This is at 66.9 km/h (40 mph) in order to greatly increase its range due to lower drag compared to normal highway speeds.
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.
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:
> This is at 66.9 km/h (40 mph) in order to greatly increase its range due to lower drag compared to normal highway speeds.
> 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.
Drag isn't the only thing in play. They both are driving below highway speeds, one more so than the other, I wish there was some data for a Tesla at 40 mph vs 25 or 48 to compare more directly the difference. The Tesla will have between 975 and 708km range at 40 mph the NEXO is 887km, I will make an assumption the Tesla is less, but how much less, is it "much" different?
What is the energy density delta between a HFCV and BEV currently?
Doesn't matter much. Below about 80km/h rolling resistance is dominant.
>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.
>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.
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.
OOC, since you know what these tanks are made out of, what is the duty cycle/lifespan of those tanks? I was presented some info on Kevlar tanks for drones using fuel cells and remember thinking that the lifespan was very short.
Lithium batteries still seem to have a way to go in energy density currently at around 250-300 wh/kg and going up year over year with a theoretical maximum (Sulfur cathode) of above 2500 wh/kg.
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.
Yes I always like to do my own math it has sniffed out the BS many a time from the likes of Tesla, Nikola and so on. Not always right, but amazing how many times theirs is wrong especially if marketing something.
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.
Do you see Tesla as a snakeoil company today when it comes to their batteries, drivetrain, range, reliability? I wouldn't put Nikola and Tesla in the same categories.
Tesla has one serious issue imho that they can only fix with refunds of the cost, that their auto-driving cars probably won't get there in the next 5+ years, so all the people that paid up to 10k for that will have to get some compensation.
No I don't however I was much more skeptical of them in the past and also the math still lets me know Elon's timelines are lets say "optimistic", however the math also told me they where not completely full of it vs Nikola which is a complete sham.
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.
Smart engineers chose Hydrogen as the first stage fuel fuel the Space Shuttle, and it turned out to be a terrible choice.
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.
I have no horse in this race, but the pros and cons of a technology that is aiming to replace an incumbent that has lasted a century across the globe with millions (billions?) of users and units produced have to be evaluated as a complete system and in many more ways than pure engineering calculations. Fuel production, distribution networks, behavioural science, town planning, etc. were of little to no interest to the scientists you deride, but need to be considered too.
The companies are not entirely worried about the total results as they have other aspects to deal with (in fact, you'll sometimes find companies doing things they personally think are silly because "everyone" in the industry is doing it, and they need to be able to check off the box for the Board - example: "Why aren't we doing anything with this blockchain stuff").
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.
You'll be surprised how much your predictions improve if you stop for a moment to do some back of the napkin calculations. Lots of overly optimistic or pessimistic news out there just to grab your attention. Having an edge in prediction and BS detection compared to the average Joe is an important life skill IMO.
The people on HN are the same people that work at Toshiba, Volvo and Daimler. Many of them are more accomplished and you'll find sub-par engineers making bad decisions at any company.
> 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.
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.
For trucks and other heavy duty applications, liquid hydrogen starts to win out over pressurized. In LH2 tanks, the scaling becomes advantageous as you are optimizing against heat ingress, which goes down as 1/R when you increase the radius R.
This information is just wrong. Air Liquide built automotive size LH2 tanks using multilayer insulation in the early 2000s that had 3 days of autonomy (time before first venting) and 3% per day boil-off after that.
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.
This is the BMW tank I got those figures from which looks to be manufactured by Air Liquide [1]:
"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.
Hydrogen needs to be a game changer to command a redirection of investment and effort for consumer transportation.
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.
> 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".
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.
Plus, unlike gas, the hydrogen is never directly burnt "in the engine", it's always converted to electricity first. A hydrogen car is always going to use EV motors (and batteries, because while denser, H2 doesn't yet have anything near the ability to supply power at high demand that current battery tech has) and have all the complexity of an EV, often without the convenience of grid charging (home charging) given much smaller batteries to compensate for the weight of the fuel cell and fuel.
Even the greatest H2 car is always just going to be a second class EV with "weird fuel needs".
Ammonia is a better fit for marine applications, as it doesn't require high pressure or cryo storage. It can also be produced using renewable energy, and is cheaper to transport.
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).
Cryo/pressurized storage isn't technically necessary for ships either. Liquid hydrogen with insulated storage works well enough. The key is evaporation rates. As long as the ship consumes fuel faster than it evaporates, there is no need to maintain pressurization.
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.
By a lot, mostly. The liquid hydrogen eventually doesn't have enough pressure/cold enough temperature to stay liquid so it turns back to gas and most bubbles out of the water (with some of it reacting with Oxygen and becoming more water). It's possible if it were a "big enough" and "concentrated enough" spill it might briefly create anoxic zones where fish will die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_waters (But humans and dumb algae accidentally do that "all the time" and the ocean does have recovery methods from anoxic waters. It's not great for the climate or the ocean, but it is mostly survivable and much more "temporary" problem than the long term effects of oil pollution.)
"If a global hydrogen economy replaced the current fossil fuel-based energy system and exhibited a leakage rate of 1%, then it would produce a climate impact of 0.6% of the current fossil fuel based system. "
> The results of the test – conducted over 3 days with three vehicles in Germany in conditions mimicking heavy urban traffic – are impressive for the Hyundai Kona Electric which is already one of the longest range vehicles on the Australian market.
Wow, it must have been brutal to drive 1,000km under faux heavy urban conditions.
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.
On the other hand, if we ever build out electrified road infrastructure, one might be able to recharge a battery electric vehicle without even stopping just by pulling power from rails embedded in the road or overhead power lines.
