Toyota Develops Packaged Fuel Cell System Module for Hydrogen Utilization
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* For transport, electric car infrastructure is already growing and hydrogen is exceedingly unlikely to be able to keep up.
* Electric batteries are getting better faster than anyone thought and after a plateau, the rate is accelerating again.
* Energy efficiency, infrastructure, and maintenance of fuel cells is worse than electric cars.
This poorly translated article for VW cover the most of these points in more detail: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...
Most hydrogen advocates discuss new membranes that could improve electrolysis efficiency to 80+%. Even at 100%, the equation still seems to be worse for hydrogen than electric, for transportation at least.
Also, home heating. When can I buy something based on a fuel cell that will let me replace my oil furnace?
And there's the potential for buffering excess renewable energy. for now this problem can largely be solved by improving the electricity transmission infrastructure between countries, but it's unclear to me that this is sufficient in the long run. I dream of the Star Trek like future where the Earths energy is supplied from solar panels in the Sahara, generating hydrogen which is then shipped around the world.
Given the inefficiency of
photovoltaic
-> hydrogen
-> liquid hydrogen?
transport (how, not easy)
But you're much better off just putting 2x or 3x the number of solar panels in countries that don't have as high a solar irradiance as the Sahara does.
Or even do HVDC from the Sahara to Europe. That is probably much higher efficiency than trying to use hydrogen or natural gas.
BTW in case anyone is interested, here is a map of solar irradiance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance
Antimatter harvesting works best in places with strong magnetic fields, which makes Jupiter and Saturn much better candidates ([0] claims Saturn is the best). Not sure how much we could capture in terms of mass/energy; the impression I get is that it may be worthwhile for space missions, but I'm not sure if it's enough to power a civilization.
--
[0] - https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2016/08/03/antimatter-produc...
So this should not be a problem for heating purposes. Cheaper cooling designed heat pumps do not obviously function to so low temperatures, but all Nordic models for example will function just fine.
Fujitsu is similar.
Mr Cool makes the claim [1] that theirs "can heat at 100% capacity at –5 degrees Fahrenheit, even with outdoor temperatures as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit".
I think Mr Cool is talking about a central system, and so they are claiming 100% with the outdoor unit at -22℉ (-30℃) and the indoor unit, presumably in your unheated crawlspace, is at -5℉ (-21℃).
Mr Cool also claims cooling with an outdoor temperature up to 115℉ (46℃), which so far is under the max for much of Texas, so heat pumps are a good choice still in Texas as long as you get one of the newer models with the good low temperature performance.
Well that is just another way to say 'battery'. If hydrogen is the 'right' solution for this is also highly questionable.
Storing large amounts of hydrogen is not easy. Hydrogen fuel-cells and electrolysers are not very cheap and you need to scale vertically if you want to be able to consume high amounts of power in both directions.
In addition, that whole stack makes it overall very inefficient.
The only real benefit compared to a battery is that its easier to scale hydrogen tank then battery materials.
However, there are other potential solution. A 'liquid air' battery, meaning liquidity air and on demand drive turbine, has better energy efficiency is more proven technology at large scale and has the same advantage of making bigger tanks result in larger storage.
Flow batteries potentially can do the same thing as well.
All that said, it seems to me that LFP (Iron Phosphate) based batteries will beat all of them once the production is fully going. LFP has very low material cost, and has a very long life and is very safe.
One of the issues with chemical storage from 'leftover' renewable is that your energy consumers will have very low utility and your plant will run at very low overall utilisation. This is less of a problem with a LFP based chemical battery.
Are they? Any sources on that?
Besides, the issue with batteries is that you carry dead weight all the time regardless of how much energy they have stored in and that weight is very high, making the driving experience "not for everyone". I guess, the weight also would mean higher asphalt and tire consumption, which as I read recently is the prime polluter of the driving activity.
I don't know if fuel cells actually have a promising feature or not, but I like seeing people working on alternatives to batteries. Light vehicle propulsion is something to be desired, it opens up possibility for aviation too.
We are only in the start of how batteries are integrated and eventually all manufactures will move to structural packs.
The driving experience is already really good, a heavier feeling is actually prefer by most people.
Any sources on that? Is this coming from a poll or questionnaire or is it your opinion(because Tesla?)?
Some people like pineapple on their pizza, others eat marmite at breakfast but the heavy car likers is a first for me.
Are there instances of people installing ballast to their light cars in order to make them heavier?
It’s an arms race. It’s hard to feel particularly safe if there are significant fractions of mobile homes barreling down the road toward you. Owning the larger vehicles isn’t fun when you need to park for that matter.
