Volvo and Daimler bet on hydrogen truck boom this decade | Hacker News Reader

Volvo and Daimler bet on hydrogen truck boom this decade

arstechnica.com

136 pointssamizdis360 comments

I'd like to remind people that heavy trucks that make fairly regular and predictable journeys between fixed points with fairly rigid timing constraints lend themselves very well to all sorts of solutions that wouldn't work for your work/soccer/whole foods type trips.

I wouldn't bet my money on hydrogen being the way of the future but I would bet my money on internet comments being wrong when it comes to predicting the future of heavy industry on a timeline longer than a couple quarters.

Batteries are getting better and look promising but all new tech does that until it hits a wall (then it generally progresses slowly until some development in a different field enables further development in the stalled field). What are the odds batteries hit a wall before they're viable in heavy trucks? I dunno but certainly not zero.

The theoretical limit of energy density for lithium batteries is already too low to be economically viable for most trucking applications. I also don't know that hydrogen is the answer, but it almost assuredly is not going to be batteries for anything that isn't for local deliveries only.

> theoretical limit of energy density for lithium batteries is already too low to be economically viable for most trucking applications

Curious to see a source for this.

Economic viability can be massaged through subsidies or taxes, if the break even point isn't too far away from the current point.

>Economic viability can be massaged through subsidies or taxes

Wow - we have subsidies than can alter the laws of physics? Neat! Why didn't we deploy that before now!

No, but just think about an extreme case. What if there was a tax on any liquid hydrocarbon based fuel of $1000/gal starting 1/1/2023? What would the reaction be? Obviously truckers would want to buy something so they didn't have to drive a diesel truck any more. If battery powered trucks were more expensive per lb*mi than the diesel at the old price, the switch would cause general prices for goods to go up, granted, but the case for non-diesel trucks would be there because it wouldn't go up enough to cause the demand for trucks to collapse.

The reaction would be the political party that passed that tax would lose overwhelmingly by a landslide in the election.

If you want to do some form of tax that is large enough to make a difference you first need to make the alternative to paying that tax viable enough that people will switch. Hydrocarbons are massively more energy dense than any other practical fuel. (nuclear is of course more energy dense, but not currently practical for trucks) If you want to get rid of them, then you need an alternative that works well enough for people to actually switch. There are a number of them, but batteries are not one, and never will be.

That’s not true. 500 mile range semi trucks are feasible with careful engineering. That’s long enough where drivers have to stop for regulator rest anyway. See: https://selenianboondocks.com/2017/11/tesla-semi-part-1/

More for lithium sulfur.

What are the chances of a Tesla megacharger exactly at the closest exit when you hit your 8 hour mark, and also not being used by any other trucks? Real life usage requires buffers.

This really isn’t a problem.

8 hour is the MAXIMUM you can legally drive at a time. 11 hours is the daily maximum driving time total. So as long as there’s a mega charger between your 3rd and 8th hour, you’re fine. Then charge overnight slower.

Lithium sulfur (or a smaller load) enables no need to charge during the day at all. Could go the full 11 hours driving each day and charge at mere Supercharger (or CCS) speeds overnight.

I worked in the commercial trucking EV space for a little bit and I don't know anyone in the commercial trucking industry that genuinely thinks batteries will be the solution for long-haul, class 7 & 8 trucks. At least not in the next decade or so, if ever. Elon and Tesla will tell you otherwise but there's a reason their Semi has been delayed for 3 years now...

Short haul, drayage, etc. is definitely workable with current tech.

They batteries you'd need for 6-700 mile daily drives would mean you're carrying a tiny fraction of what a ICE truck could haul due to weight constraints. We are making strides in this technology but are still nowhere close.

Almost everyone I've spoken to believes hydrogen is far more feasible, but it still has its own issues most importantly the massive infrastructure investment to support it.

The only way to make electric long haul trucking work out is overhead wires. Trolley buses in some cites do this, (the latest have enough batteries to run for ~5 miles without a wire which is useful for a lot of applications)

Or better yet the freight railroads need to figure out how to serve their customers better. They are already more efficient than existing trucks, and overhead wire locomotives are already on the market. The US has the best freight rail in the world - and they still lose a lot of potential customers because their operations are so customer unfriendly.

Wire trucks are tested in Germany and Sweden that I know off. I too think that it might actually be really viable to avoid tons of batteries - unless there is some technical issues I am unawere off.

An inductive system under the road surface would seem easier to install and would work better with different vehicle sizes. Suspending lines across a multi lane highway would need a lot of structures.

There is no way you could pass enough current via induction without setting things on fire or microwaving the occupant of the cab (or both). If it was viable, people would be pursuing it already.

Even if it was safe, the efficiency is much lower, and it is a lot more expensive. Wires overhead are much cheaper than than wires in pavement. It is more expensive to put the wires in pavement, and you need a lot more to get the induction to happen.

Not induction but conductive rails are already in use on test stretches of road a few places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road

I cannot comment on efficiency and the like but today in Milan, Italy the first few new on-the-road public buses "fast" (200 kW) charging stations went into operation:

In Italian but with images and videos: https://medium.com/lineadiretta/installati-i-primi-charger-h...

This is the solution Volvo has proposed except with guard rails instead of overhead wires because they are incredibly brittle. Almost anything can tear it down in inclement weather. At first glance it seems impractical because there are so many roads, but 95% of the time freight trucks say on the main highways. So you only need to electrify those.

As an added bonus, it makes self-driving trucks much much easier to implement.

The hardest part is probably standardization. You'd need buy-in from the US, the EU and probably most of South-east Asia for it to be practical.

Eh, electric trains still use incompatible standards for different regions of the same country due to historical inertia. In comparison selling trucks with a different electrical pickup for each continent wouldn't be a big deal.

Overhead wires work fine with the railway network but somehow I think that having all these independently operated trucks drawing power on one pair of wires might be a challenging problem.

A single train draws a lot of power (several MWs) but it's one entity and as such can easily be managed in respect to having the power system functioning. But having tens, maybe hundreds of vehicles draw power on the same wires would need to be coordinated somehow.

I think a hybrid concept of electric trains for the long haul and electric trucks for the last miles might be promising. Possibly with autonomous freight hand over.

I think the efficient option is electrified roads you can drive over at 70+MPH. It’s simply the evolution of trolleys, but the chicken and egg problem is huge. ~15-50kw per car/semi takes a lot of power infrastructure. Still in road charging at say 20-30c/kWh could be extremely profitable and still much cheaper than gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road

A huge upside is in road charging is nearly perfect for both load shedding and self driving cars.

I'm still going with batteries for the short haul trips, with trains for longer. There are too many roads to cost effectively electrify them all, that means there will always be short trips (my driveway at least) that need battereis. While we can electrify freeways rail is cheaper by far.

The point is electric cars with a 200 mile range and a significant electric road network simply makes internal combustion engines obsolete in a way that even a 500 mile EV doesn’t. Semi’s are a bonus at that point.

Anyway, electric rail is just down to the standard rail vs road brake down we already have. Roads are point to point without extra loading or unloading steps. Even with expensive gas and cheap electrified rail you still see a lot of long distance trucking. Long term with either electric highways or self driving trucks it’s going to favor roads even more let alone both.

It works out until you account for economics. It is cheaper to electrify a length of track vs a length of road. Rail also implies some form of planning to make the trip more efficient (rail works best with long trains - a situation that is unsafe on roads). Rail also allows a lot more cargo per lane/track and so it a lot cheaper - but only when you can take advantage of that. And so the real analysis is a lot more complex than could go into a 100 page report (much less a comment box).

Efficiency is always a function of usage. Electric rail lines have a much lower average demand for electricity. Here the efficiency of rail actually works in the opposite direction where battery power trains and electrified roads mean significantly less total battery needs.

Consider in terms of electric highway usage, a car every 100 feet isn’t that dense and get’s you to a steady state of ~20kw * 5280/100 = 1MW of power for several hours a day. Electric trains have higher peak demand vs cars, but it’s on a very infrequent basis.

Of course every car isn’t EV and right now ~0 cars can use in road power delivery. But, that’s just a chicken and egg problem not an issue with the technology.

It's amusing to watch folks bend over backwards to propose workarounds for the hard thing that solves the problem: developing a sustainable, energy dense fuel.

We already have it, it’s called electrically synthesized methane/propane.

If the carbon is captured from the atmosphere and merged with water via renewable sources, that is it. We don’t do it and it isn’t proposed because the efficiency losses are crazy, and we aren’t in a world with over-abundant renewable energy widely available for pennies on the dollar (yet)

Yeah, with the addition that if you're going to go the synthetic hydrocarbon route you might as well go all the way to a fuel which is a liquid at normal operating temperatures to simplify logistics (and which isn't a massive GHG when it accidentally leaks like methane).

Advantage of shorter carbohydrates (like propane) is that they're made up of less carbon relative to the hydrogen (compared to longer chains), so for the same amount of energy stored, you need to capture less CO2 from the atmosphere or from wherever you're taking it.

Propane can relatively easily be compressed to be liquefied at room temperature. Takes just a few bars of pressure.

Let us quantify your statement!

By my calculation, you need to capture 0.9176 carbon atoms from the air to make propane whose energy content is the same as octane made from 1.0000 captured carbon atoms.

I used the "Std enthalpy of combustion (ΔcH⦵298)" of the 2 fuels from Wikipedia in my calculation.

... which of course requires hydrogen.

Biofuels are one way. Basically get algae to absorb CO2 and produce fuel.

Especially interesting because you can just mechanically press the oil out, which is very easy to turn into diesel. Unfortunately the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be there yet.

I could reframe your statement like so:

~~ = strikethrough, italic = my inserts

"I worked in the commercial ~~trucking~~ EV space for a little bit and I don't know anyone in the commercial ~trucking~ industry that genuinely thinks batteries will be the solution for ~~long-haul, class 7 & 8 trucks~~ practical, affordable, long-range cars. At least not in the next decade or so, if ever. Elon and Tesla will tell you otherwise but there's a reason their ~~Semi~~ Model 3 has been delayed for 3 years now...

More often than not, innovation comes from industry outsiders. You can think whatever you want of Musk, but I think he has more than proven that he eventually gets the shit done he has talked about.

> practical, affordable, long-range cars

We don't have this in EV yet, or is it your perception that we do?

We do not. Most cheaper EVs are ~200 miles of EPA estimated range which here in the US limits the use of the vehicle significantly. You also have to account for the fact that EPA estimates tend to be fairly optimistic for the way some people drive.

A Model3 AWD (non LR) will struggle to hit 200 miles of range at 75+ MPH with the heat running and temperatures near freezing. For anyone in New England cold weather and prevailing highway speeds of 75+ are fairly standard.

> practical, affordable, long-range cars

I've been driving only EVs or PHEVs with big batteries for last 5 years. EVs are practical for my specific use cases. But it's a lie to say that we have EVs that practical, affordable, and long-range.

They're practical for people with garages. Affordable, only if you don't cross shop them same price point for hybrids, and don't compare what you get for the money. And none of them is long-range - ok range, at best. And not a single car comes close to being both affordable and long-range.

Emphasis on the "don't compare what you get for the money". The Tesla Model3 is nice, but once you get close to $50k here in the US you're up against much much nicer vehicles to spend a few hours in.

I bought a car 2 years back and test drove the Model3 as one of the contenders. The two things that led me to skip an electric car this go around was the poor dealership support that I had a couple of owners warn me about and the fact that the Model3 interior is pretty awful compared to what you get in most entry level Japanese and German 'luxury' cars. I'm a car guy, I can't justify spending that kind of money on something I don't absolutely love.

I'm excited to revisit the decision a couple of years down the line.

Unless you look at Japanese or German cars I think you'll be disappointed. It's not that Tesla has poorer interior than other American cars. In general they all have plastic-y, toy-like interior. Even cars more expensive than Tesla have this problem. And then there's the interior design. Cars half the price have much higher interior quality in German and Japanese cars (and Korean and French and Chinese and...). It has always been like this for some rreason. Have you seen a Mustangs interior? Yikes!

Lithium batteries have tripled in energy density since 2010 while the price has dropped about 90% I believe.

I was pretty skeptical when Tesla announced the Semi but the trend lines are there if not on Elons over promise timeline.

I agree it will be some time before they are viable for long haul, but a lot due to charging infrastructure.

Weight is the big question mark, I am anxious to see the Tesla semi battery weight and final capacity to see how viable it is. My guess is around 10,000lbs and a megawatt-hour capacity for 500 mile range. I imagine them trying to do a structural battery to try and make up for its weight. The equivalent diesel drivetrain is under 5000lbs including engine and can have up to 2000 miles range.

“Lithium batteries have tripled in energy density since 2010”

No they have not. My 2021 iPhone does not have triple the energy density of the 2010 iPhone.

The battery cells have improved but that is a packaging improvement, not battery improvement. Other companies are doing pouches for example. And then there is the question of cooling, do you include it in the weight calculations?

From what we know a Tesla model S in 2020 does not have triple the capacity of the model s of 2012. We only saw an increase from 85kwh to 100kwh in 2020. That is 20% increase not 300%.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-io...