30 mins at a supercharger is hundreds of miles of range...that's quite the commute. But if you're at home - yes, I guess not having any charge is an inconvenience in the morning, but so is not having any gas or hydrogen. Neither should happen if you are even remotely responsible and on top of your life.
The general lack of EVs in multifamily housing is concerning for EV adoption - the only places where it's really possible is if the community offers a garage and the site's willing to book an electrician to install the 240v outlet.
The Nexo is much less aerodynamic than the Model 3. One is an SUV/CUV, the other is a low sedan which looks like wet poop. The Nexo has more frontal area and a higher CD. And the Tesla is known for rigging its EPA tests for higher, but illusory, numbers.
> Tesla is known for rigging its EPA tests for higher, but illusory, numbers.
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:
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.
I have to wonder how much of that is down to the way the driving habits of people who buy a car labeled "long range" differ from those who buy one that calls itself "performance". It doesn't really refute the notion that the difference between measured and claimed performance is due to the different driving conditions being tested.
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.
AFAIK, Tesla uses the same range estimate for all trim levels of the Model 3 (or did in 2019, at least). The problem is that the Performance trim has 20 inch non-aero wheels and sticky tires. I got 325+ Wh/mi steady state cruise on the highway using AP to do the driving (in good weather; was 350+ when colder).
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.
The current site lists the LR at 353 miles EPA range and the performance at 315.
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.
> And the Tesla is known for rigging its EPA tests for higher, but illusory, numbers.
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.
Nobody cares exactly how a company gets unrealistically high numbers. What matters is as a consumer your experience won’t match the company’s claims. Best would be for companies just to tell the truth. C.f. the “full self driving” falsehood.
Anyone who has bought a car in the last 50 years is already well aware of how much EPA mileage differs from actual mileage.
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.
Ok so go to the Model Y which is slightly heavier (Actually closer to the Nexo) and the worse aerodynamics than the Model 3 should have minimal effect if hypermiling at low speed, which also helps the Nexo vs Model 3.
Model Y will blow the doors off the Nexo in performance due to much larger electric motors.
Since “tank” isn’t a unit of measure, I suppose anyone could trivially break the record with a larger tank.
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.
Beyond the missing expensive infrastructure, the big problem is energy efficiency. Moving forward, we have to switch every energy production to renewables. But for the same amount of electric energy produced, an electric car gets about 3x the mileage than producing "green" hydrogen and powering fuel cell cars with it. Hydrogen means at least 3x the electricity cost and for many years to come, we are going to struggle producing enough clean electricity in the first place.
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.
I enjoy how you are taking all of the arguments people used against BEVs in favor of gas and using them against HV. The irony is strong in these threads.
The key to a hydrogen economy will rely on creation of hydrogen in locations with extremely abundant electricity like Iceland. The next step is shipping it like it's LNG.
> The key to a hydrogen economy will rely on wasting energy on creation of hydrogen in locations with extremely abundant electricity.
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.
I don't think there's a scarcity issue with electricity in places like Iceland where volcanic activity provides massive areas of land where electricity can be freely and easily generated. The issue is the ability to transport said electricity without massive losses.
Yes, those locations will play a huge role in securing the global energy supply. However, the hydrogen will be desperately needed in the industry (e.g. steel production) and for supporting the electric grid in times of both low wind and solar. No good reason to waste it around the year driving cars.
My understanding is that hydrogen may be most useful for heavy good vehicles rather than cars.
EVs could be great for short range urban delivery vans etc but long haul infrastructure may be built around hydrogen if the supply chain is viable.
The dynamics of moving heavy loads long distances has never favored electric power. Diesel currently powers tractor semis because it produces more energy than gasoline and creates much more low speed continuous load torque.
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.
EVs are great if you are pulling heavy loads across hills, as you get your energy back going downhill (at least large parts of it). The torque also rather is an advantage of EVs. Diesel engines are popular because they are more efficient than gasoline engines and if you have continuous high loads, that adds up. Guess what is much more efficient than Diesel engines? Electric engines! And they are way more efficient than going the route via hydrogen.
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.
An electric semi's battery weight alone makes them not viable imo. I think it's a good idea to ignore the endless Tesla sales hype and brand reinforcement and focus on the basic logic and physics. Musk is as fake as his hair imo and spends most of his time being very misleading while aggressively selling theoretical future projects.
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
Why would you think a semi's battery weight would make it not viable?
If you calculate what the batteries would weight and subtract the weight of the engine, transmission and of course fuel in a full tank, you get to about 2 tons more for the battery powered semi, if not less. That is a small reduction of the maximum load capacity.
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/
The question is not whether you pay a massive efficiency penalty for storing electricity as hydrogen (obviously, yes) but whether there are applications where you are effectively buying a set of useful properties for the losses you are "spending".
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.
No, the do worse than electric cars in that respect. The hydrogen production facilities are very expensive, so they have to run 24/7 at the same load. This is exactly what mixed badly with the varying supply of renewables. With electric cars, you just plug them in at home/at work and they charge whenever there is an oversupply of electricity. Offering special remote controlled charging outlets is going to be a game changer for the grid.
If I were to store solar in my electric car as a form of temporary storage, I get probably between 80 and 90% of what was generated by my cells delivered back to my house. All I need to do this are some slight alterations to my electrical system.
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.
Tesla doesn't allow this because of the wear on the batteries, but it seems like a killer application for EVs and rooftop solar to be able to combine them like that.
"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.