More exhaust cleaning and more complex motors cost weight. Sturdier frames are also heavier. Compare e.g. the door thickness of a modern car with one from the 1990s. You can also compare the door's weight. The door will be heavier for the modern car and the thickness will cut away more from the interior space provided (since exterior dimensions are somwhat "fixed" in perception per class of car). Sit in a 1990 era Golf1 and compare to a modern Golf7. The modern version is more cramped on the inside despite being larger on the outside. And it is a good deal heavier.
So yes, larger exterior will get you a heavier car, but it isn't really consumers wanting ever larger exterior dimensions. It is consumers wanting a constant interior usable space.
A lot of interior space reduction for a given vehicle volume comes from the space required for a passenger cabin to have an aerodynamic shape.
More "wasted" space leaves more room for crumple zones, airbags, speakers, computer modules, HVAC stuff, alternative drive-trains and all sorts of features throughout the car.
Basically every engineering group in an OEM has their job made easier by making the car bigger. Making the new generation 1" bigger than the last generation is an easy way for management to please basically all the stakeholders.
Vehicles at the compact end of the spectrum are moving toward the design characteristics of 1950s heavy equipment where the operator sits where he fits and that's it.
You will see that the Golf has gotten bigger, but now the Polo has taken over as the small car. The Civic is no longer a small car, and has been replaced by the Fit/Jazz. The Focus has gotten bigger, and the Fiesta has taken over as the small car. The smaller car still exists.
Compare a modern Polo to a Mk1 Golf. The Polo will be safer, quieter, more efficient, and probably not that much heavier. Same goes for any car that I mentioned above.
A heavy car is objectively worse when looking at handling, fuel economy, road wear, general pollution and crash safety, but greater mass feels safer and sturdier. If an object is very light, it subjectively feels less strong, even though it may not be.
Car purchases are very emotionally driven and buyers choose what feels best to them, even if it is objectively worse on many parameters.
For a non-car example, I prefer riding my relatively heavy 3-speed Dutch-style bicycle to my old aluminum-framed 8-speed sporty citybike, even though the latter is objectively faster, turns more crisply and has a better gear range. Simply because the heavier bike is less perturbed over bumps and the wider tires soak up imperfections better.
what ? nobody prefers it. there are people that tolerate it and those that don't know better. weight kills driving dynamics, everybody that claims otherwise does not care or did not drive a lightweight car.
Of course because it's absolute nonsense. We spent the last several decades trying to make vehicles lighter for their size, and nobody loads their car with bricks and sandbags to get that "heavier feeling". Lower center of gravity is great but completely decoupled from the overall mass of the vehicle. The fact that the comment came back from downvote graveyard is a testament that not only will people say anything to support even a ludicrous claim, many others will support it without batting an eye.
Even if people don't understand the physics of why it works, the handling impacts are pretty apparent, especially out of low-speed city or heavy-traffic driving.
Specialty vehicles like sports cars and offroad trucksand where payload rating is not a concern function much better the lighter they are though.
https://pushevs.com/2021/01/10/guoxuan-unveils-a-cobalt-free...
FTA:
2009: 95 Wh/kg
2015: 140 Wh/kg
2019: 190 Wh/kg
2020: 212 Wh/kg (191 Wh/kg at pack level with JTM)
Context: this chemistry, while inexpensive and durable, was always thought as something that didn't stand a chance against other, denser ones in applications such as EVs.
Currently it seems that it crossed the threshold of having all the parameters - price, durability and energy/power density - good enough to essentially replace NMC/NCA long term. Especially given that it uses no cobalt or other high-demand materials.
Tesla already uses LiFePO4 in some of its Chinese-made Model 3s, without much of a weight penalty.
From planes to motorcycles and so on. Both are more sensitive to weight than any four wheel vehicle. plus portability may be an issue for some uses that battery packs will never overcome.
Even the trucking industry has to worry about weight and it may take an excessive amount of weight to get similar ranges to the diesel trucks we have even after swapping fuel and motor for batteries and its motor.
Regardless, all solutions being offered end fossil fuels and that should be the primary concern.
Battery energy density is increasing and that's great. But if I were to venture a guess this mostly benefits people who can spend several hours to fully charge them, like at home. A battery that can add 200-300Km of range in 10-15 minutes would probably do a lot for the people who can't charge at home.
But this also introduces the next issue: large scale quick charging. Being able to quick charge a substantial number of cars simultaneously takes a lot of power. Having quick charge and a big battery on the car doesn't help at scale unless all charging stations are prepared to deliver the same (maybe giant banks of batteries taking the role of the underground fuel tank).
There's no silver bullet when it comes to clean driving. It's a lot of incremental advancements mixed in with some revolutionary ones which need both time and investment. And perhaps a bit of change in human psychology.
Fortunately this is already the case in cars with 250kW charging capability.