Your iPhone example is problematic because Apple has so many competing requirements, but ok... Battery capacity from the iPhone 3gs to the 12 increased by over 2X. Sure, some of it is packaging (the 12 is 15% heavier) but the biggest factor is better chemistry.

Would you have been OK with GP saying 2X instead of 3X?

No, because newer iPhones are larger and have physically larger and heavier batteries that help them store more energy. iPhone 11 has a density of 250 wh/kg and the iPhone 4 was around 200 wh/kg.

That is again not even close to 300% increase

I am looking at apples documentation. Not sure where you folks are coming up with your imaginary numbers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191007202842/https://www.apple....

You're comparing less than ten years. Here's what I see, 2009-2019:

iPhone 3g: 4.5 Wh / 0.0335 kg = 134 Wh/kg

iPhone 11: 11.91 Wh / 0.047 kg = 253 Wh/kg

For a 1.9X improvement.

Agreed, consumers aren't seeing 3X. But they should be seeing better than 20%.

Not sure where you found the data for 3g and whether they follow the same methodology as apple (the report shows up to iphone 4 which was introduced in 2010), but even if I assume that they are correct, what you are proposing is even more far-fetched.

That in 2010 something dramatic happened in the battery technology world and they doubled in density overnight. Hint: No they did not.

I'd be curious to get your take on what these guys are doing?

Apparently they have a cost effective way to upgrade existing diesel trucks with battery + LNG to extend the range.

https://www.hyliion.com/

long-haul trucks are capped at 80,000 pounds by regulation. do you happen to know what percentage of deliveries run at 100% weight or close to full capacity?

with further advancements, battery optimists expect the weight penalty compared to hydrogen at around 6,000 - 10,000 pounds.

by your estimate, how much of this weight penalty will translate into actual lost cargo -- and thus lost sales?

> with further advancements, battery optimists expect the weight penalty compared to hydrogen at around 6,000 - 10,000 pounds.

The penalty is unbounded because one has a higher energy/weight ratio than the other.

So with hydrogen at ~ 130 MJ/kg and batteries at ~1 MJ/kg, if you need a mega Joule then the weight difference is ~130Kg. If you need 100 MJ then the weight difference is 13000 kg, etc.

So each energy will have a different penalty. Let's look at trucks.

Today a semi will carry about 1000L of fuel (~260 gallons), which is ~40,000MJ. That would require ~300Kg of hydrogen (plus supporting weight for the container, etc) or ~40,000 kg of batteries (plus supporting weight for coolant, container, etc).

Thus what is economical for cars may not be economical for semis. There is not a single weight difference between cars and trucks.

Whereas a big jet can use 20,000 Liters of fuel which would require 800,000kg of battery + weight of supporting infrastructure or ~6100 kg of hydrogen.

So it makes sense that the two biggest truck manufacturers would be very interested in hydrogen.

There are other costs to weight other than cargo capacity, both for freight companies and society as a whole. More frequent maintenance, slower speeds, inaccessible and/or altered routes, more accidents, more wear on infrastructure.

> Short haul, drayage, etc. is definitely workable with current tech.

What's a rough estimate of the size of "short haul" vs "long haul" trucking segments?

We can actually predict when batteries will hit the wall. Chemical laws are known well enough to put a limit. We use lithium batteries for reasons related to physical rules like electro-negativity (I'm too long from my chemistry to do more than throw out the right terms). The periodic table of the elements puts a limit on how much power different chemical reactions can produce. We can thus calculate a theoretical max battery beyond which nothing is possible. In the real world that maximum might need atoms that are unstable (more energy released by atomic decay), but we can ignore that for the theory.

I don't remember enough chemistry to do the above calculations. Someone does though, and they tell me that batteries won't get more than 4x smaller (I of course can't verify this claim - perhaps someone else can).

Electrode potentials are what you’re probably thinking about.

Lithium is at one end, but we could work on the other end to get the greatest difference.

It’s a relative scale. Hydrogen was just chosen as 0, but that’s an arbitrary choice.

Looking forward to lithium-fluoride or lithium-gold batteries.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/electrode-potential-d_482...

Thank you for this info. Now I realize why I heard some chatter about lithium bromide batteries a while back. Probably the "easier" to work with and cheaper instead of gold/chlorine/fluorine.

Sodium-bromide in particular looks like a cheap, highly available, easy to handle pair that can fill every one of those niches that don't really care about energy density.

But current batteries use metal compounds, where the metal itself is never completely oxidized or reduced. Those are much easier to design, as you can simply place an ion exchange membrane separating the poles. AFAIK, nobody has any idea how a metal-halogen battery would work.

Lithium fluoride sounds like battery chemistry that makes things even more fun when things go wrong...

Thunderf00t on Youtube loves these types of analyses. You can find one in almost every one of his videos. He does not have a lot of nice things to say about Elon Musk.

His page: https://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t

Common Sense Skeptic has better arguments against Elon Musk though.

Thanks, just subbed

Yeah, ThunderfOOt isn't exactly a reliable source - especially when it comes to Musk. I'm no Tesla sycophant - I'm plenty of skeptical with much of what Tesla is and how they operate - but ThuderfOOt comes across as someone with an axe to grind. Which is fine - just don't get all huffy when people call you out on it.

Call me out on what? Watching Phil Mason? I enjoy The Flaming Lips too. Should I get upset when people don't like them?

Thanks for the warning but I'm trying to save the huffiness for when people attack my own work. I've already got a backlog there, with just that alone.

Interesting, but I'm not convinced. There is a big different between Musk being overly optimistic, and the ideas themselves being unsound. Musk does have his share of unsound idea, but he also has many ideas that are probably good but ahead of their time. Attacking an ahead of their time idea as unsound is wrong analysis. (I happened to watch the one on hyperloop - which clearly is a lot of vaporware - but don't confuse that with being a bad idea. Also don't confuse it being a good idea with it being something that anyone working on now will make work)

Hyperloop is definitely lower-hanging fruit than Tesla. Of SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring and Tesla, Tesla is easily the least scammy. But this particular energy density argument does come up pretty much any time he talks about Tesla.

Why do you say that Tesla is less scammy than SpaceX?

Because of how scammy SpaceX is. Phil's points that we're just re-trodding the reusable vehicle idea from the Space Shuttle days, but somehow paying more for it, are pretty damning in my eyes [1]. It feels a lot like government-funded rocket shows.

I mean, space stuff happening is fun and I like it. But if it was cheaper to do it through NASA, on even the famously expensive Space Shuttle, what's the point of all of this?

Tesla's stuff is all minor in comparison.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TxkE_oYrjU

(Disclosure: I'm from Orlando and almost certainly somehow biased towards the shuttle program, not that I don't think it wasn't an inherently flawed idea. It was an awesome inherently flawed idea. So I actually do understand the fanboyism at play. I just liked NASA's "cool" better than Musk's "sexy." The stuff they've been pulling off remotely on other planets is more impressive than anything Musk is doing. I feel like we're picking corporate propaganda over American propaganda and I don't like it.)

Comparing a reusable launch vehicle (spacex falcon) with a reusable payload (the space shuttle) is absurd.

It might be if the nature of the comparison weren't overwhelmingly favorable to SpaceX.

This guy is a joke, that people on HN use him as a source for anything is sad.

Phil's great! He's funny, scientific and very opinionated. I don't agree with all of his arguments and viewpoints either. I think that's part of the fun.

> We use lithium batteries for reasons related to physical rules like electro-negativity (I'm too long from my chemistry to do more than throw out the right terms).

Electronegativity is the tendency of elements to hold onto elements in a chemical bond, which determines the primary character of a bond (ionic or covalent) as well as things like dipole moments. What you actually want is redox potential, how much energy you can get out of reducing or oxidizing an ion in the reduction or oxidation half-reaction.

>I would bet my money on internet comments being wrong when it comes to predicting the future of heavy industry on a timeline longer than a couple quarters.

You're probably right, although I'd probably go short on hydrogen in trucks. It seems hard to store, transport, requires a new infrastructure, etc. I expect they'll use this new fangled technology called 'diesel'.

I'm surprised when I don't hear more about the lower hanging fruit. The fact that Fedex/UPS haven't gone wholesale into electric is telling at this point, I expect they'll do it when some spreadsheet shows 10 cents in savings companywide. The champions for electric trucks should push for trash pickup, route sales, local delivery, etc. and not bother with long haul for now.

You could argue that a good place for hydrogen would be non-electric trains. When the bugs get worked out of that perhaps long distance trucking might have a chance.

edit: as an aside, I can see where large scale fleet decisions might be held back by fear of technology change. You'd sure hate to buy thousands of trucks only to have them made obsolete by some sort of large underlying change in design that's a no-brainer.

It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't a certain braking effect on vehicle purchases generally because of the advances in EVs. There's a righteous fear in being an early adopter.

I think quite a few countries will tighten their environmental regulations so that some solution will have to be found. Trucks running on Dieses crowding the highways will face strong opposition. The industry has to move somewhere.

Germany might gain it's first green-party led government this year and they are racking up wins in a lot of countries in europe. I even see the rise of smaller "greener than green" parties here in southern germany. This might change the regulatory environment/taxes enough to fuel change.

I don't think Volvo and Daimler make uniformed bets, so there must be some reasoning behind it.

> I don't think Volvo and Daimler make uniformed bets, so there must be some reasoning behind it.

It's probably fair to contrast the EU vs. the USA for this. Given the geographic and political differences, I can see where a European market for trucks might be sufficient for the manufacturers to fund development efforts. I should have been clear that I was thinking primarily of the US, living here and all.

It would be interesting to have a better overview on freight handling in the rest of the world. China tends to be left out of these discussions and I can't imagine wide swathes of Asia or Africa changing anytime soon.

Indonesia reduced plastic bags quite a bit by a decree in a year. One of the great things about (semi)authoritarian states is how fast they can change. So China influenced parts of Asia could move quite fast when needed. And if they make the right bets - you can transform country in a generation. If you don't - well you have former communist bloc circa 1989.

The article is from a British publication and concerns two European vehicle manufacturers producing new vehicles, initially for Europe.

"The Swedish truck-maker is aiming for half its European sales in 2030 to be trucks powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells"

"About 300 high-performance hydrogen refueling points would be needed in Europe by 2025"

I'm sure there's enough of a market in Europe for different trucks — there's already different designs and different fuel preferences (diesel/gasoline).

>I'm sure there's enough of a market in Europe for different trucks

Absolutely. Look at the heavy buy-in on diesel automobiles, and they sure weren't shy about subsidies/regulations to favor them.

Subsidies touting efficiencies that turned out to be fictional due to multiple manufactures committing pretty major fraud for decades that was only recently uncovered.

Yeah, that government intervention worked out well :p

> China tends to be left out of these discussions

Volvo is a Chinese-owned company. While the company is headquartered and led in Sweden, it is safe to assume that the Chinese market is a strong consideration in everything they do.

Volvo sold off their car subsidiary to Ford in 1999 and that was later bought by Geely. Volvo Trucks is still owned by the Swedish Volvo Group.

AB Volvo is owned by Geely. Volvo Trucks is wholly owned subsidiary of AB Volvo.

Volvo Cars is owned directly by Geely, but is not a subsidiary of AB Volvo. Which is probably where your confusion is coming from.

> AB Volvo is owned by Geely. Volvo Trucks is wholly owned subsidiary of AB Volvo.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo they remain an independent company with Geely as their second largest shareholder at 8.2%.

More complete breakdown here: https://www.volvogroup.com/en/investors/the-volvo-share/owne...

You're probably thinking of the car company.

Geely owns Volvo Cars, yes. Geely also owns the related, but legally distinct AB Volvo, which owns a Volvo Trucks, Mack Trucks, Volvo Construction, etc.

They are independent companies, but they share an owner.

Volvo and Daimler cannot afford for someone else to get there and hold all the patents. If it doesn't work out at all they will lobby and get the laws changed. If it works out though they won't have a strong a position to lobby from (someone else proved it works, why can't you?) and risk losing that side of the business.

That is enough reason for them to put money into R&D. It might or might not result in anything for many different reasons.

Who says Fedex and UPS aren't all in on electric? Are you in their corporate meetings? People act like the mammoth transition of a civilization (or even a huge logistics company) would be on the order of 2-3 years, and not a generation.

Public transit in many places has already switched to propane/LNG. Same with lots of municipal work trucks.

Your first sentence is the attitude he's responding to: That trucking/logistics/cityworks are able to make their own refueling stations, build their own support infrastructure, etc. in ways that the public cannot, on the short term.

>Who says Fedex and UPS aren't all in on electric?

Because I haven't seen a single electric truck of any type by any service. Perhaps someone here has, love to hear about it. Since my wife is a shipping manager for a manufacturer, there is some anecdotal backing. (jeesh, why are people so religious about this stuff?).

I don't doubt that they are planning a long term move at places like Fedex, but articles on it lead me to believe they are just dipping their toe in the water. A moon shot to accomplish something by 2040 is the opposite of all-in, they may not exist as a company in 20 years.

