It's hard to store. It leaks away. It has poor energy density by volume (and much of the energy simply goes to compress the damn stuff) - only 3x li-ion, for your trouble. It has a crappy round-trip efficiency - only 50% for water -> electrolysis -> fuel cell. It's just a shitty battery.
The only thing it's got going for it is that it's a way of greenwashing fossil fuels.
There's probably a sound reason for that
How much does a conventional gas station cost? I would expect several hundred thousand, at least.
A commercial-grade Level 1 charger (US domestic 110V 15 amp), if they even exist anymore, is probably on the order of $1000 or less - if it breaks buy a no-name replacement from Alibaba until it catches fire.
A professionally-installed Level 2 charger without any payment system infrastructure - so one that's basically free-to-use and taps directly off your AC service-panel at 240V 50-90A will cost about $750-2000 including installation by an electrician - most states offer generous tax-deductions for this btw.
A Level 2 charger that's part of some charger network, like Chargepoint... I've no idea. The hardware looks nice (i.e. expensive) but I'm unsure who pays the cost of the hardware and installation (is it the landowner or is there a cost-sharing deal with the network operator?)
Level 3 chargers... we're talking a minimum 5-figure amount for even a single-stall set-up: as you need a huge (literally: easily 3x3x6 foot) DC transformer appliance for each pair of charging stalls (hidden behind a fence around the corner), connections to seriously high-power mains electricity (imagine a 16-stall Supercharger: that's 8 DC transformers doing ~120kW each: that's 2MW!) in addition to the aesthetically designed car-connector party. According to this article from 2013 (so it's already 8 years out-of-date) Tesla pays $100-200k towards a station, I'm unsure what the cost-split is, but I'd be surprised if the total cost overall was under $250k imo - I also wouldn't be surprised (still) if simply land-use-rights was the majority share: https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/inside-teslas-supercharger...
All the other H2 issues aside, you're competing with a good, established logistic network in EVs: the grid.
H2 is like any new nuke: you're 10 years out with a ton of subsidy and investment from being a player against the EVs of TODAY. Your price targets to compete will have to anticipate 5-10 years of accumulated economies of scale, tech improvements, etc in EV/grid/alternative energy/storage.
I'd be shocked if a bank would float capital to support that given the uncertainty. Just like I'd be shocked if a bank would float financing to a new major fossil fuel development. It might be BANNED in under a decade.
So no...hydrogen infrastructure is not 20x more. It's probably slightly more expensive than an urban charging station, but significantly cheaper than a rural charging station. And remember: electrical infrastructure is mature...it's not going to get significantly cheaper any time soon. Batteries are the innovation driving EV growth, not the grid.
The only thing that is unambiguously more expensive is the fuel. And it always will be more expensive...but prices are going down constantly. If it costs $100 to drive a truck across the US, why would it matter if it costs $200 to do the same with hydrogen, especially if it means not having to stop for hours at a time to recharge?
The midwest of the US is generally wind-rich. The south and southeast will be solar-rich.
Over half the population probably has the infrastructure to home charge right now, so this does not need to replace gas station pumps 1 for 1. I was not suggesting that all of us charging at home need to start using public chargers.
I don't want to "uhm, acktually", but it's less than 5 minutes: https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-the-average-person-... - and that's including time spent faffing around with the awful pay-at-pump machines' UX.
But in any case, 10 minutes is fine no matter what. If you are willing to spend 4x as much for fuel in order to save less than 10 minutes per week when you stop for fuel, then the problem isn't the charge time.
Filling your battery might be longer 10-15 minutes, but (at least for Tesla superchargers) about 20 seconds of your time, for the remaining 10-15 minutes you're free to do whatever you want.
It doesn't make sense to do the equivalent of charging an EV to 100% basically ever, so its a weird thing to compare against. Even very long distance trips will aim to bounce between 20-80% to minimize total charging time.
The big difference being that you don't have a small gas pump at home, in your office or at the supermarket that will fill your tank cheaply for you, and so you only need enough fuel to ensure you get to the next time that is available to you.
Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time.
On the contrary - have you ever noticed how gas-stations don't have an _upstairs_? Without the massive fire-and-explosion risk from pumping gasoline, a typical urban filling-station could be converted to a multi-storey charging plaza at a a reasonable expense, imo.
I remember there was a brief fad in the 1990s to quickly build additional storeys of parking spaces on bare concrete/asphalt lots using metal superstructure: it worked and it was relatively cheap, but the results weren't long-lasting (my university tore-down their metal-based parking lot after it had been up for about 10-15 years IIRC) - I assume something similar could be done in this case.
