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Comment by martin_bech | Hacker News Reader

Because the infrastructure needed would be bonkers, and creating fuelibg stations is not really a solved problem. You also loose a big amount of energy converting from electric to hydrogen and back. The cars themselves almost always have low storage because the tanks are very big. Hydrogen car performance is also a lot lower then pure EV.

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Fueling stations are a solved problem. There are compact, modular, on-site hydrogen generators designed for installation in places like gas stations. I recently met the founder of this company: https://genh2hydrogen.com/ that is doing exactly this - they're currently taking pre-orders and looking for final funding, but they have the engineering and prototyping in place. The Department of Energy even offers interest-free 30 year loans for any stations that want to buy one.

That looks promising, but the costs are still way higher then putting in EV chargers, and you can set up EV charging at home, for almost no cost.

Again the scale of hydrogen fueling stations needed would be massive

A quick Google shows that a Tesla supercharger installation is about $250k including the power grid infrastructure upgrades needed. The self contained hydrogen generator and fueling pump from H2 is about $2 million, but it's also interest free and can be paid over 30 years and the profits of it go to the operator, which isn't true of the Tesla superchargers.

Larger and more popular gas stations can do about half a million in revenue per month selling gas, which they only have about 2% margin on. Hydrogen has the electric cost eating into margins, but even then it should be pretty profitable and much much higher than 2%.

Although it's a big up front cost commitment, the economics definitely seem feasible if hydrogen fuel cell cars start getting more popular over the next decade or more.

Thats yoyr problem right there.. its 10x the cost and only feasible if hydrogen cars become the norm, and hydrogen cars will not be the norm if no fillingstations are available. Meanwhile with an EV, I will never really need to visit a charging station, unless Im on a road trip.

Why do peopke always ignore the range, and specs, of the three separate car brand's H2 range, when making claims like this?

You're wrong.

And claims of energy loss!! Sure, no loss to heat in batteries? And batteries lose charge if they sit idle!

There is some loss in batteries but like we can measure things and hydrogen comes out way short in terms for miles driven per kWh of electricity in the grid.

No, it doesn't.

How do I know this? Because you haven't even specified where the h2 came from.

There is power generation from Ng, and there is h2 from Ng. Which do you think is most effective?

Ng -> steam generator -> power transmission -> charging loss

Or, Ng -> h2, delivery, fuel cell (fuel cells are highly efficient)

As an aside:

https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...

The infrastructure needed to create a power grid for people to charge electric vehicles at home would be double-bonkers.

Upgrading fueling stations seems much easier than mining all of the copper needed to add all of the extra lines for EV charging, and then upgrading the whole national grid.

Supposedly one company has claimed 95% efficiency on creating hydrogen from electrolysis:

https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr...

Power that by nuclear energy, and it's a green & clean winner.

There are ancillary benefits to upgrading the grid that retrofitting pipes to pump hydrogen doesn’t bring. Most of America and Europe would do just fine without upgrades, for most of the population. And the jurisdictions touting hydrogen (e.g. Japan) have 70s-era anti-nuke greens in power.

Hydrogen is a smart hedge to pursue. But thank goodness it’s mostly Japanese tax dollars doing it.

Current Japan regime isn't anti-nuclear but they are the regime that encouraged nuclear plants. Now nuclear is unpopular for obvious reason so the regime is struggling about future energy plan. Thanks (/s) to putin, nuclear is now re-evaluating. I feel Germans are more anti-nuclear.

Why Japan encourages hydrogen is not very related to nuclear (except that the gov want to feed jobs to heavy industry companies that worked on nuclear), but related to lack of every local materials/fuels. I think hydrogen research should be encouraged, but Toyota should release more PHEV/BEVs early.

Any grid good enough to air condition every house in the day time is good enough to charge electric cars at night.

There's already tons of available lines going to a ton of people's homes. It only took a dozen or so feet of cable to add a 14-50 outlet in my garage.

Their homes were built expecting them to be able to pull 150-200A of power. It doesn't take that much power to charge an EV overnight. Mine charges way faster than it needs to on 32A 240V.

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