That being said I don't think habits from combustion engines can and should translate to EVs, so you don't need such quick chargers in cities - cars are normally stationary 90% of the time. Lamp post chargers are a cheap and easy to install solution:
https://airqualitynews.com/2019/05/02/1000-ev-charge-points-...
Better still, their output could be throttled so as to not introduce too much demand.
EV will have to be able to do both though. Slow charge for constant parking charging - one charger for every parking spot, and quick charging at dedicated stations which would presumably be equipped with everything needed to cover the potentially huge demand.
That's as much as seven electric locomotives at maximum - many more are currently in motion all around Europe, China and Japan.
It's a problem, but a solvable one. The technology is here, and is much cheaper than an equivalent hydrogen infrastructure.
And all that is a problem only as far as people planning today under the assumption that they can just quick charge in 15min and it can only get faster. But they ignore the aspect of scaling. We are nowhere near providing quick charge capability as people imagine when they make such assumptions. And we won't be in 2030 either, when many manufacturers decided to have a fully electric fleet. Which isn't to say that we should stop buying EVs, we should just stop making unrealistic assumptions under best case conditions when planning or comparing tech.
It's the kind of assumption people get wrong even when thinking of household items like an electric stove. If each element is 2.5-3KW the assumption is they'll operate at that level even when running together. Then they scratch their head when the food just doesn't seem to get cooked as fast as they expected all of a sudden. Scaling up never comes to mind.
As for hydrogen, the best business case for it probably does not overlap the one for BEVs. It should target everything batteries can't, as many other commenters here pointed out. Some public transport operators are building as we speak fleets of fuel cell trains (to the tune of hundreds of millions) because overhead lines are missing in many areas they service and the alternative is diesel. There's a case to be made for quick "diesel like" refueling especially when in the hands of organized operators.
And charging stations will probably not reach gas stations level of efficiency any time soon, certainly not by the time most manufacturers go for BEV only fleets. The point isn't that "all cars fast charge at once" but that today any one of the dozens of gas stations in any city will serve multiple customers at once and offer a hefty range in a matter of minutes. The difference is even more visible if you go to more extreme situations, like a highway gas station in vacation season, where cars queue up to every one of the dozen pumps despite their substantially longer range.
Again, none of these issues are insurmountable, they just require a lot of investments in infrastructure and a change in mentality. But whenever someone compares hydrogen to battery tech saying "BEVs can quick charge too" it's clear that they don't understand how things change at scale and what's the strong point of each tech.
refueling with H is gonna blow battery recharge times out of the "water"
But how would a H2 fueling station work? Customers would have to make an extremely tight coupling, and while the compressors pressurize the customers tank. I expect that will take longer then petroleum refueling. And the cost? The bill will have to compensate the fueling station for same fairly exotic tech.
We know fuel cell technology works, and it may have a really important niche. I don’t think we can assume it will be able to compete with EVs on cost and charging time.
The one near my home seems to work, by observing people using it (it's colocated with a gas station) pretty much just like a normal gas station. I'm sure the coupling hardware is quite special, and it might take a little longer (or not) for a similar range fuel load, but when people fuel their Mirais it's the same basic flow as with gas vehicles, pull up to the pump, hook it up, fuel, and go from a drive-in pump, not a parking space. So, it's on the same basic ballpark, UX wise, not the “well, if I was on a long trip and needed to fuel, it's okay because i’ll just time it with a meal/rest break” kind of thing that is used to justify BEV charging not being excessively inconvenient.
Hydrogen is not instant to refuel so the time difference is not too crazy.
Can Hydrogen charge at home?
For ~98% of the days of the year, I don't have to even go to the gas station. For long trips, I'm not sure there's really a difference between a 5-10 minute gas station stop and a 30-40 minute supercharger stop.
There are markets (like Australia) where electric car infrastructure is almost non-existent. If someone puts hydrogen fuel cell cars on the market at the right price point, the electric car infrastructure may never be built.
Even most petrol cars can't get across Australia's distances in between major cities on a single refuel.
It's much more likely to become customary to just have it transported by a diesel truck to the destination, and then travel by plane yourself.
None of the "new mobility" is suitable for long range travel.
Japan is a tiny island on other hand.
Fuel cells do not break through in the car industry (because battery do the job there) but do everywhere else.
- We now have datacenters and hospitals that dump their old diesel generators for fuel cells for emergency power supply [^1]
- Non-nuclear submarines have run commonly on fuel cells in Germany for decades.