I used to work in a large business building a few years ago, and they had 4 charging stations right next to the main entrance, and having an electric car then was great... the "plebs" would have to park behind the building or in the garage under, and you'd have priority parking infront. Then, the number of electic cars rose to above 4 there, and first 4 that came, parked there, connected the chargers and went to work. If you came 5th, there was nothing you could do, except maybe if you knew one of those 4, politely ask them to move their car during lunch, so you can charge yours too.. but most of the people left their car there until end of work at 3-5h in the afternoon.
In regards to the chargers in your work garage: most modern charge systems let you set idle fees. If you install anything worthwhile you could easily configure it so people have to move after their car has been sitting fully charged for an hour.
This can be fixed but in the meantime it is a significant cost for the building. And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints will be trumped by later installs of dedicated, secured charging stations.
I am not jumping to an EV any time soon.
A 110V AC outlet is completely inappropriate and inadequate for charging a BEV; for example, it would take three days of nonstop charging to charge my car from a 110V outlet.
BEV automakers include the 110V adapter as an emergency stopgap more than anything else - I suppose they intend it to be used to help you get to a DC charger: but even assuming I'm no more than 100mi from a Supercharger then I still need to be plugged-in to 110V for at least 24 hours to get the 30kWh level I'd need to travel 100mi - and who is going to let someone borrow a days' worth of 1-2kWh electricity like that?
I'm not familiar with this field but I'd imagine this would take some special arrangement with the power companies. But so far that seems to be the only solution at the moment.
Without apartment buildings offering this I don't see how it could be widely deployed without changing how cities are built and transportation is deployed. Even if all the buildings offloaded to external Uber-style autonomous fleets they need to be charged somewhere and at a massive volume. And in my city 90% of new housin development for the last two decades seems to be on apartment buildings.
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Level 3 / DC fast-charging is not intended for long-term and repetitive use: it's only intended for road-trips and that's it - that's because DC fast-charging is bad for your battery.
I primarily charge at home using my 90A wall-connector - but I still rate-limit the charging to ~60A to help conserve the health of my battery-pack. Not that it matters much: since Covid and WFH my driving has dropped drastically, from ~30,000mi/yr to less than 5,000mi in 2020, and less than 1,000mi so far in 2021. (I got my Model X in 2018 and it's still got under 20,000 miles on it, lol).
But you raise an excellent point about apartment complexes and parking-lots not being able to feed dozens or more charging spaces. Yes, it's a problem, and no, I don't see a viable long-term solution.
Other than apartments, cities like London, etc, have built car charger ports into streetlamps so people with street-parking can charge their car at Level 2 speeds using that pre-existing infrastructure - I'm unsure to what extent it's a public-private-partnership vs. public, but the opportunity to profit from car-charging infrastructure means pushing the cost-per-mile up above the cost of gasoline/petrol - which undermines the economic-and-environmental benefits of BEVs (especially when you consider the dreaded fuel-tax on petrol will eventually be extended to electricity if governments don't introduce usage-based road taxes). It'll be mess, methinks.
Also, everything is terrible.
How so? J1772 itself maxes out at 80A, and I don't even know of any production EVs that support that: most max out at 48A or lower. And even for Tesla's connector, the highest I've ever seen (which isn't even offered anymore) was 72A.
The wall-connector in my garage has a 90A sticker put on it by the state-licensed electrician who installed it - and I can drag the rate-limit slider in my car's UI up to (and beyond) 90A. I'd take a picture and post it to show you, but HN is famously text-only.
But we're talking about a centralized high-density residential building vs sprawled out suburbia. It HAS to be easier to setup electrical charging en masse in an apartment building.
Once your downtown hi-rise loses market competitiveness b/c you DON'T have charging, it will change VERY quickly. The charging infrastructure will be a capital outlay with depreciation and there is about a 99% chance there will be some decent government and utility subsidies that come with it.
I agree none of that (the market force or the subsidies) exist currently, but I'm guessing in three years it will be happening.
Now maybe that is bad planning on their part, but I'd bet they're far from the only building in town that didn't build to accommodate a rapid growth in EVs.
I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase.
Having said all of the above - the 250kW charging as-is is already stupidly fast as "good enough". And charging at home will always be king even at slower speeds.
