http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/...
http://corporate.ford.com/microsites/sustainability-report-2...
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/30/fiat-chrysler-exec-future...
Most natural gas comes from fracking, which may be a major air polluter in addition to many other known problems.
http://energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-natural...
http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2015/04/01/how-m...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/16/frackin...
Fiat-Chrysler: upcoming Town and Country PHEV
Ford: C-Max, Fusion PHEVs.
What am I missing here?
GM/Ford also have hydrogen cars in testing e.g. Chevrolet Equinox. And Fiat has had a number of hydrogen cars they previous developed.
Another point that's very important, is that every single hydrogen car I've seen so far looks either dumb or ridiculous. It's been true for most EVs, too, so far, which makes me wonder if they do it on purpose to sell few models and then say "there's no demand for clean cars" or something. Fortunately Tesla came along and showed everyone else you can actually sell a "normal" looking EV car.
We are talking about the future technology of the masses here.
And yes car companies can make normal looking hydrogen cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex09fldnr1E
Pushing hydrogen cars is insane if you want to be clean.
Hydrogen Fan: But the exhaust is only water! Me: All electric cars have no exhaust! Hydrogen Fan: Well they do at the coal plants! Me: So we are going to count electric production? What about Hydrogen production? Today it uses fossil fuels and outputs carbon and methane worse than coal plants. Hydrogen Fan: But the real exhaust is only water! And you could eventually get the hydrogen back out of the water! Me: That's not how Chemistry works. Where does the energy come from to split the water molecules?
That's about when I gave up on the conversation as it derailed into the aforementioned beliefs that the guy built a Hydrogen Fuel cell that somehow fueled on water, spit out water as exhaust, and was capable of driving a car in the 70s but then his garage experiments were stopped by a government conspiracy. (I presumed drugs were heavily involved in the actual reality of this story, this was a middle aged guy working in a hardware store.) This entire conversation felt like par for the course when dealing with people that think hydrogen powered cars are anything but a ruse. You even hear variations on it from the Big 3 car companies. ("Well we almost had hydrogen working in the 70s but the government stopped us." Yup, it was clearly the government and not, say, the basic laws of chemistry and physics.)
As land becomes more and more expensive housing density is increasing worldwide. This means fewer houses will have dedicated garages/driveways and apartments are going to become more popular. This increases the chances that your car will not be within distance of a power socket.
Hydrogen doesn't have this problem. It works exactly like petrol does today. It doesn't require much education or really any change in user behaviour. It is simply another nozzle at the gas station just like when LPG/Natural Gas was introduced.
Storing hydrogen is difficult, it will leak out of steel and embrittle the steel.
The biggest drawback, as it stands today, and quoted from the article you linked is this:
"You won't even go 100 miles on current tech hydrogen tanks that are still safe to carry around in a car."
However, some of the drawbacks could very well be the reasons hydrogen wins out. Again, quoted from the article you linked:
"Even though a HFC-powered car is essentially an electric car, you get none of the benefits like filling it up with your own power source, using it as a smart grid buffer, regenerating energy during braking, etc."
Those look like good ways to maintain the something similar to the present distribution change.
It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds. People will argue over which is the better technology, but that isn't necessarily going to be the deciding factor.
And you don't do it for free, the org operating the charger can get electricity cheaper if it agrees to modulate load to match demand.
Electricity here in Ontario costs twice as much during the day as it does at night (US$0.12 vs US$0.06 per kwh). If you cycle most of a Tesla battery every day that's ~$120 a month in electricity savings. Not sure if that offsets the battery lifespan costs, but it's not nothing.
I just know that I will drive to the same gas station, use the same hardware to put it into my car, wait the same amount of time and pay for it exactly the same way I do today. Only it will be clean. And I won't involving changing my life to fit my car.
> use the same hardware to put it into my car
It is not the same hardware: hydrogen pumps are far more complicated, difficult, and expensive than gasoline pumps. (http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11493/why-fuel-cell-car...).
> wait the same amount of time
Hydrogen cars will always have very poor range compared to hydrocarbon-fueled cars. So for the range that you get, you will spend much more time pumping. See the blog-post series above for more on that.
> and pay for it exactly the same way I do today
Because the infrastructure is many times more expensive than petroleum infrastructure -- and this is not just a matter of relative economies of scale, but a fundamental attribute of hydrogen -- you will need to pay much more to recoup those capital costs. Again, read the blog post series above (I'll stop repeating this, but it holds true for every point).
> Only it will be clean.
Only at your tailpipe, which is a false form of cleanliness. Systemically, Hydrogen is dirty. Hydrogen production is spectacularly inefficient. The only remotely efficient way of producing it is to extract it from hydrocarbons -- in which case it would actually be cleaner to generate work by burning the hydrocarbons directly. Truly "clean" methods of hydrogen production (electrolysis of H2O) require copious amounts of electricity, which must come from somewhere, and again would be better used directly, via a battery-electric vehicle. Basically, any energy source which produces hydrogen could be used to directly power a vehicle, and would be 5x-10x cleaner by doing so.