Excellent range. And to the point of the comment, said linked vehicle is a production vehicle where the tank was not added for the sole purpose of breaking a record, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Shuttle had solid-fuel boosters and hypergolic thrusters for on-orbit maneuvering. The Delta IV Heavy, on the other hand, is a fully hydrogen-powered rocket: three common cores, with an RL10-powered upper stage. It also launched the Parker Solar Probe, which has been doing rounds around the sun for a while now.
I would have citied that, but they use solid boosters which makes the number messier... I could get a lot of range on a Tesla if I was allowed to use solid fuel boosters!
While it's true that you could add probably double the H2 storage to most HFC vehicles, I think this is the correct take. The Mirai's fuel tank is 37.25 gallons/141 liters vs 12-15 gallons/45-55 liters of gasoline for most cars.
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.
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.
> but having to go out of your way for a special station is annoying
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 point is that there’s a limit to it. Teslas still don’t have the same range as a gas car in the same category/price. They could increase it but then I don’t think they can sell a lot of $150k Model Ss.
At some point you’ll have more drawbacks than it’s worth it (size, price, weight, efficiency, safety).
Sounds like you're talking about distribution infrastructure, which is true but in my mind the biggest issue is efficiency. Storing and using H2 isn't very efficient, and current production techniques for H2 emit as much or more carbon as Diesel.
This is true. The current production techniques are basically using water. This is producing a ton of CO2 - the very opposite of what we're hoping to attain by running Hydrogen-powered vehicles. The hope is that we're able to leverage methane from animal droppings in the near future. Toyota is leading the research on this I believe.
Current production methods use natural gas, specifically methane. Animal droppings will never supply enough methane to be a significant source of energy.
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.
Animal droppings are not our primary source of methane. Not sure if that was meant to be sarcastic.
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.
The comment I was replying to said two odd, incorrect things: 1) water is our primary source of hydrogen (it isn't), and 2) that people were researching animal droppings as a source of hydrogen. Though people are looking for biogas to be a replacement for fossil-natural gas, there won't be enoug my for that, and certainly using it for steam methane reformation to hydrogen would be a poor use for biogas.
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:
All true, though to be fair CO2 savings with electric cars also only range, depending on car and country (i.e. local infrastructure and means of electricity production), from 0% to 35% of lifetime CO2 emissions of an equivalent ICE car). https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...
Absolutely, I meant that the gains made by electric cars aren't that huge that the inefficiency of h2 production automatically disqualifies that approach.
(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.)
10,000PSI hydraulics are rapidly becoming cookie cutter commodity parts. Once you have the supply chain for all the little crap that nickles and dimes you the rest is a lot cheaper. Having industry expertise at working at those pressures really has a huge multiplier effect on everything else.
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.
I can picture how the conversation would go. There's some pretty big differences between hydrogen and hydraulic fluid, probably to the point of whole component redesign. The little crap here (springs and o-rings) would be completely different.
You're not wrong but "can you make hose X with material Y" or "can I get valve body P with spring rate Q" is a hell of a lot better than "we need custom hoses" or "is this casting good to 10kpsi?".
The big problem with hydrogen is just how small it is. It likes to leach through stuff hold just about everything else. You very well might need custom hoses, custom seals, and custom materials for the castings just to safely store it at 10kpsi. It'll leak through solid steel containers that will otherwise hold helium fine.
Even worse than simply leaking, hydrogen can diffuse into the crystal structure of metals and cause havoc with the material properties. It's definitely not as friendly as hydraulic oil.
Compressed liquid systems don't explode so much, they tend to be way less catastrophic as they are a liquid. (The burst, or they spray out fluid)
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.
“Hydrogen bomb” is a little exaggerated. But to your detractors:
“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
I work with a guy who was involved in a near miss incident with these cannisters. They are not risk free, although you could argue that the accidents are rare and potentially worth the risk?
No, it isn’t. Gasoline is dangerous, but it’s a liquid. H2 is a gas, under extreme pressure, and with a very low spark energy.
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:
Gasoline will not explode in normal conditions. Even in an accident it is pretty safe, although the risk of fire must always be considered.
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.
The total amount isn't as much a problem as is the activation energy. Hydrogen will explode when you look at it cross eyed. For gasoline you will have to do some work.
It's not scientific at all, but for most people gas mileage comes down to "how often do I have to go to the gas station".
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.
... It's fascinating reading the comments here and other places that go between "that's crazy never heard of it couldn't imagine you're making it up" and "yup seen it / do it too" :-D
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.
he, this reminds me of a recent interview with Daniel Kahneman (of behavioral science nobel fame) where he closes with saying he works on the "how the inability to solve the famous “bat and ball problem” [bat and ball cost 1,10 together, the bat costs 1 dollar more than the ball, how much do they cost each?] correlates with belief in God and that 9/11 was a conspiracy." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/16/daniel-kahnema...
Hmm, slightly different measurement. They're not talking about "sticker price of fuel at the gas station", so not "fuel cost".
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!")
The amount actually traveled on a single tank is indeed meaningless - Teslas can go a thousand miles if you go up a mountain, end up at 10% battery, then charge to & past 100% on the way down the mountain via regen. Improving overall efficiency should be what is strived for.
Feels like the infrastructure and on car issues are going to be similar to CNG, but worse. Need new fuel stations, high pressure storage, no existing delivery network (worse than CNG; although CNG pipelines are much lower pressure than vehicles need, so you needed a compressor at the fueling point); and the killer --- the vehicle tanks expire and replacement may not be economically feasible, in which case your car's value evaporates when the tank expires (generally 15 years after tank manufacture); this is what happened to most CNG cars.
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.
The tank I linked to says it stores at 400psi, and the material data sheet indicates it doesn't vent the hydrogen in a way that creates a significant fire hazard. So I don't think these need the same kind of protection as a high-psi tank. Though I'm sure there are challenges, or we would have heard about them being proposed.