In any case, as I was alluding to, short-haul trucking will electrify far before long-haul, for obvious reasons (and if it ever does)...at least for purely economic reasons. All bets are off if the hand of the state dictates a technology.

> Your first sentence is the attitude he's responding to

lol. What? That I doubt that you'll see hydrogen fueled long-haul trucking in the US? Care to make a bet on it? What is your time horizon on the bet?

I see electric fedex and ups delivery trucks all the time in several SF Bay Area counties. Anecdotes aren’t very useful in broad analysis.

OK, I looked it up.

The Fedex fleet is a little over 1% electric...and that includes forklifts and airport equipment.

Like I keep saying, they'll be all over this tech when it really pencils out.

I think there's plenty of hints that Fedex and UPS are going electric, but taking time and thought into how it integrates. Not everything is a cloud provisioning script away from rollout.

Fedex Plans to Electrify its Entire Fleet of Delivery Vehicles by 2040" [1]

"UPS Orders 10000 Electric Delivery Trucks..." [2]

[1] https://fordauthority.com/2021/03/fedex-plans-to-electrify-i...

[2] https://www.boston.com/cars/car-news/2020/03/22/ups-orders-1...

They're talking about delivery vehicles (which lend themselves well to electric operation for the same reasons city buses do) not semi trucks.

Delivery and route trucks really are the interesting test case for battery-powered vehicles. Assuming that someone in a government meeting room doesn't dictate their technology via fiat or subsidy, it's a case based purely on economic interests. Double bonus points for being a tolerably straightforward to calculate decision.

I really can't foresee how it turns out, hopefully the battery tech has some room to run.

I think the government could beneficially move the bar with something like large guaranteed EV postal vehicle order with requirements to site key factories on the vehicles and batteries in the US. That would give businesses the order sheet backing to get loans and investment in place to build the capacity to supply the gov't order, but also as a good foundation for other customer uses.

Right, it takes time to rollout, and given battery factory constraints right now, even if a semi were 100% ready, you couldn't supply the batteries for the use for at least another two the tree years I would guess. So I think at best, right now, you'll see planning for delivery vehicles, with semis in earlier development.

Semis are an entirely different equation than delivery vans. They have more constraints around energy density, whereas vans have more constraints around price.

> The fact that Fedex/UPS haven't gone wholesale into electric is telling at this point

Both companies had a huge moat until Amazon came along blew their doors off. And Amazon has been investing heavily in electric delivery vehicles: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/18/amazon-begins-testing-rivian...

This is very different from heavy trucks. These are electric delivery vans. No one is arguing whether electric vehicles can be effective in the small vehicle market; its the semi, 18-wheeler segment being discussed.

True, there is not a viable product that is scalable in the market.

Both Nikola and Tesla are vapourware today. Perhaps they might deliver in a couple of years realistically.

Delivery companies are in no hurry to shift and bet ahead of time, once the technology is readily available and well supported they will move their fleet

I think that MCS will help greatly to accelerate things. Fear of building infrastructure for a new tech has to be a huge part of it.

A lot of folks have toes in the water with Tesla semi orders, though. I expect that to grow pretty quickly if the first ones work well for regional distribution, and that is really their strength.

That new fangled "diesel" stuff is really hard to beat for long distance trucking.

> The champions for electric trucks should push for trash pickup, route sales, local delivery, etc. and not bother with long haul for now.

Indeed, and earlier we discussed plans for battery electric trucks by Volvo (one of the company's described in this article):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999239

Batteries for short-haul, hydrogen (or something else) for long-haul.

I think EV shipping trucks are much more viable a use for automated rapid battery swaps. Extend front cab a bit, put a big rectangle of a battery module behind, or under an expanded sleeper space. If all it takes is rolling through an automated bay for x min to swap out to a new charged pack then you really don't need some superbattery (or hydrogen).

Or while we're at it, a standard energy module that could be a battery, hydrogen fuel cell + tank, or something else.

Well maybe, I wonder about the cost efficiencies of multiple fuel cells in modules (usually they're pretty expensive because of the use of costly metals like palladium/platinum). Moving the cell out of the module obviously makes for a dedicated battery truck or dedicated hydrogen truck, but modular automatic liquid fuel let alone hydrogen links I would imagine is hard to keep reliable vs an electrical interface.

But you don't need to sit them on the shelf recharging, so you don't need to have many extra hydrogen modules (vs your fleet size). So, compared to dedicated hydrogen powered trucks, you'd maybe end up having 110 modules for every 100 trucks, for a modest increase in those costly fuel cells.

Maybe the swapping/charging stations could support both kinds and would prefer to give you charged battery modules, but if running behind in the charging, would switch to giving out hydrogen modules. Or maybe only some routes would have hydrogen equipped cargo stations at both endpoints, so the trucks would get different kinds of modules depending on the route - making a gradual rollout of hydrogen fueling infra easy.

You could also avoid the need to deal with large batteries by having the truck draw power from an overhead wire. For bonus points you could put the whole thing on rails, eliminating the need for the truck driver.

I could see all of the above happening with different mixes of needs of routes, infrastructure, and investment.

> You could also avoid the need to deal with large batteries by having the truck draw power from an overhead wire.

https://www.engineerine.com/2021/04/germany-opens-its-first-...

Sounds like you're underestimating the underlying logistics of swapping out huge/heavy battery packs.

If you use the throughput (trucks refueled per period of time) of a conventional gas station as a benchmark to compare the battery pack swapping station with and try to think of all the additional difficulties you might see why I'm skeptical about the swapping of batteries, even when automated.

* Handling of liquid fuel is vastly less complicated than moving around heavy battery packs

* Space requirements are much bigger (because of volumetric energy density) with battery packs

* Battery packs may very well need to be transported to and from swapping stations, whereas fuel only goes to stations

All in all, seems to me that the flexibility that everyone is used to with liquid fuels is near unattainable with battery swapping.

I'm very inclined to bet that we'll be relying on liquid fuels for quite a number of years to come.

Might be methanol for electeic vehicles equipped with methanol fuel cells or maybe even formic acid.

Hydrogen, I'm skeptical about it. Too much of a hassle.

Battery consumed storage space and battery swap time are likely very small inconveniences considering we will have to dramatically reduce fossil fuel use (=cost increases and/or subsidies for alternatives). It means they will have to compete with synthetic hydrocarbon fuels made from renewables. But sure they will have to compete with fuel cells.

The other difference between trucks and cars is that power/weight isn't really important for the latter, and hugely important for the former. If there's an improvement that allows you to carry 5% more weight in your car, that doesn't matter much. Most of the engine's energy is being used transporting the engine around, and the weight of passengers and luggage is not an operative constraint. For trucks it matters a lot, because they just became 5% more efficient.

Crazy idea: don't store hydrogen as a liquid but as a gas. Hydrogen is lighter than air, so you've just reduced the fuel requirements by making the semi lighter than it otherwise would be.

Or just go to the logical conclusion: make semis blimps that use hydrogen to both float and as a fuel source.

... you're aware a variation of this was tried a century ago, yes?

Yes, but tech has improved a tad since then.

In every flight you take, the wings are filled with highly combustable materials, and yet we find ways to keep them from exploding. The same is true for all those batteries in electric cars, and of course gasoline.

Jet A is really not that combustible; it's very close to diesel/kerosene. If you take a lit match and drop it in a bucket of Jet A, nothing would happen, it'd just burn out. It's way safer than gasoline. It's combustible only when turned into a fine mist.

On the other hand, H2 would have exploded just from the spark of lighting the match.

You'd likely get by with dropping the match into gasoline most of the time too. Its not definite that there will be vapor from it in the right mix for it to catch fire before hitting the surface.

Gasoline also isn't quite as combustible as people imagine.

It's worth noting that hydrogen fires burn bright and quickly, but tend to not be very dangerous to people.

Gasoline and batteries are heavy and tend to stick to surfaces (including people) when they burn, almost like napalm. Hydrogen rushes upwards, away from people and surfaces, as it burns, and is generally quickly exhausted.

I strongly disagree with this statement.

I'm not sure what there is to disagree with. Fire around gasoline is dangerous for a number of reasons, but liquid gasoline pooled just isn't as volatile as people imagine.

The vapors are different. See both sides of this coin here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsZOE1nvlhI

Also, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln5-HZpgcA

Don't try this at home. Vapors can change things dramatically and horribly. The videos lightly demonstrate this too, but it can be worse.

Liquid gasoline without the present of vapor is pretty much nonexistent. Dropping a match into some is going to be a problem.

In my experience the combustibility of det fuel and similar petroleum products depends primarily on whether the context of the conversation is praising modern safety engineering or heckling someone for using diesel as a cleaning solvent.

It would be more dangerous when spread over a large surface and allowed to vaporize.

You haven't made them lighter, you've made them more bouyant. A ton of feathers weighs the same as a ton of rocks, but a ton of rocks is far more aerodynamic.

I mean, this is sort of off-topic.... but I just love this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg

Sure, but the point is a more buoyant semi would lose less energy to friction between the tires and the road.

You're missing the point. Liquid hidrogen takes much less space, that's all. It is neither lighter nor heavier than the same amount of hidrogen gas.

And for buoyancy to matter, the trucks would need to be huge (zepelin style).

That works until there's a light breeze.

And if you have 20% less weight on the wheels, you now have 20% less traction and thus 20% (or more?) longer braking distance.

You still need the same engine output to accelerate 100 tons, but you only have the traction you would get from an 80 ton load. That's a bad thing. Meanwhile, you save a miniscule amount of energy by having less-loaded tires.

Anyway, you need to compress hydrogen to store any meaningful amount, which increases the density and makes it like a normal gas/liquid instead of making you more buoyant. So it's not even possible.

No, under ideal friction the reduced traction is cancelled out by the reduced mass that needs decelerating, so that braking distance remains constant.

But actually, braking distance vs mass is more like a bathtub curve. With very little weight (talking toy cars here) it's hard to grip a surface, meanwhile very large masses like trucks have huge amounts of kinetic energy to disperse through their contact patches, leading rubber to melt, which reduces its stickiness beyond a certain point. Trucks end up with longer braking distances in practice.

The point is that there is not reduced mass.

You have the same weight, but less traction. That is not the same as reducing weight, in which case the two cancel out as you said.

unless you store them in a black wing shaped bag and let the sun lift the fuel for you

You've confused weight with mass.

It becomes a bit of a transport density problem. A semi does not take up much more room than the cargo it's transporting (if fully packed) but a blimp needs to be significantly larger to carry the same amount. They're big, slow, and require a large amount of space to land on the ground. It just seems like more issues to overcome than hydrogen fuel cell trucks.

Could trains tow blimps?

It gets really exciting when they go through a tunnel or under high voltage lines.

Easy, we just nuke the mountains. No steep gradients and no more tunnels. I’m available for consulting work if anyone at CP or CN need me.

The trailer tail aerodynamic devices are supposed to save 5% on fuel. They remain rare and 99% of those are left undeployed. The trucking companies don't seem to care much about easy cost savings.

From looking at it on Google images, could it be that this device has other downsides? Making doors more awkward to open, increasing turning radius etc?

A significant percentage of semis you see are nowhere near fully loaded.

Especially for local deliveries- the truck is often half-empty.

Don’t you mean half-full?

When you're doing deliveries half-empty is the optimistic take.

Can’t leave me hanging, brofus

Don't you mean twice as big as it needs to be?

The marginal cost of dragging 40ft of air is so small compared to the hassle of trying to determine which truck is the correct one for today’s deliveries and pickups, so the companies tend toward having all trucks the same size.

Or... semi full. Ba dum dum tsss

That's odd. Airlines would kill to install a cheap device on their fleet and save 5% on fuel. If diesel is $3/gal and the semi holds 200gal, that's about $30 savings per fillup and would pay for itself quickly.

Wind resistance goes up by the cube of the velocity, it would be a much larger savings on an airplane.

Still even at interstate speeds a 5% savings pays for itself pretty quickly.

The fuel tanks on an aircraft are a major portion of the weight of the whole craft. So make engines more efficient, and you can take less fuel, which means the plane is lighter, so you use even less fuel and can take even less, etc. As you reduce the amount of fuel needed to go a certain distance you can go further and convert two-leg flights to single hops, which saves all sorts of other costs.

The fuel tank of a semi truck is not an important proportion of the weight of the whole vehicle, so it does matter, but not so much.

They seem to be reasonably popular around here. I see them used on trucks on the Interstate probably more than 50% of the time.

They may not be worth it for short haul trucks, but long haul trucks I bet the savings adds up quick.

I was a semi-truck driver for a while. A lot of "fuel savings" gimmicks amount to sticking a card on your bicycle frame so the spokes hit it a lot and make it sound like you're going fast. It's bullshit. Why do some companies do it? Tax breaks and grants. Do they work. No. Why don't all the companies do it? There's actually a limited amount of companies who can apply for the breaks because the laws are incredibly fucking stupid when it comes to commercial trucks (and to drivers). Similar how there are limited amount of carbon tax credits you can apply for. Some companies just don't waste their time. I have nothing against protecting the environment. But bullshit gimmicks won't do a thing.