- Fuel cells start to be evaluated with ammonia usage for rural co-generation Heat & Power. [^2]
- Several Boat experiments use Fuel Cell [^3] [^5]
- With the current power density level of battery and for the next decade, there is no way you can make a "green" long range commercial plane without a fuel cell technically [^4]
Yes. Hydrogen storage is a pain and yes Hydrogen electrolysis is inefficient. But it does not change it is already a working solution for High Power & High Density electricity generation and will probably remain there for decades.
[^1]: https://techhq.com/2020/07/hydrogen-fuel-cells-the-future-of...
[^2]: https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/on-the-ground-in-japa...
[^3]: https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-a...
[^4 ]: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2020/10/hydrogen-fue...
[^5]: https://new.abb.com/marine/systems-and-solutions/electric-so...
And that customer experience is really hard to figure out, so it makes sense to invest in a lot of things to improve your chances of finding the winning solution. And there is always the possibility that there wont be a single winning solution anyways.
Enough abstraction, let me throw out some examples:
PEVs carry a huge battery that takes up a large chunk of the car's base. So one bump and that battery is now damaged. But a fuel cell is much smaller, can withstand a bigger fender bender. That may be 10x more important to customers than some theoretical optimum.
Here is another:
Batteries may not be as long lasting for customers that want their car to last 20 years (current expectations, barring getting run into). Exactly how long lasting on the road are the current batteries? Do we know what service costs they'll have compared to fuel cell service costs? Will they survive well in different climates/humidity/dust, etc? So maybe a model with a battery that is more serviceable and cheaper will outcompete a model with a battery that is more efficient, and a longer lasting fuel cell might outcompete both.
Time to recharge is a lot more important than range. I can charge my gas tank in less than 60 seconds. If it takes an hour, then range doesn't mean the same thing. Who hangs out at a charging station for an hour? So being able to charge more conveniently may be a lot more important than range or the number of charging stations. What will win out? We don't know, so cover your bets.
Yes, there is cool new battery tech coming out. I hope we get even more innovation in batteries, it is hugely important. But will the cool new battery tech be affordable, durable, long lasting, fast to charge, and able to operate reasonably well in a place with 4 seasons and lots of rains, in a car that drives for 10 years on lots of potholes and gets into a few fender benders? Not so clear. So don't put all your eggs in one basket.
It makes perfect sense that Toyota is experimenting with lots of alt-drivetrains, even as it cranks out gas and diesel cars and they came up with a much better hybrid model as well. As far as I know, they have everything covered. Ultimately the consumer is going to decide what they want to buy, and the market will respond to that. The question is whether you will be able to respond or will it be someone else because the hot thing is X and all your R&D was sunk into Y. Toyota is trying to make sure that whatever customer preferences happen to be, that they will have solid contender in the mix. And in the end, whatever gives the customer the most convenience, performance, affordability, and durability will win, and Toyota wants to win.
Go actually look at the internal of a PHEV. They have literally every single part of a BEV but also have many, many additional parts.
You actually end up with more parts that are single points of failures and more places where a impact can make the car not able to drive.
A properly integrated structural battery that are now coming to the market already is gone be much safer overall then a PHEV and very likely more robust as well.
> Batteries may not be as long lasting for customers that want their car to last 20 years (current expectations, barring getting run into). Exactly how long lasting on the road are the current batteries? Do we know what service costs they'll have compared to fuel cell service costs?
So far all indications are that battery perform very well. Not 20 years at max capacity, but still very usable after a lot of that time.
If you look at LFP batteries, you can already get 20 years with high retention.
Batteries are also getting better and cheaper with every generation.
The problem is, fuel cells have solved non of these problems. They have more parts to maintain overall. Fuel cells need to be replaced as or more often then batteries.
> Will they survive well in different climates/humidity/dust, etc?
There have been Tesla driving around the polar circle for 10 years now. EV are very popular in Norway.
Dust has and humidity are not an issue, the battery and motor are ceiled of. These things are far more likely to be issues for PHEV as for those you need to take air from the outside and filter it, to then react it in the fuel cell.
> Time to recharge is a lot more important than range.
First of all, most people will either charge at home, or at work. There will be charging in most places where you stop to top up.
If you are forced to go to a fast charging station, they are already filling up 80% of the battery in 20 min and next generation of battery are gone be considerably faster.
> Yes, there is cool new battery tech coming out.
Battery tech doesn't simply get invented and then sold in cars. If something goes into a car program it has gone threw years and years of testing already.
We already have good evidence that for example silicon loading improves the battery.
There are many such changes in the pipeline, and they wouldn't be considered if they were not cheaper and better.
> It makes perfect sense that Toyota is experimenting with lots of alt-drivetrains
There is a large amount of difference between 'experimenting' and having multiple billion $ program over 20+ years while totally neglecting the competing technology. And that is what Toyota has done.