> And I won't involving changing my life to fit my car.
You have already changed your life to fit your car -- by driving to gas stations! Home-charging is a feature, not a bug.
Besides, if you really want to drive to a remote location to get a complete top-up of your range -- that's what battery-swap is for. Battery-swap stations are far cheaper to build than hydrogen filling stations, and can give you more range, more quickly, than hydrogen pumping. And they are truly clean, not imaginarily clean.
If you could simply replace gasoline with hydrogen, then your arguments might have some merit (although it still wouldn't be "clean" by any real measure). But you can't, and therefore your arguments don't.
All your other complaints are irrelevant to the consumer.
Batteries improve ~15% per year ($$$ / kWh stored). It appears to be some sort of moore's law for batteries. It also means we'll see way better batteries in 10 years (4x better regarding $$$/kWh).
Now with way more range and non-stop travel (2-4x) the bottleneck will be how long you're willing to sit in your car without a major break (sleeping).
Such a future would be very similar to charging your phone at night. Most people can get away with just charging at night. Even if they travel. I expect the car battery capacity to grow beyond the point where intraday charging is relevant at all.
And once we've reached that future going to a gas station will seem like a strange thing of the past. Yep, it might be 10-20 years from now. But we'll hopefully all watch this happen.
We didn't run out of whale oil, coal, or wood. We haven't run out of oil, but as cheap solar infiltrates as solar generation drops in price, it will make much more sense to run personal transportation on clean and simple electricity.
And again my workplace in London was a big car garage. I don't see how that magically ends up with per bay power with the current chicken/egg situation.
You will get a ticket if you put a liquid-fuelled vehicle in those spaces.
These tend to be filled with Nissan Leaf and cars of that kind, I've yet to see a Tesla in one (do all Tesla owners charge at home?).
I just don't understand how electric cars scale out to all consumers given the housing situation. There would need to be an electric charging unit on every parking spot. Is this logistically practical ?
(US uses 110V residential, 220V industrial; Europe uses 220V/230V/240V residential, 400V industrial; Additionally usually british and German wall sockets, at least, offer up to 16 or 24A, which, again, is more than US sockets. If the socket delivers more power, you can charge faster)
US industrial is variously 208VAC, 240VAC, 277VAC, and 480VAC; some are single phase; some are three phase.
If you're discussing only the "walk up and plug into an existing outlet" situation, EU charging will be faster. Not so for permanently installed chargers.
As for the very last point, the supply equipment negotiates with the car to advertise how much supply it has. Unless you can tell it to charge at 24A, it doesn't "know" and the charge will be at the slower rate. Same in the US. If I plug my trickle charger into a typical 15A plug, it charges at around 12A. If I plug the equipment into a 20A plug, it still charges at the same rate, because the equipment doesn't know that a higher amperage is available.
For permanently installed chargers, this will be a lot more power.
Note that the J1772 charging standard won't supply 400VAC-3phase, but IEC 62196[1] will allow that super-fast AC charging.
6.6kW adds about 25 miles of range per hour of charging.
It's only the slow trickle charger that takes a long time (in fact can be over 24 hours).
Then again, they'd be in a pretty good position to monitor spaces used and already have a billing system for parking time, adding cost of power would be quite straightforward.
And it's going to be a long time before 100% electric occupancy is a real problem.
Note that you'd only need to size for average use, not peak use. With a bit of cleverness (and expense) you could set a power limit for the whole garage and distribute it between the charging cars, rather than letting everyone charge full blast. Most people will drive under 50 miles per day on average and will charge overnight, so you really only need to deliver about 1.5kW per car. (50 miles at 300Wh/mile is 15kWh, assume "overnight" is ten hours of charging.) You'd want to be able to provide more for those who need it, but that's probably a reasonable number for an average.
I have 10kW charging at home for my Model S and it's major overkill for local driving. Most public chargers are about 6kW, which would still be plenty for daily charging.
So having 500 spots in a garage means you'll need to have some technology that is aware of which car is in need of charging and when the owner is expected to return. You can then set dynamic pricing to motivate car owners to charge at the moment you have enough capacity and encourage them not to all request full charge-rate at busy moments in the garage.
In any case, allocating power between cars is relatively easy. The cars themselves can be told how much they're allowed to draw, and this can be changed on the fly, so you don't need any fancy power electronics, just enough smarts to monitor usage and tell cars how much they can take based on that.
It's pretty inconvenient to own an EV that you can't charge at home. It's doable in some cases, but it's far better to have home charging.
I'm pretty sure that 90+% of EV owners of all stripes charge at home, whether Tesla, LEAF, or other. If you see them charging in public, it's usually either to get a bit of extra range because they're planning to drive beyond what a single charge can give them, or they're just taking advantage of the availability of changing even though they don't need it. Mostly the latter.