Batteries already hit the wall with trucks; otherwise the industry would be all over them. It's highly more likely that hydrogen infrastructure could be built out faster than battery technology could improve for batteries to be effective for trucking.

Hydrogen's biggest benefit is you can quickly tank your vehicle up on energy - as fast as with liquid fuel. Also hydrogen fuel cells haven even less maintenance than battery powered EVs, and while fuel cells do require some maintenance they don't require wholesale replacement like battery packs do. Batteries degrade even faster when under heavy use - and freight puts big demands on a drivetrain.

And for those proposing battery swapping - where you going to get the batteries from? We can barely keep up with EV car demand and EVs are far from ubiquitous. These are serious issues: batteries just don't scale - on multiple fronts.

> What are the odds batteries hit a wall before they're viable in heavy trucks? I dunno but certainly not zero.

Lithium Ion battery costs have improved tremendously over the past few decades, but energy density has not improved at nearly the same rate. Energy density is the primary problem with electric trucking, because it significantly reduces the payload a truck can provide for a given range. I would be skeptical of electric heavy trucks without a real breakthrough in energy density.

California tried to do it for everyone. Arnold famously had an all hydrogen fleet of personal Hummers back in 2004. The state had plans for a "hydrogen superhighway." I think they're up to about 8,000 vehicles on the road now nearly 20 years later, but that is nearly 100% of hydrogen vehicles in the entire US.

I think the actual state-owned fleets mostly switched to LNG by now. Who knows if it'll maybe be feasible soon for long haul trucking? Hydrogen cells started dropping enough in price to at least be feasible as a luxury good maybe a decade ago. This place seems optimistic? https://blog.ballard.com/fuel-cell-price-drop

Any experts in chemistry or industry have any idea how plausible those projections are? It's a vendor, so I take it with a grain of salt. A hydrogen city bus is still more than double the cost of a diesel bus, even before thinking about the need to refuel it.

There are solutions we haven't tried that will quickly extend the range of an electric truck, like: swap the batteries, don't change them.

I was thinking why not CNG - it's readily available and will probably be the root source of hydrogen in these schemes...

But then - it's not carbon neutral.

> I wouldn't bet my money on hydrogen being the way of the future but I would bet my money on internet comments being wrong

Exactly what I was thinking when I was reading your comment...

>Batteries are getting better and look promising but all new tech does that until it hits a wall

between metal-air batteries and hydrogen, i think metal-air is just better density/utility-wise and have higher chances technology-wise. And infrastructure-wise it would be just a continuation of the ongoing electrification transformation whereis hydrogen means totally new buildout for not much gain if any.

Yes, but you can make the same argument about anything. Why not methanol. Why not battery swapping.

The question is how expensive is the initial investment and how expensive are the operating cost.

Hydrogen trucks will be more expensive, the fuel is more expensive and the operation is more expensive.

> What are the odds batteries hit a wall before they're viable in heavy trucks? I dunno but certainly not zero.

0% as current batteries can already cover the majority of the current heavy trucking market.

Regular and predictable journeys between fixed points with rigid timing constraints sounds a lot like a train to me.

Not the biggest Elon fan but I do believe he is right about Hydrogen [1].

Hydrogen is not sitting around somewhere to be pumped out of the ground it must be split from something else like water which is very energy intensive.

It is very low density and must be highly compressed / liquefied, much more energy.

Even liquefied has very low energy density per volume.

It is very difficult to store and transport safely in the highly compressed or liquified form.

Might as well just charge a battery with the energy rather than creating hydrogen.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFPnT-DCBVs

If I need to side with someone here, I'm more inclined to side with the two companies that have a long history in making trucks vs. the person whose company has yet to made the truck they debuted in 2017.

There are no hydrogen trucks on the road either, time will tell which one is viable. Physics tells me which one will be more likely no need for a argumentum ab auctoritate.

Since when has listening to an authority on a topic been a bad thing? Daimler and Volvo are the two biggest truck companies in the world. I imagine they have a pretty good grasp on the market and on the engineering.

Volvo also has real electric trucks on the road and working today. So if anybody knows the pros and cons of electric trucks, its probably Volvo.

That argument doesn't always work. GM had the EV1 "on the road and working" in 1996. Then they decided that electric cars could never work. Then Tesla happened.

Volvo has not decided that electric or hydrogen is not viable yet.

There was good reason for GMs decision, the battery tech and costs in early 2000s were not simply viable for mass market adoption at that time. They were not interested in niche product.

Battery cost per kwh had reduced orders of magnitude now. It is still not price competitive with gasoline bases vechiles but is close , in another five years it will be cheaper than gasoline vehicles.

The equations have fundamentally changed in 20 years.

Volvo or any large maker has no need to be first in the market , they just need to have good enough product when adoption kicks in, their network, brand and service will be enough to compete.

While they will invest, they don't need to bet the farm in a make or break product that startups will need to do.

> Since when has listening to an authority on a topic been a bad thing?

It isn't a bad thing, but a reasoned argument is always preferable to an appeal to authority. This is especially true when there is scant evidence of actual authority.

Not true.

They had a pilot program (limited to Scandinavia) some years ago. I think they decided to pivot from personal vehicles to trucks due to the lack of charging stations (all government funding was allocated for EV chargers back then, so thanks a lot Elon).

Shell also invested heavily in hydrogen production for trucks at their oil refineries in Scandinavia a year back or so.

I've heard one of Elon's other sidegigs deals with a buttload of hydrogen per launch...

SpaceX does not use hydrogen in its rocket engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_rocket_engines

No, but they’ll have to make a bunch of hydrogen for synthesizing that methane eventually. (Won’t make sense to do that until we mostly phase out fossil fuels from the grid.)

Elon and Tesla have bet the entire farm on batteries. Something tells me he is not the most unbiased source here.

passenger vehicles are a TOTALLY different ballgame than commercial long haul trucking. Even the early Tesla models could beat top of the line sports cars in some performance measures. The thing is the people who buy class 7 & 8 trucks work off an excel spreadsheet. They don't give a shit if the truck can accelerate way faster than a Cummins diesel or that the driver has a way better HUD or user experience than in a Freightliner cab. They certainly don't care very much that the truck is more environmentally friendly. Maybe they'll pay 10% more all else equal but that's not what Tesla or anyone else is able to provide.

They only care about $/mile and unless there is some massive technical breakthrough, batteries ain't beating diesel any time in the near future on that measure.

Notice the Tesla Semi has been delayed for three years now?

So where are the hydrogen semis?

$/mile hydrogen is far behind diesels and batteries at this point.

Hydrogen is more feasible than battery for long haul as the technology stands now. A lot of big names in commercial trucking have made huge investments in it.

But it's still not there yet and likely requires some giant gov't subsidies or some tech breakthrough. No amount of $ makes batteries work for long haul at current tech or anything we see in the near future.

This is not true. Batteries are MUCH cheaper to operate and we have capability to make 500 mile battery electric semis:

https://selenianboondocks.com/2017/11/tesla-semi-part-1/

The same place as all the battery semis: they don't exist yet. That is the whole point of this research thing that actual truck companies are doing.

> Elon and Tesla have bet the entire farm on batteries. Something tells me he is not the most unbiased source here.

I completely agree with you on this. Elon is not a credible source of arguments against Hydrogen trucks.

However, I'm having a hard time finding credible arguments for them, at least given low prices for diesel fuel in the US. What is the energy usage per mile for a hydrogen truck?

Elon and Tesla invested in batteries because of their opinions on hydrogen. Its not like they realize this now.

15 years ago Tesla could have bet on hydrogen, and they didn't.

> They only care about $/mile

Every analysis so far shows that hydrogen is more expensive then electricity by far.

Lets go threw it:

- Infrastructure for hydrogen is far more expensive

- Price per energy is more expensive for hydrogen

- The truck is more complex to design and build

- Hydrogen power trains are harder to maintain

> Notice the Tesla Semi has been delayed for three years now?

Because one Semi uses the same amount of batteries as 4 cars and 4 cars make more profits. This is really not that hard to understand.

I agree with him that hydrogen won't be a viable solution for cars in general. However for owners of large fleets of trucks traveling fixed routes I can see it working in many cases.

I think we should invest way more in trains. They are basically long electric trucks that don't have to bring their batteries with them. All its advantages, with the disadvantage of being on a REALLY fixed route. We should only do last mile with other means of transport

Likely not realistic. Rail in the US, speaking modernly, tends to wind up being an expensive boondoggle even on fairly short routes.

The US has one of the best freight rail networks in the world. It is far from a boondoggle. There is potential to further expand it, and reduce carbon emissions through electrifying tracks.

Passenger rail is a whole separate problem.

How much of that is legacy routes where the cost of securing rights of way, dealing with NIMBYs, etc, is long since sunk? It hasn't gotten any easier.

There are medians in the middle of every freeway in the United States just begging for train tracks.

eHighway[0] anyone?

[0]: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tests-first-ehighway-autobahn/...

+1. Want energy-efficient, electric-based transportation? Electric trains between major routes, they could even be autonomous, or at least don't need a meat engineer on cockpit. Electric small trucks to carry from hubs to final destinations.

Need more monorails it worked out well for Ogdenville

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, your points are surely valid.

They will not be carrying the hydrogen in a compressed form. Most solutions are to carry the water and split the hydrogen and oxygen on demand. This reduces risk of explosion.

That makes no sense, it's takes much more power to split hydrogen from water than you get out of it. Where does the power come from to split the water?

https://www.cummins.com/fuel-cells

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECNO_FFk7Hw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP_1Fe6sET4

Uses hydrogen (H2) not water (H2O), again H2 has to be split from O with energy somehow.

I edited and added some videos on HHO systems. It's a demonstration of splitting the H2O on the move rather than carrying a gigantic tank of liquid hydrogen.

You're describing an 'infinite energy' device. The Cummins link does not support your claim, no credible firm or engineer will claim to be able to do this.

The maximum amount of energy you can get out of combining hydrogen and oxygen is exactly the minimum energy required to split water into it's components.

its components.

This is physically impossible perpetual motion.

Do you have any links I can read about solutions like this? My understanding is that producing hydrogen through electrolysis takes more energy than it produces. How would you power this in mobile applications?

https://timecube.2enp.com/

If you somehow have access (on a vehicle? On the move, even?) to the _massive_ amount of energy required to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, just skip the hydrogen fuel cell and use the energy to move the vehicle.

There are more ways than electricity to split water: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/bio-engineering-algae-to-make-...

How efficient are algae at making hydrogen vs a solar cell splitting water with electrolysis?

How efficient is that vs just charging a battery with the solar cell?

The other elephant in the room with hydrogen is the fact that using current production methods, it's a fossil fuel.

Direct solar separation will be a game changer when/if that becomes a thing at scale, but right now almost all hydrogen produced for industry is made by steam reforming natural gas, which releases just as much CO2 as burning it. More, if you account for the extra steps in the process and the energy required to perform them.

I wouldn't consider that a decision criteria since it's also true for battery tech.

(Most Teslas are powered by fossil fuels today via the grid, not renewables. 80% of US energy is still non-renewable and non-nuclear.)

Is that what OP meant by fossil fuel? Fixing the source of electricity is (probably) a lot easier than fixing the source of hydrogen itself.

If by “energy” you meant “electricity” (which is the only thing that makes sense given context), that is incorrect. The US electrical grid is about 40% clean (half being renewable and the other nuclear). Coal is 19% and falling. The rest natural gas.

But even on natural gas, Teslas are more efficient than conventional cars. This is NOT true for hydrogen. Making electrolytic hydrogen from existing grid energy is not better than a good hybrid in terms of overall efficiency.

The “but electric cars still use the grid which has a lot of fossil fuel production” argument is actually compounded for hydrogen cars as they require over twice the electricity input to achieve the same distance traveled as battery electric.

Several companies have demonstrated generating copious amounts of hydrogen from algae - much more efficient than converting sunlight to electricity than performing electrolysis. I've seen even more alternate ways of generating hydrogen over the last 20 years - lots of thought around production; without demand it isn't worth pursuing/refining the processes to do so.

Production can be distributed - no need to ship fuel or electricity over vast distances either.

Charging batteries isn't without loss either.

Most importantly, vehicle refueling speed is on par with liquid chemical energy (i.e. gas or diesel) which is the single biggest problem with batteries. And we haven't had EVs long enough to where people are needing to replace battery packs in volume. That's going to be fun when that day inevitably starts to roll around.

I used to be a big hydrogen skeptic - but the more I have looked at it, the more I think we could deploy infrastructure for hydrogen faster than battery tech can improve. There aren't many combinations left to try, or to try to make practical for high volume production and that would be safe enough for universal adoption that will produce any significant gains. Maybe with liquid electrolytes - but those introduce new complexity/safety issues. I'm a huge fan of "liquid batteries" for stationary storage capacity - think Tesla powerwall but on an industrial neighborhood/town scale.