> Ultimately the consumer is going to decide what they want to buy
Yes, and consumers so far have universally rejected PHEV unless massively insentivised to do so.
> And in the end, whatever gives the customer the most convenience, performance, affordability, and durability will win, and Toyota wants to win.
Toyota are the once pushing a technology that consumers are not demanding. Yet they continue to insist that it is 'the future' and their offering in EV are not very compelling as a result.
Every company wants to 'win' but that doesn't mean every company will.
I'm not saying Toyota is going bankrupt but you are simple making excuses. They have spend huge amount of money on the wrong horse and they have failed to invest the same on the right horse.
Not only that they have continually insisted that EV were terrible and hybrids were better. Not only that put publish a lot of misleading 'studies' trying to confuse consumers for their own interest.
EV’s have zero car tax and zero VAT on Norway. That makes them cheaper than equivalent gas cars
> Yes, and consumers so far have universally rejected PHEV unless massively insentivised to do so.
Same with EV’s as shown above. They’re only massively popular if the price is right. It all comes down to it.
In Finland PHEV sales are now higher than diesel sales iirc, which used to be super popular here. Due to how car tax works on models like Volvo the PHEV variant is cheaper than the gas variant, hence people select them. We don’t have no VAT like Norway has so BEV’s are still very expensive here.
Personally I do like emissions based taxation a lot. No need to complain about people not buying them as they will buy if the price is correct vs alternatives.
As a sidenote Toyota has announced an EV. Sure it’s bit after others but not by that much.
Also they’re increasing the amount of PHEV’s. As they already have a good hybrid tech one just needs to slap a bigger battery and it’s done. And as batteries weigh a lot the weight of PHEV with it’s ICE and whatnot is around the same as BEV. See Rav4 PHEV as a good example.
My point was that they clearly work fine in the cold.
> Same with EV’s as shown above. They’re only massively popular if the price is right. It all comes down to it.
No, its not at all the same. Tesla sell a lot in the US even outside of insentives.
Often FCEV have the same intensives as EV and still don't sell at all.
Sorry I mixed up PHEV and FCEV. Our dicussions is about FCEV but I wrote PHEV, that is just a hybrid with a plug.
> Personally I do like emissions based taxation a lot.
The problem with that is that emissions from the gird a not always the same, and the same for FCEV.
Also, for PHEV the emissions are often understated.
Not much. This comparison includes apparently also plugin hybrids (So BEV and PHEV combined) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country
Out of all new cars 1.9% were plugins in US in 2020 18.1% were plugins in Finland. 74.7% in Norway.
And they were not full EV's over here. Only less than 2% is full EV here (which is still more than what's sold in US). The majority is basic family movers like Volkswagen Passats and whatnot that allow daily driving to work with electricity and then for summer cabin one can go with gas.
I do understand why consumers are not enthusiastic about them in US. As in some cases it can be cheaper to just go with gas than use electricity.
Over here its overwhelmingly cheaper to drive with electricity. As an example the RAV4 PHEV costs around 30-50% to drive using the EV mode instead of fueling using the average price of household electricity here.
> Sorry I mixed up PHEV and FCEV. Our dicussions is about FCEV but I wrote PHEV, that is just a hybrid with a plug.
Yeah FCEV's have a hard time going forwards. Unlike plug cars that can be charged at home with FCEV the full chicken and egg problem in refueling is there. Perhaps someday, but in general overcoming those problems is really really hard.
> Also, for PHEV the emissions are often understated. Yeah. Especially when there is no significant savings with charging.
As gas costs closer to $8 per gallon over here actually charging is far more common. It's so much cheaper to drive with the battery than by using gas.
It's basically all about economics. Make it cheaper and people will buy. Expensive status symbols only go so far.
Yeah, every hydrogen car, including Toyota's, still needs a big battery because the motor is still an electric motor and fuel cells still can't on demand produce the sort of electricity needed to drive the electric motor at high torque. (Plus to be similarly efficient to a BEV they need the battery storage for regenerative braking, they can't just add hydrogen to the tank.)
Hydrogen cars are still just worse battery electric cars in practice from a "fender bender" standpoint and even other consumer viewpoints. (The refueling experience is faster sure, but it is overall worse.)
Toyota is lucky that all the money they are throwing at hydrogen cars still is keeping them somewhat competitive in BEV experience, because the hydrogen vehicles are just worse BEVs. Eventually when they get past the sunk cost hurdle and cut their losses they might be in a place to use all the experience building bad BEVs into building good ones.
To put some numbers on it, the usual way to compare charging rates of different energy sources is to specify them in range/charge_time, in mph in the US or kph elsewhere.
In the US gas pumps can pump a maximum of 10 gallons per minute (although many are slower depending on how well they are maintained).
