Welsh-made hydrogen car prototype unveiled for trial
bbc.com
bbc.com
Edit: One of the reasons may be that the politicians' focus is on sponsoring large-scale industrial opportunities to create prospects for thousands of low-skilled unemployed people.
(I'd also question the "good transport links"! The M4? The overpriced railway?)
(Joking aside, Bristol does seem to be doing OK for tech jobs)
Also the Universities in Wales probably need to attract more lecturers who are pioneers in the field who would normally choose to go other universities such as Bristol, Imperial, etc... (we had Professor R.A. Falconer at Cardiff Uni for instance).
Here's one such company who is specialising in helping clients automate all the things - Focus on devops: https://www.devopsguys.com/
There are actually some great opportunities for tech startups in south Wales. Lots of grant money available if you know where to look and can persevere through the paperwork.
I have worked and lived in Cardiff, Bristol and London in tech startups and hands down Cardiff is the best for so many reasons. Cheap & lovely people. Welsh tech companies can get loads of grants and trade missions, especially if anywhere outside the Vale of Glamorgan.
Maybe it's because we like to make Serious Things like airplanes and space telescopes instead of websites.
It's no Silicon Valley - Wrexham, the population centre, isn't quite (though very nearly) big enough to hold the interest of the intellectually curious - but it's a lot more vibrant than you hear about. Here is the business directory of the business park in St Asaph where they're building the mirror segments:[2]
[1] http://www.glyndwrinnovations.co.uk/articles/latest_news/the... [2] http://www.stasaphbusinesspark.org.uk/directory/
Edit: seems there's this article [0] as well but its a bit dated.
[0] http://www.dailypost.co.uk/business/business-news/north-wale...
- currently almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas, releasing CO2 in the process.
- creating hydrogen via electrolysis is possible, but very energy intensive, using up much more electricity than it releases in the fuel cell
- in any case, there is further energy used for compressing the hydrogen.
So, in total a pure electrical car easily drives 3 times as far as a hydrogen fuel cell car with the same amount of input energy. This is going to put hydrogen cars at a big disadvantage to electrical cars.
On the other side, electrical cars are getting to the point where the advantages of hydrogen cars are getting moot. The range is pretty close, and with fast charging the "refuel" does not take much longer as with hydrogen cars - but you normally can charge them overnight and not have to recharge them on the road in day-to-day business.
It's unlikely.
Hydrogen makes a poor fuel because it's very hard to store. It leaks through almost anything, and embrittles most metal.
It's possible to store, but it's expensive. It's also not very dense, so you need a lot of pressure, which just makes the storage/leakage problem worse.
I think Methane might be the fuel (not energy source) of the future. It has almost all the advantages of hydrogen, with much fewer problems.
The energy source can be something else, so the CO2 emissions of methane are not relevant.
Unrelated, but if we could store mono-atomic hydrogen, that would be something! There is more energy available in hydrogen bonding with itself than with oxygen.
Compared to all the other ways in which you could propel a car hydrogen is a very dangerous one and that alone is reason enough why it probably will never happen. Compared to LPG for instance hydrogen is much harder on the system and much more dangerous to handle. I don't see it happening any time soon.
Keep in mind that a lot of inner city parking space is indoors / underground.
The problems: Some C02 comes out of the exhaust. But it's carbon neutral. Hydrogen has the "water out of tailpipe!" hype about it, but it's only really clean if that hydrogen is made with electricity that comes from nuclear or renewable (and clean) sources. Most hydrogen is produced from natural gas at the moment.
The other problem is that we have limited capability to produce vegetable oil. But we also have limited capability to produce hydrogen. With hydrogen you could go with massive increase of nuclear power, and you got it. But currently there is also research for oils produced by seaweeds that looks quite promising.
Edit: Seems like Fuel Cell technology would be great, but it's held back by hydrogen hype. And hydrogen hype seems to be destined as hype, because hydrogen is freakishly difficult substance to deal with.
I agree on feeding people however e.g. algae produced bio oil could be very space conservative -- and could be used to e.g. clean waste water.
NB use of could and should rather than would throughout this post. Algae produced bio oils are a matter of research at the moment and I don't think that the fuel cells exist yet.
Now if you could use batteries and electric cars for short trips you would have very high efficiency. Then shift to refueling capable system for long range needs. This is only possible if the "long range" system has very low infra needs.
Optimally we would have some kind of standard that would allow you to swap battery to fuel tank + fuel cell unit in your electric car. I've ranted about that previously.
¹ May or may not contain traces of hydrogen peroxide, but shhhh.
Holds true for any type of energy source.
You'd have to have some government involvement here so that all batteries are owned by the same entity, so you can swap batteries from different manufacturers, at any energy station.
You also have to standardize on only a few battery types, which makes it harder to design the car, since you can't custom fix the battery to available space.
And that means future battery advances are impractical - who wants to use a battery that can't be part of the swap network?
It's not realistic.
A hybrid power system is more practical - use hydrocarbon fuel for >50 mile trips, and a battery you plugin at home for shorter trips.
The Big Three might voluntarily standardize on a battery formfactor and swapping bay, because it would put them ahead of Tesla. "Our patent is free, follow our lead Mr Musk."
There could still be plenty of flexibility in shape, but it would likely be constrained. Like, the width/depth must be a fixed number of centimeters, and there must be a common connector and common mounting points. But the length is up to the manufacturer, programmed into an RFID tag for the swapping bay. (And you'd be able to use shorter batteries inside a larger vehicle.)
Battery advances are the most trivial of all to incorporate. Already li-ion packs require dedicated charging circuitry. The exact cells used don't matter, a tenth-of-a-cent EEPROM is programmed with the charging curves of the cell chemistry.
If anything battery tech will advance much faster with swapping. Without swapping you have to be very conservative. Advances can only be introduced with new models (so once a year) and are very costly to get wrong across a fleet. With swapping you could put a couple of prototypes into the pool every month, and swap them out immediately if the prototype underperforms.
to be honest I think the idea of swapping the battery is more of admission of the shortfalls of battery technology than anything. Now I think having a battery that swaps is more interesting from the serviceability aspect
All vehicles can load up at a pump, you can't swap the same batteries in a tuktuk, a large sedan and a bus.
But just one tiny explosion, as in the Tesla batteries when loading as it happens with the cheap chinese hoverboards, and the company is doomed. Just think of the Hindenburg desaster.
The main reason for that is that it doesn't stick around - it's lighter than air, so all the fuel rises instantly, and so does the bulk of the fire, which stays with the fuel.
It makes hydrogen fires rather safe as fires go - they are out within seconds.
For example the hydrogen fire in the Hindenburg was out within about 10 to 15 seconds. The casualties came from burning fabric and other things (like crashing).
Hydrogen is not a good fuel for other reasons (see my other post), but not because of safety.
Let's just pour all that money into making superconductivity at room temperatures a reality!