Even with a 100% energy efficiency to create hydrogen you use a huge amount of energy to compress it.

Can that energy be utilised?

With the price of solar so much cheaper than anything else, solar will almost certainly be overbuilt times of solar output exceeding overall demand. This will probably lead to negative energy spot prices at specific times during the day. People will want to figure out a way how to use this energy. Maybe it will be pumped hydro, batteries, compressed air, or hydrogen. Maybe it'll even lead to colocation with aluminum smelting or something like that.

The point is something needs to be figured out how to handle the increasingly excess energy supply. Each technology has a different set of tradeoffs. Hydrogen is a potential but if it has any chance of succeeding, the technology has to be built now and quickly. Once a specific solution has momentum, it will be difficult to overcome. Large scale batteries seem to have the lead for now but the weight efficiency has always been an issue. I imagine at least one of the more weight efficient solutions will gain some reasonable % of market share.

What stands out in this is that basically: if you want to make synthetic fuel for higher energy-density than batteries, synthetic propane or methane look better.

If you're going for a synthetic hydrocarbon, you might as well go for one which is liquid at normal operating temperatures, which makes logistics a lot easier.

So are liquid hydrocarbons as easy to synthesise as gas ones? (I genuinely have no idea, just wondering)

No. Methane is the easiest hydrocarbon fuel to synthesize, although the CO2 capture requires some energy. The others require increasing amounts of CO2 for the same fuel energy and also have higher energy losses in synthesis and combustion.

Ammonia has no CO2 requirement but the hydrogen to ammonia energy conversion process (Haber process) is slightly less efficient than that for methane (Sabatier).

From methane you can relatively easily produce methanol, which also has a relatively low ratio of carbon atoms vs others. Sure, not as energy dense as, say, kerosene, but an easy to handle liquid.

That’s true, but that means losses.

The main thing hydrogen has going for it is the stored energy by weight which is around 142 MJ/kg. Lithium batteries are less than 1 MJ/kg. So around a factory 200x difference. Ir you want to find something better than hydrogen energy/kg wise you have to go nuclear.

Yes! Electric energy transmission and storage is a really hard problem when you look at it compared to liquid fuels. This is the nut to crack.

Should we instead focus on sustainable liquid fuels? Diesel from algae for example?

But what is the volume of a kilo of hydrogen at practical pressures?

42 kg/m³ or 0.024 m³ per kg at the usual 700 bar.

Looks like a ballpark, current practical volume is around 25 liters per kg: https://energies.airliquide.com/resources-planet-hydrogen/ho...

I think the greater issue with Hydrogen is how it likes to go boom, and the greater the energy density you store it at, the bigger the boom!

This is also one of the benefits of diesel, it doesn't ignite so easily.

Actually Hydrogen without Oxygen doesn't make boom. Also Lithium batteries also have a tendency to go boom, so I guess that's equal.

Look at volume instead of weight. Hydrogen is only 8 MJ/L in liquid form vs 38MJ/L for Diesel. Think of the space needed in the vehicle.

Next creating liquid hydrogen is a very energy intensive process compared to refining diesel.

Next energy in lithium batteries is converted to mechanical energy with +90% efficiency in a modern electrical motor. Fuel cells just like combustion engines are only 40-60%.

Most commercial trucks are lacking for weight, not for volume.

They wouldn't use all those axles and tires if they didn't need to.

Weight and charging time are the current major roadblocks to adopting batteries. Hydrogen theoretically solves those but introduces a lot of technical complexity along the way and needs a supply chain that currently doesn't exist.

I don't see a lot of extra room on a truck for safe liquid hydrogen tanks 5 times the size of diesel tanks.

That would be true for cars, not so much for trucks. Most trucks hit their mass limits long before they hit their volume limits. Most box trucks, for example, are transporting more air by volume than cargo.

Trucks have length limits and more constrained in Europe which is why you still see many cab overs there. The US loosened length limits in the 70's allowing for long nose trucks which help with aero dynamics and safety.

So you don't store it on the tractor itself, you store it with the trailer. That's how your god Elon is proposing to do it with batteries.

Yes with 10,000 psi hydrogen lines from trailer to tractor and expensive tanks on the trailer.

AFAIK the Tesla semi has all batteries in the tractor.

He is most certainly not my god.

The Tesla semi, without batteries on the trailer, is limited to about 500kWh of batteries...maybe 1000kWh if you have some extremely clever engineering. You can't really do much more than that without moving to a monocoque carbon frame to offset the weight, because the batteries are too dense. Commercial trucks have total weight limits, but they also have per-axle weight limits. If you are too heavy on a single axle, you're illegal.

And while 500kWh batteries, are awesome and the perfect use case for local delivery, they won't cut it for OTR trucking. You need 700 mi of range at an absolute minimum for singles, ~2000mi for doubles. The weight of a 700 mile battery is a non-starter. Tesla's largest battery pack that they're even considering selling has a 500 mi range.

There is a reason Tesla quotes kWh/mile, and not kWh/lb-mi (cargo, not GVW). They aren't competitive, and they likely never will be. And adding more batteries just makes the economics less competitive. There's a saying in the aircraft industry: it takes a lot of fuel to fly a lot of fuel. The same goes for batteries: it takes a lot of battery to move a lot of battery. Batteries, no matter what technical advances can be made, have limitations posed by the laws of physics, and none of them will ever have the energy density to make sense for long haul trucking. Which is why actual trucking companies that have actually beat His Lord and Savior Elon Musk to market with electric trucks (i.e. Volvo) are still looking to better alternatives in the long run.

So now how much does a hydrogen fuel cell semi weigh whats its range? How much does it cost? Where do you fill it up?

Current hydrogen fuel cell vehicles weight more than an equivalent battery powered car not not even looking at cost and power and refueling infrastructure.

I agree that diesel is most viable for long haul and probably will be for some time and still has room to improve see Frieghtliners SuperTruck.

Fuel cell technology used in cars is inferior to battery technology cars. But it's not comparable here. A light, intermittently used vehicle, with fast startup and frequent shutoff, and with no long range requirements, does not have the same set of constraints that class 8 trucks do. Holy Father Elon's criticism of fuel cells in passenger vehicles do not apply here at all.

800hp fuel cell: 500-600lbs, 3 cubic feet. 60% efficiency baseline, easily augmented to 75% with heat recovery. https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/LEW-TOPS-120

Runs on any hydrogen-based fuel: pure hydrogen, methane, butane, propane, gasoline, avgas, diesel, ammonia, whatever. In fact, you can mix fuels in the same tank, and the SOFC will consume them regardless. Use any infrastructure that you want. Use any fuel system that you want. You can start out running standard low-sulfur diesel, or use natural gas or propane with standard modifications that are already used for diesel conversions all over the third world. If hydrogen storage works out for your use case, then use it. If it doesn't, then just use diesel and wait for synthetic fuels to drop in price.

There will never be a battery-powered truck that can compete with that value proposition for long haul trucking.

You might find a more willing-to-listen audience if you lay of the "You people all worship Elon like a god" angle.

I'm not wrong. Have you seen his posts? They're literally a regurgitation of Elon statements and tweets. I have no interest in convincing religious cultists that they're wrong. I merely post to correct misinformation from them.

I am regurgitating facts as I know them, if they happen to line up with Elon that is not by choice, I am not the cultist here.

"Never" is bold statement, bottom line current battery technology is lighter than current fuel cell technology in production vehicles while being simpler and more cost effective.

Please let me know when that situation changes I am not confident in either technology to state it will never happen.

You will also never be lighter than air, no matter how many diets you go on. Never isn't a bold statement at all when you're dealing with the laws of physics.

Batteries are rapidly improving, but they would have to exceed the physical electron carrying capacity of all known battery materials if it wants to get somewhere within an order of magnitude where they need to be for long haul trucking.

The theoretical maximum for a lithium anode battery (sulfur cathode) is 2600 wh/kg nearly 10 times the current cells used in vehicles.

So about half the energy density of methanol, which is already not good enough for long range trucking. Gotcha.

I thought we where talking about hydrogen which is 2800 wh/kg not methanol which will produce CO2 when used.

Now your fuel cell needs 100% conversion to get that energy density in electrical form.

Goal post moved, got it.

No, we were talking about batteries, and how the theoretical limits of battery energy density isn't even close to the energy density required by long haul trucking.

You triumphantly declared that Lithium Sulfur has a theoretical max (which you'll never get to, BTW) of 2600 wh/kg.

I used that opportunity to compare it to Methanol, which has already been proposed as a green fuel (it is a common form of biofuel), and already discarded by the long haul trucking industry due to energy density concerns. If methanol isn't good enough, batteries aren't even close.

I don't know if you are getting your Hyrogen facts from some special Cult of Elon fact repository, but you're wrong. Again. Hydrogen is 39000 wh/kg, not 2800. That's why it is a potential solution, where batteries never could be.

Aren't you forgetting the weight of the high pressure tanks and fuel cell and heat recovery turbine in your energy density for hydrogen?

A battery has power leads coming off of it, hydrogen doesn't, should I quote electrons wh/kg instead?

I did make a mistake though I believe the in development hydrogen fuel cell I got the number from was only 1800 wh/kg, my bad.

If batteries can reach 2000 wh/kg then a 4 megawatt-hour battery would be around 5000 lbs and give 2000 miles range, it would be on par with current diesel drive trains.

Thanks for explaining why Europe has mostly cab overs.... I noticed it but never bothered to figure out why!

Split trucks have lots of room. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bk7-L7ffiY

Long wheelbase sleepers are very difficult to maneuver, they are pretty specialized and you won't see them in Europe do to length restrictions.

Sure, but it's an absurd example of space not being a particularly critical factor. That thing is a huge factor bigger than the volume of the fuel tanks.

Not sure why you say that, its very critical in Europe and still a concern in the US.

The problem with all those calculations is that storing hydrogen requires a lot of weight.

If hydrogen were such a great idea, trucks would be already migrating to the in-between solution that is natural gas.

Trucks maybe aren't, but city buses certainly are, all over the country. That's likely because of the infrastructure. You don't need to dot the entire country with LNG stops for your city buses, just a few fuel-up points here and there around town.

Yes, buses and taxis are big adopters of it. Maybe there is something there and if we cut the cost of hydrogen enough (you know, all that extra solar power must go somewhere), it will be interesting for them too.

I second this insight. I'm a pressure vessel designer by trade. I got my numbers for all of this here[0]

Liquefied hydrogen either needs to be stored cryogenically as a liquid, or at a very high pressure as a gas (65 MPa). I'm ignoring adsorption methods here.

Given that we can't continuously maintain -253 °C all the time, this method is impractical for mobile usage.

That leaves gaseous storage. To match the current range of diesel tractor-trailers, you'd need at least 4x the volume in hydrogen to come close to the standard of 600 miles between refills. I'm going to assume we need to store 1500 L of hydrogen to match the range.

Other assumptions:

The tank has a max overall length of roughly 2.5 meters.

Inner and outer corrosion / gouge allowance of 6mm

Design temperature of 200 °C (in case of fire).

Material of construction is A-387 5 2 (5% Cr, 2% Mo steel) lined with something that prevents diffusion into and hydrogen embrittlement of the base metal.

Vessel consists of a cylinder with spherical head on either end.

Given:

Inner diameter is 890mm, shell length is 1830mm, allowable stress is 178 MPa at the design temperature, we can use equation 4.3.1 from the ASME BPVC Section VIII Division 2 to determine the minimum thickness required for the given pressure.

D is the corroded inner diameter of the vessel, P is the design pressure, S is the allowable stress, and E is the weld joint efficiency (assumed 1).

D / 2 * (exp[P / (S * E)] - 1) + Corrosion

902 / 2 * (exp[65 / (178 * 1)] - 1) + 12 = 211mm wall thickness

The weight of just the cylinder at that thickness with a length of 1.83m (without the spherical heads) is 11,000 kg.

At that weight, batteries are pretty competitive.

[0]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-basic...

Nice to see someone doing engineering math.

Based on this Semi with 150 miles of range and a 250kwh battery.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34876269/volvo-trucks-ele...

Probably need 1000 kwh to get 600 miles of range.

At 150wh/kg (based on a Tesla 3) that's 6,670 kg for equivalent battery.

vs your calculation of 11,000kg for the tank.

SOHCs are approaching 100% conversion efficiency, and SOFCs have 60% baseline efficiency, and with practical heat conversion technologies, have closer to 75% efficiency. And they can use hydrocarbon fuels which can open up fuel options to synthetic fuels that have more reasonable mass/volume tradeoffs.

Heat conversion is going to mean more equipment (heat recovery turbine?). SOHCS run at what 1000c?

Don't see that being practical for vehicle use any time soon.

Heat recovery turbines are awesome. A single moving part, that's it. And those temperatures are not a problem at all. Standard off-the-shelf calcium silicate insulation will work fine.

Single moving part and generator and power control. None of that is free in terms of complexity, weight and cost. This is on top of whats needed for the fuel cell, plus you will probably need a buffer battery to fully utilize.