For an average US gas car, which gets 25 mpg, that works out to a charge rate of 15000 mph (24000 kph).
A Tesla charging at a V3 Supercharger charges at 1000 mph (1600 kph).
A 240 volt 48 amp home charger does 44 mph (71 kph).
We have seen no massive adoption rate growth and we have seen no massive cost curve going down. We have also not seen a lot of gains in overall efficiency.
Battery on the other hand are showing massive adoption, at the same time as falling price and a gigantic amount of private capital.
And Toyota is making 10 million cars a year, they have not invested all that massive amount of money in the hope to sell fuel cells into submarine market.
Trucks and cars are basically already clearly going battery and that is far bigger market then all the others together.
Grid Battery also have not adopted fuel cell tech for the most part. LFP Chemistry seems like the most likely winner for grid batteries at the moment.
> - With the current power density level of battery and for the next decade, there is no way you can make a "green" long range commercial plane without a fuel cell technically
You can make simple produce a carbon based fuel out of hydrogen and use engines very much like the ones we use now instead of switching to fuel cells.
Also, I disagree depending on your definition of 'long range', if you re-engineer planes from the ground up to be electric you can replace a huge number of flights that are domestic, or rather within a continent. That is the majority of flights.
It seems that data says the opposite [1].
I know several datacenters in my region that are currently running fuel cell or/and plan to do so. It was unthinkable 10 years ago.
> And Toyota is making 10 million cars a year, they have not invested all that massive amount of money in the hope to sell fuel cells into submarine market.
Telsa produces 0.5M car a year in 2020 and still they built their Giga-Factory to generalise Battery technology to other applications than car.
The same is valid for fuel cell and Toyota with this move.
The article is about 'product' usage, nor about 'car'.
For instance, without too much imagination: Seeing luxury yachts switching from diesel generators to fuel cell in incoming decade to avoid a ban due to environmental concern from most touristic regions would not surprise me.
This is an application. And it even seem very likely to me.
Doing the same with current battery energy density is impossible.
> Also, I disagree depending on your definition of 'long range', if you re-engineer planes from the ground up to be electric you can replace a huge number of flights that are domestic
I said long range. Excepted if you live in Russia, domestic is NOT long range.
Doing a Frankfurt-Tokyo or Paris-New York on an electrical plane today is unthinkable. And it will very likely stay like that for the next decade.
But, don't get me wrong: Battery technology democratization is amazing and a proof of hope in our current climate change disaster scenario.
However, hoping we can solve every high power usage with battery technology currently is completely illusory and we need to solve these use case too if we do not want to go full speed straight to disaster.
Hydrogen production is the real elephant in the room here. The inconvenient truth is nearly all of the hydrogen produced at any scale is made by steam reforming natural gas.
Electrolysis is great for testing things out in a lab, but using electricity to make hydrogen which is then used to make electricity is a much less efficient process than taking the elecricity you already have and storing it in a battery.
Direct solar splitting looks promising, but the tech we need (described here [1]) is still in its infancy, plus it uses the super-expensive easily-fouled platinum catalyst that anyone who's worked on PEM cells knows and loves.
[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/02/04/novel-catalyst-produc...
Then economies of scale come into play to make things cheaper as per batteries. Plus it's Toyota and they are well known for industrial processes (they also own a part of Tesla, no?)
What's the issue with having Hydrogen/EV's together? Diesel and petrol had no issues.
Could there not be an EV/hydrogen combo that potentially fixes range anxiety or another issue?
Besides competition never hurt anyone, batteries will be developed faster, research conducting more often and so on.
Electric vehicles worked around the chicken-egg problem by having home charging (with fallback to power socket whilst travelling), and then chargers got built.
Which gas stations want to carry hydrogen to support just the first 10, 100, 1000 cars, and who wants to buy a car where you are 100% dependent on those gas stations carrying (and continuing to carry) the fuel that your car will need?
What's the fallback option that short-circuits the chicken-egg problem for hydrogen? Maybe it'll work if the cars can also use conventional fuel, but it will still seem entirely pointless to have the hydrogen option until gas stations have hydrogen.
So, for "hydrogen" think "natural gas". Then realise that natural gas is much easier to store, and if you're prepared to "pay" the carbon cost (not a real cost in most places, more of a .. moral cost), you should just use natural gas. And you can already buy LNG/CNG vehicles.
If you want a hydrogen vehicle on zero-carbon hydrogen only, how much is that fuel going to cost you?
I think Toyota is effectively leveraging government subsidies; part of that is putting some of the technology in cars, but that's not necessarily where the big win for the tech is.