(Just in case it comes across wrong, that isn't meant to be disparaging. I plug in when there's a free charger even if I don't need it. If it's offered, I figure I might as well take advantage. I do leave my phone number on the dashboard in case someone comes along who actually needs it to get home.)
If anything it's the electricity infrastructure that already exists, and you only need chargers installed, which are far cheaper than hydrogen stations - which is why we're already seeing thousands of EV chargers across the US and only a handful of hydrogen stations.
Cars use a whole lot of energy, gasoline stores a whole lot of energy. I doubt there are many places around the world where electric power distribution systems are equipped to serve vehicles, on top of cooling, heating, refrigeration, electronics, etc.
Half-credit. The DOE has shown that 77% of light vehicles could move over to overnight electric charging without adding any additional grid capacity.
If we need more capacity, we add additional renewables to the grid.
Not quite true. It's estimated[0] that up to 75% of light-duty vehicles (the kind regular people drive) could be converted to electric without requiring major grid upgrades. The one major assumption is that most people would be charging their vehicles at off-peak hours (overnight) which is already the case[1].
[0] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518066/could-electric-c...
[1] http://www.powermag.com/impact-of-electric-vehicle-charging-...
The same could be said of the hydrogen infrastructure, except that hydrogen faces a massive chicken-and-egg problem. There are a grand total of twelve hydrogen fueling stations in the US at the moment. These stations cost a ton of money to build. Who will build them if there are almost no hydrogen cars on the road? Who will buy hydrogen cars if there are almost no filling stations?
EV charging infrastructure is relatively cheap. That means it doesn't face the same chicken-and-egg problem. A person whose daily driving fits entirely within their EV's range doesn't need any charging stations except the one at his house, which can typically be installed for $0-2,000. (The $0 is for if a suitable outlet is already available and you just use the mobile charger that comes with the car.) And since the stations are relatively cheap, that means that businesses can install a few to attract EV owners without making it a major investment. Because of this, there are already over 10,000 public charging stations in the US, with more showing up all the time.
Each additional station stresses the grid a little bit more. But it also contributes money to maintaining and upgrading the grid. As long as stupid political forces don't prevent utilities from gradually upgrading over time, there will be no problem there.
This is also where you get into discussions about the "smart grid". The thing to note is that the grid in most countries is already "smart" on the production/generation side: it has to be to deal with changes in demand over time, particularly given something like the bathtub that happens every single day. The goal of the "smart grid" is to make consumption smarter by signaling better when demand might change (my owner just got home from work for the day, your house says, so please get ready for higher power needs this evening) and electric cars are a vanguard for the "smart grid" precisely because they are programmable consumption devices with useful consumption patterns that can be smartly adjusted. An electric car (or its charger, same difference) can ask the grid for energy and adjust its energy input to the grids needs (and vice versa), charging on a slow trickle during high demands and a full blast to help fill in the bathtub. Cars use a whole lot of energy, but primarily in short bursts (trips to/from a destination) and ultimately spend a lot more time parked. With a little bit of information from the user, or a bit of inference from pattern matching, a car can predict about how long it will be parked and about how much charge it will need for the next trip (which is not always 100%; if you drive to lunch from work you probably are only planning to go a short distance because you have to return to work just after lunch). The energy grid loves this because it can better predict demand over time and better adjust consumption to meet generation and vice versa.
(This is all even before you get the "smart grid" facets that electric cars are giant parked batteries and that a truly "smart grid" could borrow energy from an electric car to meet high demand and then repay that energy (with "interest") as demand shrinks back down. It's this part that gets a bunch of interest when people talk about the "smart grid", but that's actually a less practically useful part of it than just consumption demand knowledge and preparation/time-shifting. The "battery loans" would more likely be useful and actionable merely at the scale of between your personal car and home than at the level of the grid.)
Tesla only has one charger and that is in SW Michigan near Chicago though they recently announced one more in the Ann Arbor-Detroit area.
In order for electric cars to become a good alternative, they need to be chargeable in <5min at least.
I'm not sure what would happen if you had a whole residential street wanting on-street chargers, though. At that point, we might need some new planning rules. Doesn't seem an insuperable problem, though.
The same would have to happen for almost all residential streets in Berlin. Even ignoring the fact that there simply isn't enough space for chargers everywhere, it's also not practical financially.
Incorrect. Even if you run a car off coal, its cleaner than gasoline. That coal fired plant has better emissions controls, and is more efficient than the powerplant in your vehicle. And the grid will continue to become "cleaner"; a gas-powered vehicle will never reduce its emissions over the life of the vehicle.
Emission controls yes, but CO2 release cannot be captured and you can't beat entropy - energy is wasted on conversion from chemical=>electric=>mechanical rather than just going directly chemical=>mechanical.