Makes more sense to look at heat recovery turbines for a diesel engine which is exactly what Freightliner is doing with their Supertruck bringing its thermal efficiency up around 60%.

It makes less sense on a diesel engine because their heat sources are lower temp. Fuel cells produce much more useful heat for a heat engine to capture.

And no, the complexity of heat recovery isn't high at all. The costs pay themselves off almost immediately. They're orders of magnitude less complex than an ICE, last almost forever, and require almost no maintenance apart from cleaning after tens of thousands of hours. If a modern heat recovery turbine is too complex, then so is an electric motor.

Diesel exhaust temps are around 600c SOFC operate 600c-1000c.

Heat recovery turbines use either organic Rankine cycle (steam turbine) or Brayton where the fuel cell replaces or is along side the combustion chamber in a gas turbine.

Comparing the complexity of a Heat recovery turbine to an electric motor is absurd. Let me know when a SOFC with recovery turbine is in a truck.

It's a turbine. It spins inside a housing. It has an input and an output. Modern turbines don't even have oil...they use ceramic air bearings that might need to be replaced sometime after you die.

A turbine does nothing by itself again an absurd statement. A heat recovery turbine has a host of support systems to actually recover heat including a generator which is essentially an electric motor to capture electrical energy.

I don't see a lot of gas turbines in various use around me, and the ones that are are quite expensive to fix. I do however see electric motors everywhere and they are extremely reliable and cheap.

Lol, there is no need to speculate about the practicality of heat recovery turbines in vehicles. They're already in use by millions of cars and trucks. Nearly every semi truck on the road has one...sometimes they have two!

They're called turbochargers. More specifically, the heat recovery turbine is the exhaust-connected half of the turbocharger. Most car turbos drive air compressors to increase ICE efficiency (surplus electric power isn't so useful for ICE cars), but you can literally chop the turbocharger in half and attach an electric motor to the turbine shaft, and voila, now you have an electric heat recovery turbine.

Were you actually thinking I was proposing attaching a steam turbine to a fuel cell? Lol. Can I subscribe to the Cult of Elon's Version of Facts? This is hilarious.

Turbo chargers are not heat recovery turbines they will not increase and engine thermal efficiency by any significant amount, diesels use turbo charging to increase power they are just as thermally efficient without them.

In order to utilize the increased air mass that forced induction creates more fuel must be injected, this should be obvious. Most turbo chargers do not engage under light throttle.

Turbo charger also adds significant cost and are not inexpensive to repair.

An actual useful heat recovery turbine is much larger and more complicated, all of the examples of one attached to diesels or fuel cell are either steam turbines as is the case with the Freightliner SuperTruck [1] or full gas turbines as is the case with some fuel cell implementations and some of those also have a secondary steam turbine [2].

The Freightliner still has a turbo charger like any diesel along with a recovery steam turbine, much of the effective heat recovery comes from capturing heat from the engine block itself not just hot exhaust gas.

Again your claim that a full heat recovery turbine is a simple as a electric motor is ABSURD.

1. https://www.ccjdigital.com/business/article/14931733/waste-h...

2. https://www.ee.co.za/article/co-generation-hybrid-fuel-cell-...

> Turbo chargers are not heat recovery turbines they will not increase and engine thermal efficiency by any significant amount, diesels use turbo charging to increase power they are just as thermally efficient without them.

This is 100% false, and trivially easy to google. But it also misses the point: turbochargers are heat engines: they convert heat to work. The fact that they use waste heat from exhaust means that they recover energy that is normally lost, which means it is a heat recovery engine. That work can be used any number of ways, but if it is used, you have increased the thermal efficiency of the engine.

> The Freightliner still has a turbo charger like any diesel along with a recovery steam turbine, much of the effective heat recovery comes from capturing heat from the engine block itself not just hot exhaust gas.

Those are both heat recovery engines. One is rankine cycle (the steam turbine), and the other is brayton cycle (the turbocharger). The only other difference is the source of heat.

And again, to drive the point home: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...

If a turbocharger is configured to act as a heat recovery turbine it is significantly more complicated including again a generator. Therefore it can not be simpler than an electric motor, this should be obvious. This is referred to as turbo compounding not turbo charging [1].

Turbochargers allow more efficiency through engine downsizing and that they can be bypassed under light/cruising loads. That is you can have smaller engine that acts like a bigger engine under heavy loads but has the efficiency of a smaller engine at normal loads [2].

The turbo charger on the Frieghtliner is not part of the heat recovery system, it is compressing intake air in order to allow an increase of power by also injecting more fuel. If you attach a generator to the turbo to make it recover heat as output power it will no longer be able to use that work to compress intake air. Then it becomes a turbo-compounded engine. They use a steam turbine as it recovers more heat while adding almost no back pressure to the system.

As shown to get a modest increase in thermal efficiency something much larger and more complicated must be used on a semi in addition to the turbocharger.

Show me a fuel cell using a turbo charger to attain any significant heat recovery. Show me one that doesn't use a generator and is therefore simpler than an electric motor. You will not attain 60%+ thermal efficiency with a just a turbo charger and you know it. Fuel cells look to need a secondary combustion system in order drive the turbine properly due to them having no compression of their own so now you have a full gas turbine with generator on top of the fuel cell.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo-compound_engine 2. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/veltman1/

I don't know where you keep getting this idea that I think a heat recovery turbine is simpler than a generator. All I said was that if you think a heat recovery turbine is too complex to be feasible, then you'll also think an electric motor is too complex to be feasible. Because neither are too complex to be feasible.

And no, it is not complex at all. The turbine part stays the same as your garden variety turbocharger. Instead of directly attaching a compressor (which makes it a turbocharger), you directly attach a generator (which makes it a turbine-driven generator). In fact, you could even do both: power an intake air compressor as well as a generator. Literally anybody could build one in their back yard using parts ripped out of random cars at a junkyard.

Without capturing any waste heat at all, Solid Oxide Fuel Cells are ~60% efficient. With a waste heat recovery turbine, you increase the efficiency. 75% efficiency is already feasible.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

Yes, this solution is more complex than a normal fuel cell...in exactly the same way that a turbocharged engine is more complex than a naturally aspirated engine. That is to say not only is it entirely feasible, but it is a well developed easily adaptible solution that has been used for increasing efficiency for over a century now. Learn how to google...there are literally hundreds of papers detailing efficiency gains from using turbochargers on fuel cells. Hell, most turbocharger manufacturers are already making custom hybrid turbocharger/generator packages specifically designed for fuel cell use.

https://www.garrettmotion.com/electric-hybrid/twostage-elect... https://www.mtu-solutions.com/eu/en/stories/technology/turbo... https://cdn.borgwarner.com/docs/default-source/default-docum...

You thought it was infeasible because you were imagining a big ass steam engine, and when it was pointed out that turbochargers are an entirely commonplace form of heat recovery turbine, you backpeddled and tried to redefine words (b-b-b-but that's a Turbo Compounder!!!) to weasel your way out of it. Give it up. You're embarrassing yourself.

>If a modern heat recovery turbine is too complex, then so is an electric motor.

A generator is bascially an electric motor running in reverse, at minimum you have a turbine and a generator to make a heat recovery turbine, or you can mechanically couple it with a transmission. That is more complex than just an electric motor, is this not obvious to you?

The SOFC you linked at 75% efficiency uses a turbine with a secondary combustion chamber (post combustor) and along with a generator. Again this is not just a "simple" turbocharger.

https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/3362b2a27c2ec1f3064114...

Does that look like just a simple turbo charger?

You are the one redefining what a heat recovery turbine is, no one calls a turbo charger a heat recovery turbine, and no devices called heat recovery turbines are just a turbo charger at minimum they drive a generator or are mechanically coupled to an engines output.

So you have on one hand a:

battery - motor controller - electric motor

high pressure liquid H2 tanks - fuel cell - recovery turbine with generator - motor controller - electric motor

Hopefully the fuel cell can have enough burst power for acceleration and not also need a buffer battery like current fuel cell EV's, then again you need a battery or regenerative braking, oh well.

Which one is simpler and cheaper to fuel, maintain and operate? Which has more moving parts? Current fuel cells in cars don't even have an energy density advantage, maybe they will and will outpace batteries but they are certainly not simpler than a battery powered EV.

Also stop being an ass, you are the one embarrassing yourself, at least try and keep it civil.

> Does that look like just a simple turbo charger?

It doesn't look like a turbocharger, it looks like a system diagram of a fuel cell attached to a turbocharger.

::facepalm::

> You are the one redefining what a heat recovery turbine is, no one calls a turbo charger a heat recovery turbine, and no devices called heat recovery turbines are just a turbo charger at minimum they drive a generator or are mechanically coupled to an engines output.

::doublefacepalm::

Did you even read how they attained 75% efficiency on the SOFC with gas turbine? They fed 25% of the fuel to the gas turbine and it was creating at least 25% of the power, they then tried 45% of the fuel with a 50/50 power split.

Is a gas turbine sitting next to an engine being fed half the fuel and putting out half the power a turbo charger?

Did you miss the combustion chamber and generator for the gas turbine when you face-palmed?

The Garrett link you presented isn't even a heat recovery turbine, it's just a electric compressor it draws electrical power from the fuel cell to compress the air. The other links are similar, they actually use power rather than generating it, they allow reduction in fuel cell size not increased efficiency:

"The process temperature of modern fuel cells for cars is rather low. Therefore, the exhaust gas enthalpy provided to the turbine is not sufficient to drive the compressor. Hence, a powerful electrical motor is necessary to drive the compressor; in fact, it is an essential component of the FCAS system. Even a variant of the FCAS system without a turbine is available as part of the FCAS family."

A turbo charger compresses air using heat, then rejects much of that heat in the intercooler very little of it is recovered as engine output power. Its purpose is to increase volumetric efficiency not thermal efficiency. More air + more fuel = more power with less displacement.

A heat recovery turbine increases thermal efficiency not volumetric efficiency, that is the distinction between a turbo charger and heat recovery turbine in all literature I can find. They operate on similar principles and share a component (the turbine) but one is simpler than the other and they are not the same.

Please show me a fuel cell using just a "simple" off the self turbocharger as a heat recovery turbine.

So SOFC seems to be a solid oxide fuel cell[0], but despite the automotive context I don't think SOHC means single overhead camshaft here.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_fuel_cell

Sorry, meant SOEC. Meant for converting water + electricity into hydrogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_electrolyzer_cell

High temperature operation is what allows it to have such high conversion efficiency.

http://www.helmeth.eu/index.php/technologies/high-temperatur...

OTOH, using the model 3 as an example, you have to drive around 480kg of batteries all the time, while the same energy (75kWh/270MJ) in hydrogen would only amount to less than 2 kg.

You won't get 75Wh to the wheel with 2kg and the hydrogen tanks and fuel cells have weight.

Yes, obviously, but even then batteries are multiple times heavier. A fuel cell for this size is about 50kg currently, and a tank 50-80kg. The Mirai has a tank for 5kg hydrogen which weighs about 90kg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

Mirai: 1,850 kg

Model 3 (Long-Range Dual-Motor): 1,847kg

I am going to guess it's all the structure needed to protect the 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks.

Or you don't guess, follow the link instead and find out the Mirai is a) a bigger car and b) a hybrid, complete with electric motor and battery pack.

The Mirai has a 1.6 kwh battery pack because the fuel cell cannot output the needed power for acceleration and to allow regenerative braking. It runs on the electric motor alone just like a Tesla. But yeah so add the buffer battery in your weight calculations needed for a fuel cell vehicle.

Pretty minor difference in size, unclear how that translates into usable space:

Mirai Length 4,890 mm Width 1,815 mm Height 1,535 mm

Model 3 Length 4,694 mm Width 1,849 mm Height 1,443 mm

Also note the Mirai has a single 113kw motor (even with buffer battery to help) while the long range single motor model 3 is 211kw and only weighs 1730kg, I actually posted the heaviest performance AWD model 3.

The Tesla completely outperforms the Mirai in cost, weight, ease of charging and performance.

Nothing of this is relevant for the question of the weight of a hydrogen tank.

Seem pretty relevant to look at the final weight, cost and performance of a vehicle when claiming fuel cells are superior to batteries due to hydrogens weight.

Bottom line your example hydrogen fuel cell car weighs with a smaller motor more than a equivalent battery powered one, the question is why if hydrogen is so much lighter than a lithium battery?

Doesn't the Mirai have less passenger and cargo room than the 3 due to the inherent packaging issues with hydrogen?

Why is this down-voted? It’s correct, even though it is counter-intuitive! The battery electric Model 3 LR gets more range and weighs less (while also being MUCH faster and cheaper to operate and more convenient to charge...).

I design pressure vessel for a living. At the pressures required for hydrogen, required vessel wall thickness goes up really fast as diameter increases. I commented elsewhere about the weights required for a tractor trailer - to carry the volume required and maintain the same refill range, you'd need an 11,000kg cylinder to contain the hydrogen.

The Toyota Mirai Hydrogen car is slightly heavier than a Model 3.