> Maybe I'm missing something. I don't ever see hydrogen fuel cells gaining traction for a few reasons:
Fuel cells already have traction in larger and stationary applications (less so much in autos, but Toyota has another solution for that market), and while less efficient than pumped hydroelectric, hydrogen is already the most cost effective energy storage medium for the electrical grid.
For cars, Toyota is plans to introduce a solid-state battery prototype this year and have them in general use early this decade (VW and Nissan have similar plans, but are a few years behind.) The numbers being tossed around for these are something like 50%-100% higher energy density than current batteries, and vehicle charge times in the 15-minute range.
Toyota is a big enough company to have been doing more than one thing at a time.
This video gives a good breakdown on how the inefficiencies in hydrogen fuel cell based cars add up. The best case scenario for hydrogen based land transport I can think of is probably in the trucking industry where engine weight, range and refuelling time are important factors
Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to get any idea of what's going on.
It's impossible to get good analysis of whatever any Toyota is doing because they have so much upper middle class mind-share and fanboys that you get analysts/journalists pandering to them for confirmation bias clicks with "look how Toyota is doing everything right" content and fishing for rage clicks with "Toyota is doing X and it will never work" content and the noise drowns out any real analysis and the comments are no better.
If I pretend there is suddenly no oil I can see them for land transport in off-grid areas or long-haul trucking, but that's not going to happen. Instead what will happen is that electric vehicles will displace where they can displace and oil will continue to power vehicles in the niches that EVs can't displace yet.
Transportation is collectively only about 25% of CO2 emissions too, and if EVs displace say 2/3 of that (most cars, buses, delivery vans, some trucking, some farm equipment) it will shrink to being an insignificant contributor.
So yeah, I think Toyota is wasting their money.
More details: It's flawed because EV and H2 work in so many different markets/use cases and that it isn't a zero sum world where it is an either or. We need both H2 and EVs to knock off traditional ICE and traditional fuel stocks for a cleaner future for future generations. Remember that they will be knocked off the pedestal in the future by something even better hopefully.
As others have mentioned - the debate isn't around which is the most efficient technology though that does help. There are so many different variables involved - too many to put in a HN comment thread.
I think this is one of the big things fuel cell proponents are missing: the heat and water that come out the other end are liabilities in most transportation contexts, but can be side benefits in a different setting.
A pure electric system is much simpler as the motors are the regenerators and there is one energy store.
There looked to be two problems for hydrogen EV's. One was storing it, and the second was the platinum in the fuel cell.
It's now looking like storing Hydrogen as a compound of some sort is going to be a thing. There are several compounds out there now, Ammonium making big strides recently.
The platinum in the fuel cell's is still a thing, where "a thing" means we need more platinum to power the world's electricity needs than we have platinum, and not by a small factor. They've been reducing the amount needed but not by enough and there is no hint anyone's found another catalyst doing the job. Yet.
Maybe Toyota's bet is there has to be one, surely? That sounds like a bit bet, but batteries aren't there yet either. They have to drop in cost by a factor of 2 of 3. We don't know how that will be done, but it's looking it will happen and these announcements of "we will only be making EV's in 2030" are essentially bets that will come to pass.
A rental place not far from me offers a hydrogen vehicle. And while the range in theory is better than many EVs, you are essentially limited to that radius from their offices. It's the worst things about gas and charging infrastructure combined: the infrastructure does not exist and it is a substantial investment to outfit it in new places.
The word "only" in your sentence is only meaningful in a world in which diesel fuel and natural gas don't exist.
Check out this map from the US DOE: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/natural_gas_locations.html
Why there must be dozens of natural gas (both LNG and CNG) fueling stations around the country. There are even a handful in Canada. Almost nothing, but still way ahead of hydrogen.
If you look at pure hydrogen (same map), there appear to be a few dozen stations in the entire country, all in California.
In comparison, the number of electric stations (same map) is huge.
Pure hydrogen is in last place. It's a joke. Toyota has wasted billions of dollars on it. Nobody is going to build out a hydrogen infrastructure given all the alternatives.
Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is deader than the parrot in the Monty Python sketch. No amount of wishful thinking can change that.
There are 168,000 gas stations in the US. Supported by a huge network of oil fields, pipelines, and refineries.
There are now 26,000 EV charging stations open to the public. In addition, there are literally billions of wall outlets that can be used to charge EVs. All supported by hundreds if not thousands of generating stations and an enormous power transmission network.
There are hundreds of natural gas (LNG + CNG) stations.
Given that existing multi-trillion dollar infrastructure, what would the business plan for building out hydrogen look like?
I don't know, maybe something like CNG or EV stations two decades ago?
About business plan: start selling to fleets of taxis and short haul trucks. They are sensitive to fuel cost and consumption, but only need one or two stations in the whole metropolitan area. Do that in major cities. After that you only need a few stops between the towns.