Aren't they really heavy? This is also why swappable batteries in EVs never got off of the ground. You need a crane to do it and that's too much effort for a top-up.
I thought the tanks were much lighter than the batteries. I think they use multiple smaller tanks due to the rate of release of the hydrogen.
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.
FWIW: the material challenges for hydrogen are such that I do not think that it will ever be a mainstream storage medium for vehicular use (it's not a fuel, it is a battery).
- 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.
I have to agree with you, because I've seen detailed instructions, schematics and photographs of the apparatus for refueling a hydrogen fuel cell based UAV. The pressures of the tanks involved and connectors, pipe and hose system do not look like something you would want millions of ordinary untrained end-user consumers attaching to vehicles. Everything needs to be perfectly clean and in pristine condition in order to be safe.
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.
I think if you are going to go with a highly energy inefficient storage medium then methane makes more sense. It's a lot more practical to transport and store. It can be carbon neutral as well if you use sabatier generators or bio reactors instead of fossil fuels. You can convert existing ICE engines to use it too.
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.
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.
Hydrogen fuel is still a fossil fuel byproduct right? I’m not sure what the point of this is. It sure doesn’t seem like a green technology at this point.
It is, but it doesn't have to be. It is possible to make H2 from H20 and sunlight. At the moment there is little market for such "green" hydrogen but the hope is that hydrogen-based transportation will create that market.
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.)
Apart from some freak events that happen every 50 years -50C doesn't _really_ happen anywhere settled in Canada. Even a place like Inuvik, the coldest temp ever recorded was -56.7C but only for a few minutes... in 1968. Edmonton gets a few nights where it can get below -40C every once in a while, but it's not common and again, it's not all night.
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.)
Fort McMurray Alberta. Not exactly the end of the earth. It is often colder than the far north because it is far from the ocean. May 19th today. There is snow on the ground. Every year there is a week or two of -40, not wind-chill, temperature. Nobody who actually lives in the north misunderstands wind-chill.
Yeah. I have been to Fort Mac many times, and lived in Prince George for 6 years. Fort Mac is kind of the end of the earth. But I know how hard it is to manage ICE cars in that kind of cold. Plug in the block heater. Leave the engine running when at the store. Carry deicer always. Fractured windshields. Ice on the inside of the windshield. Cracked dashes. Flat batteries. Hard starts due to bad fuel/air mixtures. And let's also include bad handling, because you don't really know how bad ICE cars are on actual ice until you've driven a good AWD EV like any Dual Motor Tesla.
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.
> the conversion is inefficient. It takes a lot of power to extract H2 from H2O.
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.
That analysis ignores the heat used to raise the reactant (water) temperature to 800C.
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.
That's the difference between LHV and HHV. It is possible to exceed 100% efficiency when using HHV because it is an inherently more conservative convention for energy content due to practical concerns. LHV, by contrast, is bounded by the laws of physics.
Well, no, that's still wrong. The >100% efficiency comes from using two slights of hand:
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.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It takes me about 5 seconds too. I plug in, I walk away. When I'm ready to drive, I unplug and get in. Not complicated, adds up to about 5 seconds. All the work is being done when I'm not around. In sum, since ditching gas, I have in aggregate spent much less time tending to my car's energy needs.
Handling very low temperatures isn't very hard if the car is designed with that in mind.
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.
Maybe, but cars like Tesla have minimum operating/storage temperatures, usually on the order of -30c. With modern telemetry systems I don't want a warranty repair to be rejected because I had to park it overnight at -40. It hit -46 one night last winter, staying below -40 for several days in a row.
Lots of pickup trucks in that price range are parked outside. Garages are not a norm outside of detached homes.
Diesels don't handle it well, but it doesn't actually damage them. The northern 2/3rds of Canada may be an edge case ... unless you actually live there.
It's not a fossil fuel byproduct. It's a fossil fuel product.
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.
3 main sources.
1- Natural Gas
2- Renewable Natural Gas (capping waste emissions from waste water treatment or municipal solid waste and coverting to Hydrogen). Net negative CO2 but smaller supply
3- Electrolysis (electricity + water). Source of electricity determines the cleanliness of the H2. Still requires water which is not ideal (especially in california)
Splitting water with electricity then recombining in the fuel cell back to electricity is extremely inefficient compared to just charging a battery with eletricity.
There are already early stage projects in France (and I assume other places as well) where Siemens Gamesa is using prototype turbines that does exactly this at an offshore wind farm
Sort of, on some qualitative descriptions. But on the quantitative level they are quite different, enough to change the entire quality of the relationship to carbon. The cheapest source of electrical power are renewables, and for more than a decade renewables have been at cost parity. Additionally, electrical vehicles are the perfect complement to the weakness of renewables: intermittency.
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.
The car has an HEPA filter which removes dust from the air which is nice but that's not the whole story, as can be expected from marketing.
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.
To make a fuel cell work, you need an external oxygen supply for the chemical reaction. A cleaner oxygen supply with fewer particles make the fuel cell work longer, therefore Hyundai added an air filter which filters out fine particles before passing it on to the fuel cell.
(I'm not an expert, but this is how I understood the process.)
> “I was constantly checking the Nexo’s efficiency readout to maximise the distance I was getting per kilogram of hydrogen. I found that by using techniques from rally driving, such as looking as far down the road as possible, as well as tips I have learned from my dad for driving a truck efficiently over long distances, it’s actually possible to go way beyond Nexo’s official range.”
Anyone have some insights on this? The efficient driving tips that is?
