomes much less than for storing the energy by synthesizing some appropriate chemical compound.
For storing solar energy, both short-term storage (e.g. for a day or a week), like rechargeable batteries, and long-term storage (e.g. for a year or more), like synthetic gasoline, are needed.
Fun fact: methanol has a similar "invisible fire" risk, which is the origin of the "Don't let the invisible fire burn my friend" joke in Talladega Nights.
(not joking, it's useful to see worst case scenarios)
I think all the car manufacturers have moved to the more premium sector. They all make good cars.
btw. hydrogen energy cells are also subjected to wear, especially when doing a really really long trip. energy density of course is still in favor for hydrogen, especially since they do not need to store oxygen, which means a hydrogen car only needs to keep half the fuel, but battery technologies are expanding way faster than hydrogen can keep up.
I do wonder how much the driver needs to rest, if high speed charging works during the driver's breaks. Could use overhead chargers.
Ammonia is another alternative.
- The trade-offs work in favor of EVs, hydrogen has a similar distribution problem to gasoline (fueling stations).
- Hydrogen requires production somehow, electricity we already have the grid and people can charge at home
- The things hydrogen is good at (lighter weight than batteries, faster refueling) are starting to become less relevant as battery and charging tech improves.
- The argument that you need an equivalent charging infrastructure isn’t really true since you only need that for long tail long range trips (and also we have that now).
The reason I personally dismiss people talking about hydrogen or supporting it (Japanese automakers) is it ignores the obvious current success of EVs in addition to the arguments above and it often feels like a disingenuous argument in bad faith. Specifically, someone is anti-EV and bringing up hydrogen as misdirection to make some EV thing harder to implement.
The success and market uptake of hydrogen vs. EV seems to be empirically obvious at this point. I suspect because EVs could get over the chicken/egg charging infrastructure issue because early adopters could just charge at home (and most trips are short range).
To add: Hydrogen stations are fairly unique. It's really expensive to build such stations (millions). Plus heavy restrictions on where they can be placed. Putting up a charge station is really cheap in comparisons (think it was something like 10k for on a public street with 2 charge ports), plus you can place them pretty much anywhere (way less safety restrictions).
What I dislike about EVs is how expensive they're to charge if you're not using your own electricity. At least, that's the situation in NL.
People that own EVs have to deal with the lack of supporting infrastructure, and have a vested interest in steering public opinion to go in a direction they have already personally committed.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong about the future, just that they have incentives that could cause them to hang onto some bad ideas because they adopted early (and want to save face).
* There isn't a fuel distribution system. The reason BEVs work is because everywhere has power, setting up power distribution is generally just plugging into the local grid.
* Hydrogen escapes any container it's placed in. That's a pretty hard thing to deal with. Most approaches have looked at chemically binding hydrogen to something in order to keep it from escaping, but that, as you can imagine, is expensive. The other option is onsite electrolysis, but that's rather expensive to pull off.
* Speaking of electrolysis, while we can get hydrogen from many sources, the one we are likely to actually use isn't electrolysis but rather natural gas and oil. Why is that? Because electrolysis is inefficient (about 20% efficiency IIRC edit I recalled incorrectly. Electrolysis has a ~70% effciency).
So you have a hard to store fuel, without a distribution network, that may be coming from fossil fuels anyways. -So why do major companies like Toyota love hydrogen? Because it doesn't require them to make any major changes to their fleet. You can get a lot more miles out of the basic combustion engine design and you don't need to retool all your product lines.- edit I was wrong, looks like most hydrogen vehicles are fuel cell based.
Now, that isn't to say that hydrogen has no place in the future. I think because of it's energy density hydrogen will likely play a role in the airline industry. It may even be possible that hydrogen ends up finding a place in long range shipping. However, hydrogen in a consumer car is, IMO, DOA. BEVs already exist as do their charge networks.
Toyota Mirai (their hydrogen powered car) is fuel cell vehicle, it uses hydrogen to power electric motors.