Ironically, at least last time I checked 1-2 years ago, the Long Range Model 3 weighs less than the hydrogen Mirai and has more range.

Doesn’t matter what theoretical weight of hydrogen is when you have so much overhead the battery version weighs less! this is because: 1) hydrogen must be compressed. The compressed tank has to have high margins so it’s safe on the road. That means a much heavier tank than you might think 2) the fuel cell itself is expensive and weighs a lot! 3) fuel cells are MUCH less efficient so the useful energy isn’t what you think it is. That also means a lot of heat needs to be rejected which means: 4) heavy radiator (whose cooling also compromises aerodynamics), air filter and handling, you still need a lithium battery in there to handle regenerative braking and bursts of power, a bunch of high pressure hydrogen-rated valves which aren’t lightweight, etc.

May as well look at the weight of electrons in a battery as just look at the weight of hydrogen gas in a hydrogen car...

I’ve seen this misinformation repeated everywhere in this thread. It’s simply not true, stop repeating this nonsense. Another user posted the calculations for the weight of a pressure vessel needed for the hydrogen storage and it explains why current hydrogen cars are more heavy than long range battery cars. Even accounting for more efficient storage for the trucks the weight needed for hydrogen is similar to what is needed with the batteries. Please stop with this nonsense that 480kg of batteries are equivalent to 2 kg of hydrogen.

You have to factor in the losses inherent to hydrogen energy storage. You have to produce the hydrogen, compress it and then use a fuel cell to convert it back to electricity. If you account for all the losses, I bet that in practice, storing electricity with hydrogen is not so much different than using lithium batteries. Does anyone have some figures?

Hydrogen is far more efficient. At least for long-haul class 7 & 8 trucks. The problem is the massive infrastructure investment needed to support it.

All the substantial investments I've seen in commercial long-haul trucking are in hydrogen. You have Tesla, Nikola and others claiming they have a long-haul battery solution but they are full of shit. Tesla has already delayed their Semi for 3 years now. Nikola is a joke but even they were pushing hydrogen along with their BEV stuff. And the legacy CV companies are, again, only investing in BEV for short-haul stuff.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge... has a good infographic showing overall efficiency.

And this text:

With battery-powered e-cars, only eight percent of the energy is lost during transport before the electricity is stored in the batteries of the vehicles. When the electrical energy used to drive the electric motor is converted, another 18 percent is lost. This gives the battery-operated electric car an efficiency level of between 70 to 80 percent, depending on the model.

With the hydrogen-powered electric car, the losses are significantly greater: 45 percent of the energy is already lost during the production of hydrogen through electrolysis. Of this remaining 55 percent of the original energy, another 55 percent is lost when hydrogen is converted into electricity in the vehicle. This means that the hydrogen-powered electric car only achieves an efficiency of between 25 to 35 percent, depending on the model.

But there's other ways to produce hydrogen that are both more efficient and "greener" - using algae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohydrogen

Also I just found out that over 90% of our hydrogen comes from "natural gas reforming" https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...

The losses can be made to be completely irrelevant though. There are many places on Earth with abundant energy -- think hydro plants in the middle of Wyoming, geothermal plants in Iceland -- that simply are too far away from population centers to be directly viable. Those places are where hydrogen will be produced, since you can pipe hydrogen basically infinitely, or compress and ship on-site.

Yes, but that's not the e2e efficiency of the hydrogen powertrain, a 120kW hydrogen stack found in Hyundai Nexo is as big as an average petrol engine and its energy efficiency is somewhere around 45%, so it's not only the hydrogen tanks and the hydrogen inside it. If we're going to analyze the volumetric and mass efficiency and compare it to a BEV, then we need to take everything into the account.

Majority of hydrogen produced is made from processing oil, the energy efficiency of "green" hydrogen (electrolysis) is very poor and thus expensive.

I believe there's a strong chance of using hydrogen for long haul type of transportation, however, there are a lot of misconceptions about the technology and its general practicality.

Is syngas/synfuel [1] a viable route? Obviously it would be less efficient to produce than pure hydrogen (anyone know how much energy would be lost in the hydrogen conversion step?) and probably cannot compete with natural hydrocarbons with current tech, electricity prices and carbon taxes. However compared to pure hydrogen it should have a couple of advantages: compact (same energy by volume as current fuels) and can take advantage of current infrastructure. If done right it could probably power both current ICE vehicles as well as future fuel-cell vehicles. Can anyone comment on any major downsides except it not really being economically viable with current tech.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel

Yes it is certainly viable. Far too many people think efficiency is going to be the deciding factor, but in reality we already have tons of energy that goes to waste, and it is only going to get larger with intermittent renewables. Over provisioning of renewables seems to be the current best option to deal with baseload demands from intermittent renewables, which will mean that the cost of surplus non-peak energy is going to trend toward $0/kWh. In the end, who cares if it takes 150kWh to make 50kWh of fuel if that 50kWh of fuel only costs $1? I'm 100% sure most trucking companies won't give a shit.

This all would mean that efficiency doesn't really matter anymore, but rather the practical characteristics of the fuel. Liquid fuels, and many easily compressed fuels, are amazingly practical. Natural gas is already a viable fuel for many trucking applications, and synthesized methane is incredibly easy. But synthetic diesel and butane are also within the realm of possibilities.

Yes tbh I don't understand why there isn't more attention devoted to making renewable fuels that are more practical than hydrogen. Until we find a better way to store hydrogen I don't think it'll ever take off.

I'm excited about this - we need to invest in different energy storage solutions; as promising as batteries are they may not be the global optimum for all things as the common woo tells us.

For long haul trucking, battery mass eats substantially into payload. And while batteries are getting much cheaper, they aren't getting much lighter (cue the "but structural batteries" woo here). Hydrogen is an incredibly energy dense fuel and can be used in a wide variety of applications, but trucking may be the driver that pushes hydrogen economics and infrastructure towards being a viable part of our power storage and distribution system.

Once something drives hydrogen at scale, it becomes possible to think about long term (seasonal) energy storage, electrification of long-haul flight, and replacement of fossil fuel for industrial process heat - all vital for driving emissions to zero.

"hydrogen truck boom"

I'm all for puns, but at some point we need to stop the association between hydrogen and explosiveness. Absent the perfect mix of H₂ and O₂, Hydrogen burns like most other fuels.

Hydrogen burns until the point of stoichiometry, then, boom.

My understanding is that Hydrogen is not like most other fuels and very much does like to go boom under a much wider range of oxygen concentrations, rather than burn. I think it may have to do with how little mass the hydrogen atom has. For instance, gasoline volatility over diesel is because it is refined for shorter hydrocarbon polymers, which have less mass. Hopefully someone can clarify this?

Well, at the pressures you'd have to store it at I start worrying about a much more conventional type of boom than the flame-based kind.

I like that a pressure boom is neither deflagration nor detonation, it’s just “escape”but it’s the same sound and effect so we use the same word.

90% of hydrogen worldwide is made using carbon sources. First de-carbonate that before talking about "clean energy".

Most of the trucks nowadays can be replaced with trains. Let's focus on that first.

This it not an engineering issue, it's a political and organizational issue.

thank you. it would be nice if there was more recognition of the whole energy chain rather than the pretense that lithium, electricity etc just spring fully-formed from the ether

> 90% of hydrogen worldwide is made using carbon sources.

Because 90% of worldwide energy anything is currently non-renewable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Power to gas is actually a technology employed productively to convert excess renewable energy into hydrogen etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

I fully agree with your goal, though I do think this isn't a first this than that situation.

> Most of the trucks nowadays can be replaced with trains. Let's focus on that first.

Yes and no. Trains do not work well for distribution centers like walmart, krogers, target, etc... The last 1-100 miles will need trucks.

Long haul, yes, trains _can_ be used. But there are situations where that is not a feasible solution.

Right, but long-haul is where batteries don't work. If we can get rail to every regional distribution centre (or rather, build regional distribution centres at rail yards) and then use batteries for the last hundred km, that's a win.

So Volvo should give it all up and go into US political lobbying? Or learn how to build a train?

I don't agree. Global warming is an issue that should be approached with a multi-prong attack. And, if there is a future where hydrogen is clean and abundant, there's no point waiting for it to start working on making it useful.

This headline just made me think of how hydrogen likes to go boom.

Yeah, the big hydrogen guys should really not let hydrogen and boom appear in the same headline.

> Of the need to build the infrastructure at the same time as the trucks, Lundstedt said: “It can be seen as a chicken and egg. But we have said we will go for it. We will deliver the chicken. Someone else can deliver the egg.”

Is it just me or does this sound incredibly naive?

> “Fuel cells and hydrogen will play a super-important role,”

That's the point. It's not hydrogen as the fuel to drive the power train but as the storage medium to generate electricity which drives the power train.

This article is not a lobbyists knee-jerk reaction but a topic deserving much more attention than being buried in Tesla stock market tickers.

I keep hearing about hydrogen and batteries being an either/or problem, but it doesn't make sense. For one thing, gas/electric hybrids exist and have been successful despite requiring two engines.

But with hydrogen it's even simpler because a fuel cell already feeds an electric motor. You only need one engine to use both forms of storage. And the advantage of putting a battery in your hydrogen vehicle is immense: you get cycle optimization, regenerative braking, improved peak acceleration and cheaper short trips (w/ plug-in hybrid) because while hydrogen can compete with electricity on convenience, it will never compete on price.

Granted, the battery brings a weight penalty, but potentially much less than if you tried to deliver 600 miles of range with 18 wheels and 60 tons gvw.

Is this a problem for Tesla? Not if they just acquire a hydrogen startup if/when the time comes. The market for pure electric vehicles will not go anywhere. The question is whether the administration has the necessary competence.

> For one thing, gas/electric hybrids exist and have been successful despite requiring two engines.

Hybrids are pretty simple. Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive is basically a replacement transmission and is much more basic in design than a conventional automatic. HSD reduces the number of planetary gear trains to just one, replaces the large number of clutch packs with two electric motors, and eliminates the torque converter all together.

One could build a working HSD unit using 1920s technology. It just would need to be manually operated (probably using a lever similar to an aircraft throttle).

Mechanically simple, but it was nightmare to develop the ECU at 1990s.

Is there anyone in the know on this thread as to how hydrogen compares to the other 'greenish' fuels? Ammonia, methane, methanol/ethanol etc.

It always seems to me that hydrogen is just so, so hard to store, that just about any other fuel ought to be more practical. Cars running on natural gas already do exist, as does some infra - so maybe it's not such a far cry?

Hydrogen molecules are so inconvenient to store. It would be great if the hydrogen atoms were stored in the form of, e.g., octane, then the carbon atoms (from the octane) were recovered somehow so they don't accumulate in the atmosphere.

Every automaker is investing in many many different alternative drive train types. Volvo and Daimler are not putting all their money on black per se, just diversifying their R&D like everyone. Porsche and Toyota for instance are dumping money into synthetic fuel, but it doesn't mean they're anticipating any sort of synthetic fuel boom, they're just trying to be ready if it happens. This isn't news.

Seems like Trucks would be ideal for swapping out batteries at refuelling stops. Since they more or less travel at the top speed limit.

I still haven't figured out why solutions like MagLev trains aren't used for this problem...

Just do more freight trains already...

This truck will be mass produced by 2026 but there are some difficulties ahead

First it is a liquid hydrogen one, second they are calling for massive investments from government

Volvo is selling very well a lng truck, and the biolng theme makes it quite compelling.

These trucks will be super useful in transporting all the necessary hydrogen around!

In the UK we used to have coal powered trains that were useful for moving coal around. Lots was needed.

How does hydrogen store over time? For example regular gasoline can be stored only for about six months.

like this? "Time is right for hydrogen fuel in California, concludes new policy report " July 2004

https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/07/26_rael...

There's obviously a lot of complexities here and clear reasons why many in the transport industry think this is the solution. If they didn't Volvo and Daimler would be announcing their bet on BEV, right? Unlike oil majors, they have no sunk-cost reason to prefer one over the other and a lot of the technical change is shared between the platforms. A FCEV is just a BEV with a small battery, a small fuel cell, and a big hydrogen tank.

That being the case, it feels a bit easy to just say, "obviously this doesn't make sense".

However there are a few important differences between trucks and passenger cars that actually reduce some of the issues with EV trucking. A long-haul truck probably needs about 700kWh to 1MWh of battery storage. How long does that take to charge?

Some constraints on passenger car charging become less relevant when you're serving a professional audience and can have staff on-site to help. Cable thickness / weight is an ergonomic constraint that can be relaxed if you are serving truckers and not the 99th percentile of the public. You can even mount them on articulated arms on a gantry so that you're not dragging them around.

Multiple cables charging in parallel? Inconvenient on a passenger car, perfectly sensible on a truck.

Liquid cooling loop to external chiller? Again, that just doesn't work if you're building tens of thousands of chargers for the public, may well be worthwhile on network of truck refilling stations.

In the EU, there is already a mandatory 45 minute break every 4 hrs 30 mins. So there is no need for trucks that can drive for 12 hours on a tank. (US rules are in theory laxer but in practice insurance companies also insist on break rules).

