Hacker News Reader

Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

They bet on hydrogen vs electric cars, and that didn't pay off. They're already good at making ICE vehicles, so rather make up for a huge amount of lost time and effort, it's a bid to keep the current business going.

View on HN

Lets see in 10 years. Id bet hydrogen is one fundamental discovery away from winning

Transported in/as ammonia. Minimises leaks compared to hydrogen gas, utilises existing liquid storage and pump delivery model. Doesnt require long charging times. Commercial production being funded in a number of places, including Australia to produce it as a scalable fuel source.

I'd say its just about there.

Sure, but to be fair, they've probably thought the same thing for years as well.

The overall efficiency of using electricity to create H2, ship it somewhere, then convert it back into electricity with a fuel cell will never make sense for passenger vehicles. I'm sure we'll find new catalysts and methods to improve electrolysis, but there is a hard upper limit on how good it can get. We're not going to cut the energy requirements in half. Battery prices have cratered over the last decade and continue to drop. The overall efficiency of a BEV is something around 85-90%, whereas FCEV is around 40%. That's a lot of wasted energy for H2 and that will have a big impact on TCO (plus fuel cells remain very expensive after decades of work).

I do see H2 fuel cells having a part to play in industries like shipping, forestry, and agriculture where grid connections are either tricky or impossible, but fuel cell passenger vehicles won't ever make sense financially.

There is no hard limit except 100% efficiency (sorta*). As fuel cells are a type of battery they can eventually match li-ion batteries on efficiency. Combined with their ability to capture curtail power on a very large scale and the economics of hydrogen could easily surpass that of the EV.

* There is a soft limit at 85%, but that is mainly due to the need to turn liquid water into steam over the entire process. This can be ignored if electrolysis is done on steam instead of liquid water. Also, 85% is close enough to li-ion batteries that very few people will care about it.

It looks like you've created this account to argue only about one thing on HN. Agenda-driven accounts and single-purpose accounts are not allowed here, regardless of the agenda/purpose, because it's not in keeping with the values of this site—i.e. intellectual curiosity doesn't work that way. So would you please stop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hydrogen has already found those fundamental discoveries, and much of it is the rapid reduction in green hydrogen cost. It's really a matter of time before economics shifts the entire industry towards hydrogen over resource-intensive batteries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com