Actually Electrify America can charge at 350 kW. They have to actively cool the cables to keep them from overheating.
> in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW.
I think with v3 Superchargers, this is no longer true. There is a megawatt allocated per 4 chargers. I'm not sure how much this applies to the really big stations, because it seems they could be using multiple megawatts of power.
Chargers substantailly bigger than that are definitely in or past the planning phase, for example: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-po...
I'm surprisingly ignorant on this. ICE engine is fast-recharge as baseline; feels like batteries will forever have slow charge as baseline, fast charge as emergency occasional compromise that you know is killing your durability. This is where hydrogen seemed an exciting alternative. Am I wrong?
Jury's still out on that. Some manufacturers (GM comes to mind) are claiming their next generation batteries won't degrade from constant fast-charging.
Charging at home can happen. But this will be a hassle for a lot of people.
With current battery tech we'd probably need a 600 mile pack to make those charging speeds feasible for 300 miles in 10 minutes. That's a big pack, but again, just a bit of an engineering challenge, not revolutionary.
Though I otherwise agree, home charging is where it's at. Starting every day with a full charge and never going to the gas station is really nice. I hope we can quickly scale up the infrastructure so everyone can enjoy it. Right now maybe 50% of the US population is able to easily charge at home.
So just naive application of already-deployed technology can get you to ~500 kW. You don't think someone's going to squeeze out a thicker cable, really? No, this is doable. The real limit is how much current the battery can sink without degradation at the top end of the charge curve. The electrical stuff is kinda trivial.
Coming up with batteries that charge quickly is a different matter. Batteries are getting better, but it seems that part of the solution so far is to just have batteries that are so big that they don't need to be charged very often. Charging a 30kwh battery in an hour only gets you half the range in the same time as charging a 60kwh battery in an hour.
Maybe if we keep increasing the power of the chargers, we'll eventually ditch the cables and move to something like parking a car over a pair of big copper plates that extend to make contact with a matching pair of copper plates on the bottom of the car. I could also see some kind of system where the car has a fixture for attaching a coolant hose, and the charger pumps cold water through the battery while it's charging.
At some level, though, I think this is a trying to engineer around a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. If we had electrified roads that are capable of charging vehicles while they're moving, then battery sizes and charge times would be less of an issue, and we wouldn't need to have cars that devote a quarter of their mass or so to batteries. It would only really need to be on major roads, and probably only in short sections at regular intervals.
4.5MW systems are being planned
https://cleancities.energy.gov/files/u/news_events/document/...
Hydrogen gets around this, because eventually it's going to be a clean source of consistent demand that takes advantage of the fact that renewables require overproduction. A country like Denmark meets 40% of its electricity demand from wind, but produces up to 140% during periods of oversupply. If Denmark wanted to produce 80% of its electricity demand with wind, and do so with 90% confidence, it will generate more than 100% of its needs on average. Even if you wanted to look at the EU instead of Denmark, the same will still apply, because in order for two locations A and B to able to cover for each other when one has excess and the other doesn't, it must also be true that there will be times where no-one has a shortage. Since we want to guarantee our ability to provide X units of power at any given time, we need the grid as a whole to almost never have a shortage in aggregate, which means we will generally overproduce.
To give you an idea of the scale of this; California already curtails around 2.5TWh a year, which is enough to charge anywhere between 25 and 40 million BEVs. And that's one state, today, at relatively low-moderate renewable penetrations. It doesn't really matter if the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is lower than Li-ion, because we aren't going to have a shortage of electricity by any means. We're already throwing the stuff away.
If US decided that instead of waiting for green tech to emerge, we would just simply stop burning fossil fuels and revert to an Amish standard of living until clean fuels are developed, we could have converted to Hydrogen already
I’m always amazed at how Americans consider driving to be a simple fact of life where you either drive daily or go back to throwing spears in the jungle.
> massively reduced car transport
How the hell could enough people be convinced to spend say 10% of their income on public transport instead of their car and petrol/charging? https://www.statista.com/statistics/748911/us-average-per-ca...
> improve electric rail and walkability.
So click your fingers and you have cheaply and immediately magically redesigned the distribution of residential and commercial property to suit public transport and/or pedestrian/bike access?
Finally, ignoring the above, building out that infrastructure and other changes would cost trillions, which indirectly causes trillions of dollars worth of extra CO2…
Your argument is as trite as saying “why don’t we just stop producing CO2?”.
Edit: disclaimer: yes I own a car and I also use public transport when convenient (I was even 100% carless for a few years, by living close to work and bus route was accessible).