Why would there be a combustion engine in a hydrogen car? I expect that there would be a fuel cell powering electric motors. Are there other ways to use hydrogen in cars, other than fuel cell? I'm not an expert.
Doesn't look like a great path forward - deep internal engine parts need to be modified (no "hydrogen kit" for existing cars), they emit NOx emissions (so not zero-emission), and you have all the disadvantages of a combustion engine.
However, combustion engines have 100 years of development behind them and a proven track record of reliability (probably billions of running hours by now). Fuel cells are still newish - "the devil you know". This would also keep mechanics employed and keep dealership service bays busy... kind of a perverse incentive, but it's there for sure.
It may be a stop-gap, or useful for certain situations (long haul trucking is mentioned). It could be part of the tapestry of technologies needed to move to a more renewable-based future.
Actually it's pretty efficient. According to wikipedia, efficiency ranges from 70% for the cheaper method, to 80% with more expensive catalysts. Theoretical efficiency is 94%.
Electrolysis is only a small factor.
It's all of the other required bits that makes Hydrogen so inefficient. Transportation, building up pressure, etc. Hydrogen if you compare things simply is more efficient than gas/diesel. However, gas/diesel is pumped out of the ground. Meaning, a lot of the energy needs for gas/diesel are already there.
- Transport. You can either transport hydrogen via pipelines or simply produce it via electrolysis in-place. You have to get the electricity to the destination somehow, so this doesn't really differ between electric and hydrogen cars.
- Building up pressure. Energy required to build up pressure is related to how much the volume is reduced (force x distance and all that...) Conveniently water is almost incompressible, so you can raise the water to the desired pressure cheaply before you electrolyse it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-pressure_electrolysis says this can be done at 97% efficiency.
The problem with hydrogen is there is no hydrogen available, we have to first generate it and distribute it to cars. So far this process is much more expensive than generating and distributing electric power.
The whole promotional attitude towards EV will cause an EV winter when the rubber meets the road and things aren't as rosy as advertised. Mark my words. It's already happening .
This is in Minnesota too, with very icy and cold winters. I've seen that commonly brought up as an anti-EV talking point, but it's empirically wrong.
Isn't the Leaf known for poor battery temperature management? This causes the battery perform way worse over time than other EVs. A battery performing way poorer over time is a common fear that I've noticed. If someone notices this and doesn't know it's unique (caused by manufacturer not doing enough) then I'd expect some Leaf-owning people to dislike EVs.
The huge price difference between charging an EV at home vs anywhere else is why I dislike an EV. Though I actually do not dislike EVs, I dislike the price difference.
Every Nissan dealership around me has free Leaf-only supercharging, and there's also a few superchargers around the Twin Cities that just cost the price of parking (e.g. ~$1/h). Other than that, every Goodwill has a supercharger that costs some actually metered amount of money.
Lower mantainence costs is also a legend unless we are talking about Toyotas and Benz build quality. Teslas have lots of issues, don't know about the Leaf.
My maintenance costs have been tire rotations. I joked to the service tech that I'm sorry they're not making more money off of me.
Why is that? When you purchase a car you buy the 24/7/365 availibility of said car.
An EV is not availible to use 24/7/365. Regardless of the human biorythms you should get a discount because an EV is less of a car compared to an actual car which is always ready to go.
With EVs you are not getting a discount, but you'd have to pay a premium. This is a subpar outcome for the consumer in my book.
The few times I got super low on battery from driving around all day, I stopped by one of the dealerships near me and used their free Leaf-only supercharger, went inside and sat in their nice comfy chairs with free wifi for a bit. Note that I didn't have to do this and could've charged at home, but figured it would be nice to have the quick charge. I've done this less than half a dozen times in the whole time I've had the car, so this is not a general concern I have.
Also the build quality on a Nissan is as good as a Toyota.
Maybe for long distance transport hydrogen makes sense, because you can have a big tank and CO2 impact is lower than gasoline/diesel, but this will require incentives/subsidies from the state to make economic sense.