Hydrogen-powered Toyota Hilux unveiled with 365-mile range | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen-powered Toyota Hilux unveiled with 365-mile range

autocar.co.uk

9 pointsclouddrover20 comments

Hydrogen is expensive to produce, store and transport.

We only see Hydrogen vehicles like this because of Government grants .. we only see Hydrogen fueling stations because of Government grants.

Once the grants stop, the cars will stop. Literally.

If electricity is very low cost then Hydrogen beats batteries for applications past a certain number of hour of operation. This is because batteries have linked power and energy density. To power a house for a hundred hours you need a battery that can power 100 houses for 1 hour. To power a house for 100 hours you only need a hydrogen tank and a small fuel cell. This is why even Tesla is calling for a 1 trillion dollar hydrogen market in 2050.

> To power a house for a hundred hours you need a battery that can power 100 houses for 1 hour.

A battery that is meant to power a single house doesn't need to be able to output enough power for 100 houses.

It's important to not be misleading about that because, usually, the lower the rated output of a battery, the higher the power density can be. Which means cheaper and smaller batteries.

I'm not sure I follow. What battery are you referring to when you say a low power density battery can have a high energy density? A flow cell battery?

I'm talking about existing commodity batteries, like lithium ion batteries.

No one is powering a house with a battery, or hydrogen, for 100 hours.

Neither are an energy source. We will power houses with low cost carbon-free energy: nuclear and renewables.

For renewables, interconnection and load and generation diversity will deal with most intermittency issues.

We then provide additional firming capacity with other technology, including energy storage, that in the case of batteries, is probably operating every day, and for pumped hydro and other long duration storage that’s probably operating every week or two, and then some fuel-based generation that’s probably only operating a few days a year.

Hydrogen is probably not a big part of the future power system.

I think if you run the numbers microgrids and cheap storage wins vs major grid upgrades and vast transmission networks.

The grid is going extinct when renewables and storage reach their terminal scaled costs.

As Tony Seba so eloquently put it: "you could capture god and force him to generate limitless power forever at the center of a power plant and it would still not be cheaper than decentralized renewables and storage".

Hydrogen makes much more sense than battery powered cars. Japan's going for it in a real way, which means they will have a big head start in this field and dominate the next century. Battery cars are a dead end with insanely high environmental costs. Insanely high.

The big petrochemical companies have a distribution network already in place for gasoline.

You can bet that they’ll be the ones pivoting to hydrogen when they have to.

People don’t really want to change their behaviour so, I think, hydrogen will be the winner.

However, economies of scale currently mean that it’s not economic but it will be at some point. It will cost money to do that which, I suspect, is why they’ve not yet promoted it.

Hydrogen is just petroleum with extra steps.

It can be made with no moving parts from water. I would contend that petrol is hydrogen with massive amounts of extra steps.

Electrolysis is hideously inefficient and expensive even if you use a 'free' source of energy like solar.

It's a bit inefficient, but I think state of the art is over 80% commercially and 95+% in the lab. Of course, then you have to compress and transport and store it.

It is an electrochemical process. It is similar to other electrochemical processes, like charging batteries. The better question is how did people get convinced it wasn't efficient? Likely, this is the result of some kind of corporate FUD, possible from oil companies originally, but now more likely from battery companies.

If you believe the most efficient listed numbers from Wikipedia, it's roughly 50kWh/1kg of hydrogen to produce. That excludes any cost to transport, store, etc.

The Toyota mirai gets something like 60mi per 1kg of hydrogen fuel. Which, translated, gives you an efficiency of roughly 800Wh/mi. Excluding transport and storage costs. A modern EV gets roughly 250Wh/mi, and incurs no storage costs or transport costs.

How exactly is that efficient compared to EVs?

You're number bending. You cannot move continuously change a few percentage points at each step. You can create whatever outcome you want by doing this.

In reality, the most efficient numbers are 41.5 kWh/kg with modern technology: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/14/hysata-testing-hydrog...

The Mirai gets 74 miles per kg of hydrogen according to the EPA. That's ~560 Wh/mi.

And no, a "modern EV" does not get 250 Wh/mi unless your talking about a smaller car than a Mirai. A good point of comparison might be the BMW i5 which gets ~320 Wh/mi. This is also from the outlet, and does not include upstream energy losses.

What people realize from honest analysis is that FCEVs and BEVs are around 1.5-1.75x of each other. But then people have realized that upstream losses, especially the need for energy storage for renewable energy, greatly undercuts this argument. For season energy storage, the mechanism is literally just burning/reacting hydrogen for electricity production.

So in reality the gap in efficiency is small, and as we switch to greener energy sources this gap shrinks.

Can be, but isn’t. The most cost effective way of generating hydrogen is by cracking it out of petroleum. That won’t change anytime soon. “Green hydrogen” is a lie created by the petroleum industry.

That mirrors similar rhetoric surrounding wind and solar just before they hit large-scale deployment. As it turns out, sustainable resources tend to be much cheaper than unsustainable ones.

Green hydrogen is made from water.

Where is a significant amount of green hydrogen being made? What is the price? All I’ve seen are technical prototypes with low output and a lot of expense. The only volume production seems to be converted from natural gas.

You are not keeping up with latest events. This is the same story as when solar took off, and a bunch of engineers came out to "explain" why solar power was unviable. In reality, it was already taking off, and those people simply weren't aware.

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