The energy density situation looks less attractive when you include the beefy 350-bar storage tanks, and the fuel cell itself. A battery just has two wires sticking out and that's it.
What about thermal management, the outer shell that can hold the battery cells and modules, and the battery management system?
Considering the heating/cooling mechanisms required for EV batteries this is a pretty disingenuous statement. Not even considering the highly-toxic fire risk with Li-ion.
https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...
Not for grid-scale stationary storage, it doesn't. You store it underground as compressed gas, just as many millions of tonnes of natural gas are stored today.
It's also a likely wealthy contingent that imports all of its food, flies everywhere, etc.
And a decade from now? EVs will probably be half the cost of an ICE.
ICE work in a much broader range of applications and at wider temperature extremes. They aren't going away.
Your comparison reminds me of advertising for electric water kettles. 95%!! 97%!! Wow!! ... or not, because you're converting pure exergy (highest quality energy) in the form of electricity to heat. You're dissipating it (heat), using a resistor. That's child play and the efficiency is meaningless. The other way around is the interesting part.
I mean, pick any fuel you want, their utility as stores of energy are all based on hydrogen content. So we're going to kick the fossil habit and still have fuel of _any_ sort, we're going to have to learn to produce and utilize hydrogen at scale.
Grey and blue hydrogen are transition fuels. They build a market for green hydrogen to fill. It's going to be a little messy along the way.
OK, I pick black coal. No hydrogen content. What do I win?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bituminous_coal >The carbon content of bituminous coal is around 45–86%;[1] the rest is composed of water, air, hydrogen, and sulfur, which have not been driven off from the macerals.
Shitty coals like lignite and bituminous coal do. The real chad coal, anthracite, is up to 98% carbon.[1]
Really, we should just put massive tax levies on fossil fuel extraction operations and call it a day. The market will sort the rest out.
...if and when you burn them with pure oxygen like done in rockets. Mostly they're burnt using using atmospheric oxygen though, leading to the production of nitrogen oxides (NOx) which come with their own problems [1]. It is possible to reduce the emission of these gases [2] at the cost of increased complexity and cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Health_and_environment_eff...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Regulation_and_emission_co...
Carbon dioxide is a permanent, global issue, where no (large-scale) capturing/cleaning methods exist.
NOx removes itself out of the atmosphere through natural means, CO2 does not.
You can close the cycle, hence 'ignore' CO2 emissions since they cancel out, and deal with NOx using today's existing technology. Same thing for PM and sulfur.
> NOx removes itself out of the atmosphere through natural means
...because of this [1], among others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_c...
Plus you don't need hydrogen molecules to synthesize hydrocarbons, and when people say hydrogen they mean molecules.
Fossil fuel is hopefully going away, but we will have petroleum in the toolbox forever and we can still use it when it makes sense to.
Case in point, SpaceX going larger rocket with less efficient kerosene first and now methane to increase efficiency and reduce soot, while still keeping everything simpler than hydrogen.
Li-ion energy storage capacity: somewhere around $200/kWh?
So, no, hydrogen is not "hard to store". It's vastly cheaper to store it at scale than it is to use shorter-term storage technologies. The disadvantage is low round trip storage efficiency (maybe 40% if used with a combined cycle power plant) but THAT'S OK for long term storage, which will have many fewer such iterations than diurnal storage.
If you want to level grid energy use and demand over a year, batteries would be insane. Hydrogen, however, could be quite practical.
Increased Green Hydrogen production is an essential and inevitable part of the response to climate change.
But the people pushing it for personal transport (often putting more effort into talking down their battery equivalents than actually building and selling vehicles) and anyone suggesting blue hydrogen, as a stopgap because green hydrogen is so far away and expensive, is more pro-fossil than pro-hydrogen.
If oil and gas majors aren't annoyed by your hydrogen strategy, then you're not doing it right.
Toyota Mirai is heavier, more expensive, has less range and cargo space than Tesla Model 3.
So it's definitely not true when we're talking about batteries vs hydrogen for passenger cars.
Maybe when you scale the tank to the size of a semi it might edge out batteries, but at the moment there's no data to support this.
Hydrogen is worse than gasoline / diesel.
The hydrogen that is only slightly more expensive than diesel is just as much (if not more) damaging to environment. That's the hydrogen made from natural gas.
The "clean" hydrogen i.e. the one made by electrolysis, is way more expensive than gasoline which is why it's almost non-existent, commercially speaking.