It generally breaks down to don’t brake unless you have to, and know & use the performance characteristics of whatever you’re driving.
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.
When you go in neutral downhill your engine idles, vs if you leave it in gear the ECU cuts fuel supply completely. It's generally better to stay in gear except when you're at a standstill. (This assumes a modern vehicle with fuel-injectors)
Do automatic gearboxes compression brake when going downhill? That's what I was trying to avoid. My point was to conserve your kinetic energy, not optimizing the fuel flow during the times when you don't want the engine to produce power.
Note that even on electric vehicles, regenerative isn't "magic": it's typically about 60% efficient or so, because of losses in the brakes and motors when using that energy again. Rolling better can easily get you an additional 10-20% on your efficiency.
I drive a Prius, it's a skill to drive efficiently. The main tip: do not use the gas pedal if you're going to brake soon anyway. Think of the brakes as wasting gas, then you'll use the brakes sparingly, and the safe way to do that is by not accelerating unnecessarily.
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.
Yes, it’s a skill you learn with hybrid cars because they reward you with silence when you are efficient, and they punish you with noise when you run out of battery.
I feel like a lesson lots of people (including some recent rideshare drivers I've had) could learn is that the pedals in your car can be operated with more subtlety than an on/off switch.
Would be good to have this implemented in the curriculum in Canada & US. The amount of times I've been honked at because I was approaching a red light without hitting the gas, only to have the person behind me speed up and overtake me then slamming the brakes as they approached the light is ridiculous.
If there's one thing I've learned on the internet, it's that if there's a measurable number, people will turn it into a hobby and then a sport to maximize or minimize it.
It depends on how you define convenient. Hydrogen can be refilled quickly, in minutes, like a conventional liquid fueled car. If there were a network of hydrogen filling stations then driving, especially long distances, would be similar to driving a liquid fueled car.
Right. Similar to a liquid fueled car, but worse than an electric car in most circumstances.
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.
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...”
I thought it sounded expensive hearing that Tesla's high-powered superchargers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars[0], but apparently hydrogen stations can cost north of 2 million dollars[1].
I think the two biggest sellers of Hydrogen electric over battery electric, are the fact that batteries have a useful life. That life degrades over time. Hydrogen doesn't have this characteristic. Secondly, cold weather doesn't affect Hydrogen electric vehicles the way that it does with battery electric. If one lives in a cold weather climate, owning a Tesla isn't as advantageous.
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.
absolutely wrong. Hydrogen fuel cells absolutely degrade over time (they are batteries! Just with more maintenance required due to needing fluids pumped through them). Their lifetime for automotive applications is about 5000 hours, or 150,000-200,000 miles, which is less than what a Model 3’s battery will last.
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.
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.
In NL a hydrogen station needs to follow loads of safety requirements. So not just fire safety, safety in general. This was raised as an issue around hydrogen gas/fuel stations.
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).
More like an electric car, if it's a hydrogen fuel cell car (I'm not sure if all hydrogen cars are that or if there's another variant that combusts the hydrogen)
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.
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.
> Hydrogen cars have tiny batteries that don't need to support fast charging.
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.
High power batteries aren't like high power engines. They're built on the same production lines. High power engines prioritize power over cost; high power batteries just prioritize it over capacity.
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.
If you are wiring all 1826 cells in parallel, that means you need 1826 battery controllers to achieve reasonable life and reliability. Plus the hassle and cost of using bus bars instead of wires. And it means that the battery module output is 3.6V at an insane amperage and needs a massive transformer for a reasonable voltage.
> If you are wiring all 1826 cells in parallel, that means you need 1826 battery controllers to achieve reasonable life and reliability.
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.
> 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.
I think it’s precisely that; with electric, there’s no special product to sell you. With hydrogen, or ethanol, the old oil and gas companies can more easily pivot into simply selling another chemical product. With electric cars, the oil and gas companies are like cable TV in the age of the internet; their days are numbered, and they fear it like nothing else.
(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.
Asian countries like Japan, Korea and China are the ones who are still pushing hydrogen tech.
None of these are big oil producing nations so the conspiracy theory does not make sense.
> None of these are big oil producing nations so the conspiracy theory does not make sense.
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).
There is supposedly a huge gas deposit under the sea between those three countries so it’s supposedly just a matter of negotiating and setting up a fair mining operations and start extracting it to theoretically become big oils overnight.
That isn’t how things work but that’s the logic behind pushing Hydrogen.
Plus the folks here probably forget what poverty looks like. In areas with no infrastructure the only way of getting energy is to literally carry it home for your stove or motorcycle. Gas is ideal for these cases. Hydrogen cylinders maybe? Batteries are definitely a no go to transport energy.
Those cars have 10,000 PSI tanks, and Hydrogen is notorious for leaking through everything. It's not an option for places with no infrastructure.
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.
You don’t have to have 10,000psi tanks. A regular 3,000psi industrial gas cylinder would do the job and it would store energy equivalent of around 8gallons of gasoline. The gas cylinder would weigh ~ 100 pounds. So totally feasible.
Now, do we have cheap appliances that consume hydrogen and produce work/heat ? Not yet.
> 100% electric cars isn’t feasible for countries like Japan
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).
Even if there is single power grid in Japan, it's still really small grid compared to America/Europe/China. It's hard to compete with other countries' manufacturing industry with relatively stable green energy if carbon tax become thing. Also nuclear plant is dead end since 2011. That's why they developing hydrogen to store energy. Maybe Korea is in similar situation?
But I still doubt is hydrogen for cars (not trucks) practical. Maybe this is just a demo rather than serious competitor to EV.
