Hacker News Reader

Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

That's easy to solve - use Hydrogen trucks or EV trucks for the heavy duty load. Not yet in the commercial market - coming in quickly.

View on HN

How is that easy if there are currently on H-powered garbage trucks on the market and it will take billions of dollars to replace all of them?

It costs billions of dollars to replace the fleet anyways so its already a sunk cost - instead of replacing with diesel your replacing with H2 or EV at the end of their life. You are just substituting out one product for another - that is relatively easy.

Yeah but it will take years for this to happen, and just replacing the trucks is only part of the cost - you still need to build new infrastructure to either charge with electricity or fuel with hydrogen. But wait! There is more - you need to pay millions to get rid of all the old infrastructure like gas stations that cities have, with old fuel tanks, distributors etc. In the current economic climate, I don't see how most of the cities could afford to do all of this.

If you take it as a one off maybe it is more difficult to make the finances add up. However given the groundswell of change happening right now, political willpower to change, private funding, corporate support and public support these changes look to be inevitable. I think you need a bit more of a can do attitude than a meh looks impossible to me why bother mindset.

In the case of hydrogen - it isn't that difficult. You develop on site hydrogen production capabilities and replace the fleet returning to site to re-fuel. Self contained.

Getting rid of the old infrastructure - good local jobs to do that, and upgrade it with something new. Come on now, that was too easy.

What bothers me is that people like to be "eco" if it involves cool new tech, but they never consider a simple facts like the one that in most cases, it's more eco-friendly to use whatever you have until it can no longer be repaired than to buy something that's just few percent efficient. We're being wasteful but we make ourselves happy by packaging it all in "save the planet" box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com