Not to mention all the "but electric cars are not clean because coal plants!" arguments apply 3x as much to hydrogen, because due to losses you need 3x time electricity (and therefore cost) for hydrogen compared to just putting it in a battery.
It doesn't matter which way you cut it, even with all of its disadvantages, hydrogen with a tank still has 3-5 times the energy density of lithium ion, and it scales better with larger vehicles. This is also the reason why industrial drones are moving to hydrogen. They've been using batteries for more than a decade now, and it's been the big limitation holding back a number of applications. Hydrogen gets you double-to-triple the endurance, even at relatively low pressurizations, which makes things like surveying easier, and delivery services possible. Military-grade platforms are supposedly already looking into using liquid hydrogen, with a number of platforms having already been converted over the past decade.
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/algae-biodiesel...
The demand curve would push out dramatically.
Also, we have a ton of supply for free to start with. All the oil we use right now is still usable for fuel even after it's used up for cooking. Food grade oil is a higher grade product than fuel grade. Most of it is just wasted now.
I'm not saying we should build our entire energy infrastructure off vegetable oil. There are probably cheaper, better ways. But the market will sort that out. The point is we don't have to give up oil - we just have to give up digging it up. Biofuel isn't some remote and impractical future tech, it's something we throw away millions of gallons of right now.
[edit] From https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&p=545335#p54...
>Level 1 (120v, 12 amps): 78% efficient
>Level 2 (240v, 16 amps): 91% efficient
>Level 2 (208v, 30 amps): 91% efficient
>CHAdeMO (500v DC, ~100 amps): 93% efficient
At least for li-ion, the infrastructure problem isn't too terrible, as most cars will have an endpoint with high-voltage, i.e. the workplace.
It ends up lighter, cheaper, and not much less efficient to do a high-frequency conversion instead, either as a boost directly from the 120V AC or as a DC-DC in the secondary.
What green hydrogen need to do is become economical, and to my knowledge it is even more expensive per w/h then nuclear is.
My understanding from them is that while Li-ion batteries cannot create weeks long capacity, rust batteries may be able to in the future.
Check out Form Energy[0] for an early version of this, they're claiming ~100 hours of storage right now and if they're right about the science and can manage the engineering it could grow past a month. These batteries are challenging to run, a bit like a mini-chemical plant, but they do actually seem plausible.
(No personal association with the company, some of my coworkers know the founders though)
Previous attempts at these batteries have run into a lot of operational problems and have had trouble keeping the batteries up and running long enough for them to be useful. There's a lot of novel engineering and chemistry that's gone into operationalizing the system.
With those number we can then look at rust batteries. If we take a country like Germany we can estimate the longest period of low wind conditions in order to estimate how long capacity is required to have the country exclusively run on wind+batteries, and how often such periods occur to calculate the charge cycle. Can rust batteries create an return of investment within a reasonable time frame (with nuclear energy prices as the economical limit for what the market will bear).
It would be very interesting to read a reply.
1. The cost of these iron flow batteries is almost entirely in operations, the cost of battery material is negligible. It's early days so it's really hard to say how low ongoing costs for things like valves, pumps, control systems, etc. are going to be.
2. In principle, flow batteries shouldn't need to discharge at all. This is why researchers are confident they can create batteries with multi-month capacity.
If the cost can be reduced so much that a single discharge is all that is required to both repay the production cost and charge costs (assuming reasonable sell price for the energy) then it would be like a fuel and could be stockpiled as much as could be expected to be used.
If the technology is so much in early development that there aren't much concrete numbers, could you at least give a suggestion about where the costs are right now? How far the economics of nuclear is the technology?
For context of why I am asking this, my country has set the date 2030 as the year when no more IC cars might be sold. We do not have a date for IC power plants and we really should have. It is wrong to continue to burn fossil fuels just because the alternatives are more expensive.
Essentially, in order to produce it in any reasonable quantity, assuming highest available efficiencies, required such massive overbuilding of renewables that economics started to take second position to just plain "zomg" effect.
It got better if you combined it with nuclear, but there the free market that EU insists on in energy actually made it harder to achieve anything useful, so you end up with massive overbuilding still. It had a little chance if you overbuild wind & solar while also making it so you had nuclear providing close to 100% of the "base load" (defined as "floor in daily electricity consumption") while possibly providing green hydrogen as extra sink for renewables to recoup costs... but it still was problematic economically :(