So the real question is whether you can make the charging process fast enough to get approx. 4:30 extra capacity in 45 minutes. That's probably about 800kWh in 40 minutes of actual charging (assume time to connect and disconnect) or 1.2MW.

350kW chargers are installed and operating now (though I'm not sure how many cars can actually use them at that power) so naively you would think that running 4 of those in parallel would give you the charging tech required to run trucks today.

Hydrogen may still be cheaper for truck transport once you work out all the costs and logistics but I don't think it's wildly impossible either.

The big advantage that hydrogen has is that the cost of hydrogen tanks scales much more slowly than batteries. If pack price is $100/kWh then you need $70k-$100k worth of batteries. Doesn't seem crazy for a truck but a tank that can hold equivalent H2 at pressure is much cheaper. Takes up a lot of space but trucking is mass limited rather than volume limited.

Volvo has already bet pretty big on Battery-powered trucks. They've actually started full scale production already, beating Elon's fantasy truck to market:

https://www.volvotrucks.us/trucks/vnr-electric/

For some reason, otherwise intelligent people seem to think that hydrogen and batteries are diametrically opposed and that if you bet on one, you can't bet on the other. The reality is that they're both awesome and have a lot of potential, and they're both worth betting on. But batteries will never have the range that is required of long haul trucking. Their research into hydrogen is entirely consistent with this. BEVs for short haul, FCEVs for long haul.

As to the rest of your post, I'm not big on pure hydrogen, but solid oxide fuel cells don't necessarily require hydrogen storage. At least not in the compressed sense. They can easily use any form of fuel you can throw at it. Synthetic fuels are the future of renewable energy for long range use cases.

There is an efficiency hit to creating synthetic fuels, and an efficiency hit to converting them back to hydrogen, but efficiency doesn't actually matter...at least not directly. For example, we have had 60% efficient engines for a long time, but we still buy cars with 35-40% efficiency. What matters is dollars per work done. Synthetic fuel production can extremely cheaply be manufactured with off-peak surplus renewable energy. And as we invest more in renewable production, that surplus is only going to grow larger and get cheaper.

Actually, there may be a few reasons why legacy truck manufacturers are pushing this agenda:

1) They've been pushing it for a long time and have already invested a lot. Most of that investment is going to have to be written off unless they find a use for all the hydrogen R&D. I note that it is mainly legacy manufacturers pushing this whereas battery operated trucks have a fair amount of startups in advanced stages of getting their trucks, buses, heavy mining vehicles etc. on the road.

2) Hydrogen trucks and their designs are a lot more similar to current trucks then battery electric ones. These manufacturers have a vested interest in their legacy production facilities and supply lines and milking that investment as long as possible is a goal for them. Their real goal is exactly that: keeping the infrastructure that produces Diesel trucks going for a few extra years. That's also the elephant in the room: their operational cost of hydrogen trucks is going to be much higher than battery electric trucks; or even Diesel trucks. The fuel cost is higher and they have about the same complexity as Diesel trucks.

3) There is a lot of government money flowing into the hydrogen sector and getting in on that action is interesting for big companies. Given future availability of this stuff, and the subsidies, there is going to be a market for trucks that run on it. Even if it is tiny, it might still be interesting. Unless of course battery trucks take off and destroy the business case for this. Like happened to hydrogen cars.

Storing 1Mwh of electricity might actually be pretty fast and not necessarily a lot slower than charging a normal EV. A battery contains numerous cells that you charge at the same time. All it takes is a lot of power and temperature control (and thick cables).

The answer to how fast or how slow this will be is more or less a function of how much speed is worth to a trucking company. Idling trucks and drivers cost money. But then trucks needing regular maintenance are also idling. And drivers need to take breaks regardless of whether their trucks need charging. And drivers might ultimately no longer be needed if trucks become autonomous.

People pay for getting stuff from A to B. The rest is just a means to an end. Trucking cleanly, cheaply, and reliably is what matters. Cost per mile basically. There is a notion of good enough here. E.g. having lots of charging stations and trucks that charge to a reasonable percentage in say 45 minutes might mean that a 45 minute break every 6 hours or so might not be the end of the world for a lot of drivers and trucking companies. Entirely feasible with current battery technology. Tesla is basically pimping 500 mile ranges. That's more like a break every 10-12 hours or so. I imagine that, charging times, and cost per mile might improve quite a bit in the next ten years. Tesla is starting production end of this year apparently. And they are not alone in the market.

Getting that break time down might of course be worth something to someone. But the question is how much that is and whether it justifies more complicated and more expensive technology like hydrogen. I suspect not a lot and just no.

What they know that I’m missing, for me, hydrogen is a dead horse.

I thought by now it's clear to everyone that electric motors are the way to go? Is this some kind of lobby / legacy crap?

The charging time issue is basically solved for cars, but not nearly solved for long haul trucks (which both require more energy and expect a lower idle:active time ratio). It seems worth exploring alternate fuel sources for that case.

How so? My friend told me just last week that all the charging stations where full because even if 20-30 min might not seem like a long time, on a busy station the queues becomes intense. Meetings are missed if you don’t plan ahead.

The needs of trucks are very different than the needs of commercial vehicles, so that 20-30 min charging time becomes several hours if not more. They might just do battery swapping at that point.

The bigger the battery the faster you can charge it. And commercial drivers have to stop for an 8 hour rest every 8 hours of work by law anyway(at least here in UK/EU). Even using the already existing infrastructure and charging at the relatively common 150kW, you're regaining 1.2MWh(!!!!!!) capacity in those 8 hours. That's a lot of energy, about 12 Tesla Model X batteries worth.

In the US team drivers are common: two drivers in one truck, one drives while the other sleeps, they take turns who is driving. They still need to stop for fuel/supplies and exercise, but they can cover a lot of ground in a day because they never stop for very long (they are very careful to track all restroom breaks so that they can prove they never exceed the legal limits of how long they can drive before a rest)

A large percentage of long haul trucks have team drivers, which legally can and do run 24/7. Even for those that don't, you're talking about building charging infrastructure for a huge quantity of trucks most of which will be wanting to charge at the same time. It's hard enough to get commercial 240v connections in the US, how hard do you think it would be for truck stops to get 10MW connections?

I really don't know. Don't have the answer for US. All I can say is that we ship goods cross Europe all the time(UK-Poland, trip that takes 3-4 days one way) and it's always done by a single driver, we've used many different shipping companies and we've never had a driver team - I guess that the economics of transport don't work for dual drivers in EU for whatever reason, but again, I really don't have the answer as to why.

"It's hard enough to get commercial 240v connections in the US"

Again, not an expert on US infrastructure, but any charging site will be getting a 10kV connection which will be then stepped down to whatever you need - it has to be converted to DC anyway so you need those transformers anyway. As to the feasibility of providing 10MW to a charging stop - really don't know, someone else has to answer this.

Yeah, the complexity and cost is pretty high at that sort of of localized power density. Most truck stops max out on nighttime parking (about 100 spaces), and assuming all of them charging at the time, a moderately sized truck stop would require about 20MW peak power...even more if they plan on having megachargers. The biggest problem is line capacity...you won't be able to piggyback on local infrastructure. You'll have to run dedicated lines from tens, if not hundreds of miles away from the nearest distribution station. Remember, most truck stops are far away from population centers, and thus electrical infrastructure, as a matter of practicality. They need too much land.

I'm not betting on hydrogen specifically because 1) it's too complex, and 2) while the volumetric density is within the realm of feasibility, it's still not great. But I am betting on fuel cells. Solid Oxide Fuel Cells in particular. They're already extremely efficient, and also produce high grade (i.e. easily recapturable and convertible) heat. And they can use hydrogen, but they can also use methane, ammonia, butane, propane, diesel, gasoline, or any other form of fuel (I've run one off of wood chips!). And that flexibility has a lot of power, especially with the future of abundant and cheap non-peak power costs and rapidly developing synthetic fuel technologies.

Yeah, these are all very good points. I suspect companies which will make use of this first are companies which can control charging on both ends. Say UPS/FedEx/DHL buying a fleet because they can put strong charging points in their larger warehouses. Those trucks rarely drive more than 8 hours away anyway, parcels go from one distribution centre to the next, so that's excellent time to charge while the truck is being offloaded and loaded again. And they will have megawat-range connection to the grid for their warehouses already.

That sounds like a good news story for EVs. So many people bought them that the installation of charging stations is lagging behind. There is no strong constraint on building new charging stations though. Soon they will catch up, and no one will have to wait more than 20-30 minutes.

It’s definitely not solved. There are a half dozen different plug formats, voltage levels, etc…

If you want fast charging for instance you need a special vehicle with a high voltage system. Those are not super common right now, although it’s getting better.

Really this is the biggest unsolved part of EV’s.

The biggest unsolved part of EV IMO is the fact that mining lithium destroys the environment, and IIRC uses a fair bit of child labor. Looking at it from that perspective it’s not yet a green technology.

Lithium mining is pretty well industrialized I think.

Cobalt mining has problems with child labor.

There are? Here in UK you have Type 2(can be safely ignored for this, pretty much only used for at-home charging up to 7kW single phase or 21kW triple phase), Chademo(only used by the leafs and other Nissan cars) and CCS. CCS being the most common, there are motorway charging stations with super modern 250kW chargers and they only have CCS, so no issue with compatibility at all. Basically all new cars have CCS connectors, it's the standard.

And yes, CCS supports either 400 or 800V charging, but that's seamlessly negotiated by the car once connected, I don't see that as a problem here.

A large truck will not be able to use a CCS charger even at 800v for under an hour. The Tesla semi look to be using a special connector with 4 parallel DC connections while a CCS2 is only a single pair.

Your going to need a Megawatt for reasonable charge times, CCS tops out a 400kw at 1000v and 400amps with liquid cooled cables and connectors.

BTW a diesel truck pump puts out about the equivalent of 6 megawatts after efficiencies are normalized.

Like I said in another comment - commercial drivers have to stop for 8 hours every 8 hours of work by law anyway(in UK/EU), so there's plenty of time for charging. Even at the relatively common 150kW charging speed you're charging 1.2MWh(!!!) Capacity every 8 hours. I really don't think trucks will come with megawatt-hour capacity batteries, but if they do then 8 hours are long enough to charge such a battery with infrastructure that exists today.

Tesla is claiming "under 2kwh/mile" for their semi. At 2kwh/mile your looking at a megawatt for 500 miles range which is close to an 8 hour drive.

There will need to be stall where a semi can park for 8 hours using a charger.

Local deliver makes sense also city buses obviously and thats already happening. Long haul will need a lot more charging infrastructure to make sense.

In the US there is J1772 that works on everything and it works with 120v - 240v up to 80 amps (though typically 40 max).

The US has settled on CCS type 1 for fast DC charging, most new cars support it.

There is CHAdeMO a Japanese standard but that connector is on its way out in the US.

And then Tesla does it's own thing but there are adapters available.

I think it is a solved problem, if you don't want a Tesla a modern EV will have a CCS plug that fits both CCS and J1772. And if you want a Tesla you either get adapters or use Tesla's chargers.

I think the perceived advantage is range? I don't really know anything about fuel cells but I'd be interested to know how they compare to battery power in terms of the environmental consequences of material extraction/manufacturing, eg lithium

Hydrogen powered vehicles can use electric motors.

See:

https://www.daf.com/en/about-daf/sustainability/alternative-...

True. I need to be more specific: Electric motors powered by chemical batteries.

Hydrogen power cells have a number of advantages. For one they are more efficient while being much more environmental friendly than batteries (which to be perfectly honest is basically an environmental disaster on wheels).

Also, much faster to charge which is important in commercial traffic.

That's part hype, part subsidy-hunting.

The whole piece can be condensed to that single sentence:

> Both men urged governments not just to ensure that the necessary fuel infrastructure would be in place for hydrogen but also to provide sufficient incentives for transport companies to shift to greener trucks.

That is all there is.

It's by no means clear, that's the point. From battery to motor is fine for your ride within city limits but by no way a solved problem for long hauls.

Energy density, charging time and the problem, that even an exhausted battery has the same weight as a fresh one, are the issues yet to be solved.

Electric battery storage density is nowhere near diesel or petrol.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Energy-densities-of-vari...

They seemed to be referencing fuel cells not combustion engines.

Diesel locomotives are still powered by electricity. The Diesel engine runs a generator which provides power to the traction motors on the rail. The same concept can be applied here to Hydrogen.

I'd say "powered by diesel but moved by electric motors"

Trains have different requirements in terms of how power is applied to the wheels, and the loss of efficiency is acceptable in this context.

I bet a lot of people read this and think "Well, looks like a good time to buy Tesla."

Perceptually, this means the "Europeans" are not competing in the electric truck market; the market which is believed by most to be the future.

[IMO, electric trucks _are_ the future. However, that is incidental, as stocks rise on perception, not fact]

Volvo already sells battery powered electric trucks. I have seen a few of them used in Oslo.

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