I disagree with what he says about co2 and the old “you have to make electricity with something” argument. It wasn’t until I bought a Tesla and did the math myself that I realized how inefficient gas cars are compared to an electricity generating power plant. My equivalent mpg with my electricity rate is something on the order of 150-180 mpg. For trips where we can charge at home (most of our miles) it is a 1/3 of the cost of our Prius to drive.
I'm begging to doubt this. Right now all hydrogen car are about 15% heavier than their BEV equivalents yet are SLOWER and make worse use of available internal space.
When the 4860 cells are used in the structural battery pack, I recken electric semis will have a good power to weight ratio too.
Often overlooked is when you turn a hydrogen car off, it's off. Come back days or even months later and it should be exactly as you left it.
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.
> 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.
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.
Model 3 uses the wheel motors to generate heat and has some kind of single nexus for all coolant, very much different from Model S. The story you posted doesn't say anything about how much energy was lost over just 4 days, and it being noteworthy that the car can be left for 4 days without incident at presumably a high state of charge is telling on its own.
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.
Most people can't charge at home (because most people live in multi-story houses in a bigger cities and don't have a garage to charge in), so refueling in 2min at a gas station still has appeal.
I think this underestimates the massive infrastructure investments those charging poles would need to work. I live in a medium density European town (about 1000 inhabitants/km2, think 4-5 story buildings on average). In residential areas the whole street is lined with parked cars on both sides. To charge these, one would need something like 1MW charging per every 4 cars, which means every 20m of the road, on both sides. So 1km of inner city street would have new electricity demands of about 100MW for fast charging.
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 :)
> To charge these, one would need something like 1MW charging per every 4 cars, which means every 20m of the road, on both sides.
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!
The plural of anecdote isn't data and all that, but:
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.
> To charge these, one would need something like 1MW charging per every 4 cars
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.
> one would need something like 1MW charging per every 4 cars,
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.
Autonomy and ride sharing is the only answer to this problem. Most people who live a dense European town are not driving long distances every day. SO the should just rent a car on the days they need one or take an autonomous or non-autonomous taxi. Those cars do not need to be parked on those specific streets at night.
I also live in a medium density European city and charging poles have been popping next to parking spaces an impressive rate over the past year or so. 2 years ago I might have agreed with you, but today it would absolutely be possible to own an electric car if I lived back in my old apartment without its own parking space.
The number of charging poles I see in public and store parking lots has literally increased 10-fold over the past 3 years. To the point where I always see several free charging points every time I bother to look. I'm reasonably convinced that this scaling can continue at the rate of electric car adoption.
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).
Forget? No, but that's ultimately up to the property owner to fix it. It is certainly no more onerous than a lot of amenities that they already provide. We have several here that have pretty good charging setups, and that will only improve.
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.
Hydrogen cars usually are electric cars. The main advantage to the owner is being able to fill the tank in minutes, and to society as a whole is being able to manage the H2 generation process to align with supply and demand on the grid.
Hydrogen production is not well suited to be run depending on the power supply in the grid due to the high prices of the production facilities. If you keep electric cars plugged in, they are far better suited to absorb high supply situations at a much higher efficiency.
If we're going to store energy by generating H2, is it more efficient to consume it in small cars rather than in big plants that convert it back to electrical power on demand?
I don't think the previous commenter meant converting it back; just that if there is an excess of power, e.g. on a sunny and windy day, that can be captured into H2 which is much easier to store than electricity. It wouldn't be converted back to electricity for the grid.
That's also what I understood, but I'm asking if that's really an argument in favor of H2 vehicles: with electrical vehicles we can also store excess power as H2.
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.
Hydrogen is likely a much better fit for semi trucks, aircraft, boats, and remote rail lines than electric cars. The advantage is twofold, first you can produce and then cheaply store it for weeks and it very quickly refills a car.
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.
I live in a city center, no driveway. My neighbour with an electric i3 runs a charging cord across the sidewalk, I'm not going to do that, ever. I'd much prefer a hydrogen car I can fill up someplace else over requiring plugging in my car every day.
Hydrogen has a great energy density, that's why it is used in rockets. It may have similar range as battery electric cars but it can scale better.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Hydrogen has a great energy density, that's why it is used in rockets.
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.
> 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.
Electrons are more energy dense than hydrogen unfortunately you need a heavy battery to store and use them properly.
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.
You are right, but considering that many people think it is too dangerous to put hydrogen tanks in cars, I wonder what they are going to say about "exotic rocket fuels" :)
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.
Being able to fill up the tank in 2 minutes is the value proposition. When driving a lot or long distances, it matters. Also, not everybody has the possibility to charge at home.
It isn’t that much of a value proposition. Modern EVs do fast charging pretty well. Given that it takes on the order of 10 minutes to pull off a freeway, navigate a traffic light or two, select a pump, pay, use the restroom, grab a snack from the store, and then navigate another intersection to get back on the freeway, adding 5 more minutes to that time to make it a fast charging stop is not really a big deal.
Right. Assuming that: there is a fast charger available, there is no queue, the charger is not broken. When I drive from Aachen to Berlin, if I have to stop, I stop at the pump, pay - takes 5 minutes, use the bathroom maybe, get in the car and leave. When I arrive in Berlin, I don’t have to look for a parking space where there is a charger, I just park wherever it is legal to park. I leave the meeting, get in the car, stop at the pump if it needs to be and off I go. Roundtrip takes 16 hours. I can do 1000km+ on 65 litres of diesel when driving reasonably or 750km when driving flat out where there is no speed limit. I can use aircon, indicators, satnav, charge stuff in the car and when the gas runs out, I am not forced to have a snack... how often can one snack.
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.
