It is generally considered more ecological than electric, because of much lesser environmental footprint than required for producing batteries.
Another advantage would be bigger driving range and faster refuelling.
However, it looks like that outside of Germany, electric cars just won, and Germany itself will not be able to reverse the trend.
I'm very concerned about this, but have found basically zero impact for batteries, in that if one is concerned about batteries, then all that iron mining to build the rest of the car should probably be a bigger concern.
After doing research, I'm 99% sure that lithium battery environmental concerns are just concern trolling from fossil fuel interests. But I am very open to concrete new information.
"An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only 2 years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy."
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
Are you also concerned about the steel, which is on the order of thousands of pounds per vehicle, and requires not only digging for iron, but also the coking coal?
And speaking of digging, iron and coal do actually dig up landscapes, whereas most lithium is actually brine mined rather than dug out.
What's more worrying is battery recycling. Toxoc batteries. So far, The West's plan has been to ship them to poor countries, which tend to just bury them.
This can be resolved, but will it be? I say this to anyone claiming to be green, unless you know 100% how your product can be recycled, with concrete, in place processes and recyclers, you're a liar, and not green.
In reality, lithium ion battery recycling is baked into this supply chain from the start. There are many startups eager to recycle batteries, the biggest challenge is that there isn't any substantial amount to recycle at the moment. Manufacturing rejects are one of the prime inputs to current battery recyclers.
Could be they are trying to find a way to get a piece of the European pandemic recovery funds, which are going mainly to "green" projects?
In my opinion any fossil fuel hydrogen should be banned, or at least taxed at far higher rates than current carbon taxes.
We need electrolyzed hydrogen for industry, and we should make sure it's the cheapest option so that we don't have a market failure again.
Getting electricity to a battery EV at scale is somewhat of a "last mile" problem, and I'm not sure if upgrading our grids to handle this will be cheaper than rolling out hydrogen infra.
Consider that you can ship hydrogen on a truck to existing pump stations (maybe not as efficient) as we do with gas right now.
I have no data to back this up, just the handwavy arguments above...
I read recently that the UK just needs to go back to 2002 levels of electricity generation to cover the whole fleet switching to electric.
There are some problem areas, generally people who live in dense urban areas without an allocated parking space but I don't think that is insurmountable.
However EV's last mile problem is solved, at least for people with garages. 220v is more than enough for daily charging. A 120v 15amp circuit is almost trickle charging at <5mph, but most car are idle >90% of the time and that slow charging is enough to replenish a typical days driving in 8 hours.
As far as the transmission and distribution grid, shiftable load like car charging has the potential to drastically reduce grid costs, by shaving off peak capacity, and utilizing the times of Los grid usage. Chris Clack is a leading grid modeler, and his latest grid models tor decarbonization show massive savings by putting batteries and solar at electrical meters. Car charging is half of the function of home batteries, and it's likely that in the near future, many cars will allow vehicle to grid discharge, like the new f150 truck.
In my area (in Norway) there are probably 50% EVs on the road now, closer to Oslo I bet the proportion is higher. In my street alone with 10 houses the cars are about 80% EVs and I just heard another neighbour has ordered an ID.4.
The local bus is also electric and it has a pantograph that draws 450 kW from a charger just 50 meters from my house in it's "down time" as I am at the end of the route.
No problem with the grid so far, but they have put a capacity charge on how much max capacity you use divided into 50 NOK ($5) monthly tiers. The tiers so far are 5, 10 and 15 kW, I'm unusually in the 5-10 bracket since I turned my cars down to 3.4 kW charging. In addition they lower the grid price during night to encourage people to charge when not much else is in use.
But so far it has not required a massive grid build-out. It might be since the grid itself is well maintained being critical infrastructure.
Since we are in the subject of hydrogen cars and pumps, there is also no tax on hydrogen cars here so there have been a few, but not nearly in the number of EVs. The pumps will sometimes require more time to refill than a charge since if you have many filling in a row the pump itself tends to freeze up and requires quite some time to thaw.
The requirements of a hydrogen pump station is far higher than a gas station, it's not just the matter of shipping it on a truck to an existing one. You need compressors and decompressors (why it's freezing up) and it does take quite a bit of energy.
There is also the issue of leaking since hydrogen atoms are so small, we did have one blow up not that far from here a couple years back.
After living with only EVs for over two years now I think it's the way to go for personal cars and buses, but for ships and perhaps aircraft hydrogen makes more sense.
It's also easier to store excess grid power on sunny or windy days using hydrogen, but right now the issue is also that most hydrogen is produced using steam-methane reforming [1] which emits CO2. Way better than petrol though.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydrogen/production-of-h...
Toyota are also betting on hydrogen. This is the reason why, even though they were early with hybrids, they still haven't released any purely electric cars.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/japan-china-combu...
We really are the most short sighted and stupid species, and only have ourselves to blame for what is to come.
Investigating hydrogen for other uses like truck, ship, storage, emergency generator looks reasonable (Toyota also sell fuel cell system for various use), but still I doubt is they serious for hydrogen car like Mirai, or it's just a demo or for special case.
Toyota in particular seems to be betting big on hydrogen with a PHEV -> BEV transition as backup.
On the other hand, if hydrogen proves to be a lot more expensive than a BEV, then you expect fewer hydrogen refueling stations, which makes hydrogen less attractive.
Hydrogen sounds useful for commercial vehicles where you can plan routes and stay close to pumps (eg. delivery, bus, etc.) Sounds horrible for personal vehicles.
I can see Japan investing in it - you are unlikely to travel out of country with your car.