Natural gas, as all fossil fuels, are dead within a few years. It’s amazes me that people still haven’t seen that writing on the wall.
Only idiots buy new fossil fuel cars today. They won’t have any resell value in a few years.
And incredibly sensitive to price per mile. You add 800lb of batteries to a step van that delivers bread and you lose so much cargo capacity that you're no longer profitable or it bumps you up to a different class of vehicle with different regulatory requirements that make you no longer profitable.
Believe me, tons of fleet operators are drooling over the idea of EV fleets that recharge overnight and the cost savings from drastically cutting the required regular maintenance. The economics just aren't there yet.
>But idiots buy new fossil fuel cars today. They won’t have any resell value in a few years.
Idiots vote so.....
Which is why they choose hydrogen fuel cells instead of batteries. The energy density is much higher, and refuelling much faster.
And even if you consider electric vehicles, I guess you know that Amazon have ordered 100,000 vehicles.
Fortunately you don’t have to rely on politicians to do the right thing regarding electric cars. The total cost of buying and driving an electric car is already on the brink of being cheaper, and in two or three years there won’t even be any competition.
Right now energy density of them is enough for decent passenger car experience. But it’s not competitive in big trucks.
Weight: Electric semis will have a reduced load of over 4 MT (~9,000 lbs) due to increased weight in the batteries
Range: Even with a ~500 mile range, that is not even close to satisfying long-haul trucking needs
Recharge: With a 150kW supercharger, you are looking at 7+ hour recharge time
Charging infra: You can charge your electric car at home, you aren't gonna be charging your semi at home. Many owner-operators store their trucks in a truck yard along with dozens of other trucks. Even just 10 trucks @ 120kWh = 1.2MWh, large company fleets will be even harder. On the road, this will be even less feasible in the short term
In the end, what you have is a more expensive truck, with a decreased payload capacity, that cannot drive as far, that will have more downtime due to charging, and will require massive updates to electric infrastructure.
The only case where they might make sense are in shorter routes, with a vertically integrated company like Amazon going from one distribution center to another where truckers can switch trucks on arrival and let the previous one charge. But even then, it will be a long time before running these trucks will be as profitable as the existing ones.
Honestly I don't understand why that isn't already a thing, even ignoring the environmental benefits and just focusing on economics. The amount of diesel big trucks consume is expensive. Maintenance is expensive. Even manufacturing trucks with big diesel engines is expensive.
Because contrary to the impression you get from reading comments sections on HN, Reddit and other sites they are fallible. They are run by humans making decisions based on incomplete and imperfect information. Sometimes they get it wrong.
> for wide variety of applications, including mobility such as trucks, buses, trains and ships, as well as stationary generators
This has not much to do with electric _cars_.
AFAIK hydrogen mixed with oxygen ranges from 'highly flammable' to 'highly explosive'. Wouldn't hydrogen cars (or any hydrogen power for that matter) be much more dangerous compared to fossil fuels or electricity?
Sure, a lithium battery burning in an underground parking garage is dangerous. But having a car leaking hydrogen into an underground parking sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Can anyone with chemistry experience shed some light on the dangers if say 10% of cars in an urban environment were to be equiped with high pressure hydrogen tanks?
Now that lithium batteries have been proven to work well I don't think anyone is still seriously thinking about hydrogen cars.
There's definitely a cost/weight/safety/efficiency trade off that makes hydrogen just very unattractive for cars or really any consumer application.
We need alternatives, and there will be markets where hydrogen makes more sense than electric etc.
But as a company/shareholder it seems nuts. They are swimming against a massive current and investing lots of money that instead could have gone on their EV offering.
Now, if they can get those boxes to run both directions (to consume power and water to produce hydrogen when needed) that will be very interesting.
Of course, this may also be a hail-mary attempt to monetize their years of R&D of fuel cells for vehicles.
We gotta try everything!
The kicker is timing: Is Toyota financially strong enough to persist until the H2 market is big enough to sustain them?
Separately, Tesla has eschewed solid state Li batteries. That's kinda weird, right? Solid state appears to be a much better option.
I think both Tesla and Toyota have determined, separately, that H2 will become viable before solid-state is mature enough to replace Li-ion.
Again, timing. How long? 10 years? 20 years?
Solve those two problems first before dealing with hydrogen storage.
1) The energy from the fuel cell has to be temporarily buffered in a battery, which is capable of finely modulating the power output needed for driving vs a fuel cell.
2) To absorb energy from regenerative braking. Hydrogen fuel for automotive applications don't work in reverse (convert energy back to H2)
Granted, this battery in a fuel cell vehicle can be smaller than in a pure EV, but now you have 2 very expensive energy management systems in the car, which makes the whole thing very expensive.