A Tesla with under half a charge charges at a rate of 1000km of range per hour at a Supercharger. So 10 minutes of charging is definitely not a full charge but it is often a useful charge.
Same question from me also. Also, hydrogen is highly explosive, so how can that be safely used in cars without detonating a la Hindenburg whenever there's a collision?
The danger of using hydrogen gas in a vehicle may be on the same order as compressed natural gas (CNG) which is used for e.g.: some busses. Hydrogen is stored under very high pressure in tanks, which if ruptured in an accident can cause a physical explosion.
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."
> If you make a hole in hydrogen tank and set it on fire
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.
For me the biggest appeal is you could convert a petrol powered car to run off of hydrogen. While they are not as efficient as fuel cell, running a regular engine off of hydrogen would allow us to create demand for fueling stations faster than waiting on fuel cell cars to gradually enter the market.
I don't know if there is data to support this, but k have heard hydrogen proponents say that even in London it would be difficult to charge all cars, because the grid could not handle it.
So fully electric cars for everybody might not be practical in high density environments.
In hydrogen versus electric, it would seem that hydrogen offers way more to the auto and fuel industries in terms of ability to extract ongoing payments out of consumers for parts, single source or limited / controlled source fuel, and maintenance of a large complex system of high tech components.
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'm curious whether https://proton.energy/ will pan out. They claim to be developing a process to extract hydrogen from natural gas wells, leaving the CO₂ underground. If that's possible, it would basically make hydrogen a fuel.
I remember back during the 2008 oil crisis, I was on a forum where we were talking about energy and the alternatives to oil and the consensus was that hydrogen was a lot less efficient than batteries. You had to store the hydrogen in compressed cylinders, it's flammable, you need expensive catalysts in fuel cells to transform it, though hydrogen is light, it takes a lot of volume to store it because it doesn't compress very well, refueling is complicated. There are also losses at every step of the energy pipeline: electrolysis, pipelining, compressing, decompressing, running it through fuel cells ,etc. It's much more efficient and less complicated to just use electricity and batteries.
Hydrogen is the future of electric transportation!
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's not quite clear from the article, but is this a stock Hyundai Nexo or was it modified to add more fuel tanks? The stock range of the car is 413 miles or 664km, so how exactly was this new record achieved?
The factory recommendations are not always the maximum theoretical distance you can get from your cars, those recommendations are based on real world usage, e.g. 120 km/h on a highway or 30km/h average with stops in the city center.
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.
The arricle says it was a production spec Nexo, it was just being driven for maximum efficiency. As the driver says “it’s actually possible to go way beyond Nexo’s official range”.
We were getting 1000km between fill ups (60L tank) on a family road trip in a bog standard 1.8L gasoline (!) Ford Mondeo, seating 2 adults 2 kids and with trunk loaded to the brim and A/C running on full.
Really difficult to be excited or impressed by these "records". Both Tesla and H2
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the issue with hydrogen the supply chain? I believe the overwhelming majority of hydrogen is currently produced from fossil fuels.
> 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]
There is a great concern about the safety of Lithium batteries because of the fire hazard, yet we are pursuing a much more dangerous technology with Hydrogen with very little gain in performance. Also, it still takes a significant amount of energy to produce the hydrogen.
I've always hoped hydrogen would have taken off. Since you can convert gas engines to run off of hydrogen it would be easier to move the market to hydrogen than electric. Allowing us to build out the infrastructure first, then transition vehicles over to fuel cell.
Burning hydrogen in an ICE is a very expensive and inefficient process. It's a bit like electric heating, you need to first make the hydrogen which is itself a lossy process. In both cases, the "high-quality" energy source that is produced, can be efficiently used by a specific process (fuel cells for hydrogen, heat pumps for electricity) or squandered in an inefficient conversion process (internal combustion engine for hydrogen, resistive heating for electricity).
By the time you can build the infra, we'll have replaced all the ICE cars to EV. And the cost to build the infra far exceeds the cost to replace all ICE to EV and install electric chargers everywhere, too.
Editor’s note: there is no naturally occurring source of hydrogen and no established industry of producing hydrogen from renewable energy. It’s made from oil and natural gas and exists purely by the grace of the carbon industry.
Great. Now you just need to find an economic and clean way to make large amounts of hydrogen. Nuclear power is probably the best option given that you can use it as a source high process heat source.
Probably just as dangerous as driving with a tank of pressurized natural gas, which is already very common (for instance, where I live, nearly all taxis are converted to run on pressurized natural gas, since it's cheaper than gasoline).
I shouldn’t think it’s much more dangerous than other pressurized flammable gases. Those pressure vessels are designed for safety contrary to what you see in movies. I’d be about as concerned as I am driving around with a tank of highly flammable gasoline.
Hydrogen forms explosive mixtures with air at a much wider range of concentrations than typical hydrocarbons and has a nasty tendency to permeate straight through a lot of materials.
It’s lighter than air though so it won’t pool in low areas and if a pressure vessel won’t contain it it probably diffuses through car interiors / dry wall and vapor barrier pretty quickly. What’s the rate at which it escapes? Probably pretty slow.
It can be very safe if using hydride tanks. I think there are some international arms controls related to hydrogen bombs that makes hydride tanks difficult to produce.
Yes. Gasoline has a relatively narrow ignition range, it has much less rigorous sealing requirements, and it burns with a flame that's visible in daylight.
The problem is that we can't easily make gasoline with solar panels and water.
Actually it is possible to make gasoline with solar panels, water and carbon dioxide from the air.
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.
Wasn't Germany's synthetic gasoline derived from coal?
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.
For short-term storage a rechargeable battery is certainly preferable.
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.
Lithium self discharges at 1-2% per month, not an issue in most circumstances, not sure where it would be an issue, if it was just have a maintaining solar panel nearby.
Off by a magnitude, but can you see any future where entry level car manufacturers like Hyundai and Toyota will snatch the market from the German auto makers?
They're not entry level anymore, they're huge companies, some of the biggest in the world. And yeah they have already, people used to laugh at Hyundai, now they're renowned for their quality.
I think all the car manufacturers have moved to the more premium sector. They all make good cars.
For everyone here comparing Teslas range to this:
It takes less than 10 minutes to fill a tank with hydrogen.
It takes 40+ minutes to fill a Tesla to 80%.
Superchargers can only take around 25 minutes for a model y, it heavily depends how many people are on a charging station.
of course not every car can be "filled" with 250kW, it also is a huge wear on the battery.
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 have an acquaintance who has made a substantial fortune from energy focused startups (including a battery tech one) and is now working on another hard tech startup and they are very critical of hydrogen as a fuel. I’ve had superficial conversations with them about it but could never get a sense of their fundamental arguments. Is hydrogen a non starter or are they just protecting their investments with FUD?
Here a few major issues hydrogen would need to solve.
* 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.
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%.
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.
I was only commenting on electrolysis, I did not make any statement about hydrogen power in general. However, now that you brought it up, the other issues that you mention are very surmountable:
- 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.
well theoretical efficiency can never be achived, also it might be more efficient than gasoline cars it can never be more efficient than BEV, because you need to convert power into hydrogen and back, converting anything always has losses
> You can get a lot more miles out of the basic combustion engine design
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.
The arguments I’ve seen have specifically been about hydrogen in the context of EVs (specifically almost always as a way to dismiss EVs).
- 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).
> - 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).
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.
The chicken or egg problem with charging is one of the reasons I tend to down-weight the opinions of EV owners when talking about the future of transportation.
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’s a ridiculous amount of of FUD from the industry (at both/all ends). It’s a Catch 22. You need infrastructure before people will invest in infrastructure. You don’t want to invest the millions/billions in the wrong one, so people spread FUD to protect their investment. For example, Elon Musk had doubled down on battery tech, so H2 winning out isn’t in his best interest.
There's a lot of Hydrogen FUD for sure, but the core of the problem is storage and transport. Hydrogen is just extremely hard to store and move around pressurised. This makes it uneconomical in most use cases. There's nothing fundamentally wrong about it as a technology (if you treat it as a energy store instead of a fuel), just engineering challenges and cost.
In this use case, hydrogen forms a fairly inefficient way of transferring energy from renewable sources to your car. As well as that, you have severe problems with distribution and storage - the pressures required are frankly terrifying as an end-user, and hydrogen embrittlement of any steel in contact with the hydrogen is also a big problem.
Aside from the other points raised here, presumably there are safety concerns too - a hydrogen tank is basically a highly pressurised bomb; I'm not sure how you go about keeping that safe in a collision except making it heavily-armoured and hoping for the best.
It is a bomb alright, but surprisingly that is the least of its problems. The bomb can be made strong enough to withstand great majority of accidents. Of course it won't withstand some very nasty ones, but that rare possibility people could live with.
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.
Hydrogen is not dead, all the hate it has been getting from Musk made people leave the space. If somebody bets on it right now it seems like a better bet compared to say 5 years ago.
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 .
I doubt that. I've got a Leaf that I've had for almost 2 years (i.e. lots of rubber on the road), and I'm not going back. Judging by the number of Teslas I see driving on the road every time I'm out, I don't think other people are going back either.
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.
> I've got a Leaf that I've had for almost 2 years
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.
The Leaf doesn't have active cooling. From what I understand, charging up to 80% instead of full except on long trips prevents any thermal issues. I've got a 230 mile range, so 80% is not an issue for me for daily driving. I will say that the max capacity meter hasn't yet gone below 1.0 after nearly 2 years.
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.
Hydrogen has the same infrastructure as gasoline. A "recharge" takes as much as 40 seconds. EVs have a negative impact in the quality of life of those who buy them because they cost more and have the problem of recharging time. It's simply an own goal you are doing to your team which in this case is your family because of woke ideals.
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.
I really just fucking love plugging in at home to charge (and so does my family, and no I'm not just saying that). I don't want "infrastructure". I would take even slower charging if it meant I got to charge at home. As-is, I'm very satisfied, and excited to see where EV tech goes. I'm sure in a few years the charging speed and range I've got now will be peanuts to what's out there.
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.
> I really just fucking love plugging in at home to charge (and so does my family, and no I'm not just saying that)
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.
This is honestly a rather bizarre take, but also not true. I almost never run out of battery at the end of the day, because I've got 230 miles of range. I plug the car in overnight, and it's fully charged in the morning, but if there were an emergency overnight, I'd still have plenty of range for getting to wherever. So I do have 24/7/365 availability? I even don't have to remember to stop by a gas station (or hydrogen station given the original post).
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.
If you'd rather have a car that's twice less efficient (and twice more expencise to fuel) than wait 20 minutes to charge, then you are living in a bubble of privilidge that does not reflect life priorities for 90% of folks out there
EVs are perfect second cars or city cars. You don't need to charge them completely all the time. If you want to take a road trip then get a PHEV, or a Hybrid.
I own a LEAF. The maintenance costs are basically zero: just tire rotations. It pains me to think about spending money for oil changes on my other car.
Also the build quality on a Nissan is as good as a Toyota.
Hydrogen car is much less comfortable and more expensive to use than electric car - few refueling stations, much lower energy efficiency.
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.
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...