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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Batteries are heavy, expensive and we don’t have infrastructure to charge them at the required scale.

I don’t believe hydrogen is the answer but methane cells could be… liquid energy storage is just so much more practical compared to alternatives.

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We (in the US) have very little hydrogen infrastructure but there's high voltage power lines basically everywhere - so it seems like hydrogen has the infrastructure and scaling issues.

Batteries are indeed heavy - but so are portable hydrogen storage cell that don't easily explode or require liquid cooling.

I agree with you that hydrogen isn't the answer but methane doesn't really seem to be either. Batteries and electric cars are already here - they just need to continue scaling the infrastructure and work on lightening up the vehicles.

There isn't enough infrastructure to power all the eventual electric cars.

Yet.

You're right, we'll need about 20% more electricity if we replaced all our ICE cars with electric ones. If we stop selling gas cars in 2035 then by about 2045 we'll hit ~99% electric cars.

Are you implying we can't increase our infrastructure by 20% in 20 years?

What's involved in increasing electricity infrastructure by 20%? Have you looked at the timeline of some large scale, coordinated effort public infrastructure projects?

One that's close to home for me is the Seattle area's light rail system. Voters approved a plan that includes an extension of the line from downtown Seattle to the neighborhood I live in sometime around 2016. Service is now scheduled to start in 2039, but there have already been multiple delays.

Interconnect backlog queue is limiting factor, and it's five years.

There are currently enough projects in the queue to double our generating capacity.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...

2016 means you're talking about ST3, and 2039 means you're talking about Ballard [1]. It looks like the date in ST3 for Ballard was originally 2038 [2], so it doesn't seem delayed that much *yet*.

That said, I'm not sure large-scale transit projects are too comparable to electric infrastructure. The ST1 project had a lot of delays due to disagreements about where the rail line would go, and the cost of purchasing land [3]. It's a system designed to move people to places, so a lot of people have opinions on which places the system should go. By contrast, people mostly care that enough electricity is getting delivered to where they live, and don't really care how it gets there.

[1] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sou...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Link_light_rail

We can't even provide for the current needs on a cold or hot day… I'm not "implying" anything, I just notice the continuous blackouts in summer and in cold winter days.

There wasn't enough silicon wafer manufacturing infrastructure in 2005 to meet global silicon wafer demand in 2023 either, yet somehow humans magically got together, invested money, built plants, and wow, a decade and a half later there is silicon wafer manufacturing infrastructure to meet global demand.

Imagine not understanding the ability for humans to build things. Pretty sure the comment i'm responding to is a gas industry shill.

It is both a violation of HN guidelines and reason to assume that the person you are simply disagreeing with is an industry shill rather than simply someone you disagree with.

This is one reason I like to suggest putting PV onto cars directly, even though normal shaped cars will only get 8-12 miles of extra range per day from this, and even though the surface of a vehicle is one of the worst places for PV cells: 8-12 miles per vehicle per day makes a big difference to the overall infrastructure requirements.

Small scale plants are the key when the grid is either unreliable or insufficient.

It's not much of an issue to have, say, a 1000kWh battery with some small/medium scale solar or wind power feeding it. Or even the grid if there's extra.

Then everyone around that battery uses it primarily for their energy needs and only when it runs out they tap into the larger grid.

The only thing solar panels on cars are good for is keeping the AC running in the summer so the car (and battery) are cool at all times.

But there isn’t any infrastructure for fueling the hydrogen cars.

A move towards hydrogen means 3-5x more energy requirements (which also cost money) as well as a transmission and distribution network for the gas.

At home charging and on street parking charging will be an easier retrofit than the construction of new refueling stations.

Well the whole powergrid needs to be basically re-made to handle all the extra load… although I agree that it's probably cheaper than distributing hydrogen.

Anyway we should go towards trains IMHO, we should absolutely not even have long distance trucks.

“We don’t have the infrastructure” is a temporary problem. The same could have been said about gas stations and the electrical grid capacity needed for widespread air conditioning.

Weight isn’t such a crazy thing either. The Tesla Model Y long range weighs 900 pounds more than a Honda CRV. It’s a lot, but the most popular car in America is the Ford F-150 which weighs about the same as a Model Y at the low end.

The weight efficiency can only improve from here and more charging infrastructure and faster recharge times will mean less demand for long range variants. This is ideal for electrics because shorter frequent stops are more time efficient for EVs while for gas vehicles it’s the opposite.

The great thing about electricity is that it’s even easier to transport and generate than liquid fuel storage. Generation can be centralized with a diverse set of energy sources.

> The weight efficiency can only improve from here

I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons.)

Is range really an issue if you can easily find charging spot and recharge in less than 15min?

It is in the mind of consumers, yes (I have not offered my personal opinion and don’t want to, as it’s irrelevant to the point.) There has been a lot of consumer studies on this and range anxiety is a very real thing.

> They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons

The difference in wear between a 3600 pound RAV4 and a 4400 pound Model Y is so minor that it'll disappear in the noise. Nobody will notice. The only time it'll even come close to mattering is on residential streets that never see any commercial trucks. And even then, nobody cares now about the 6500 pound HD pickups that are so popular, so I can't see why that would suddenly become an issue.

I mean, if we’re picking models to support our points, I’d counter with the Hummer EV which is 9,630 lbs. Road wear goes up with the 4th power of weight, so doubling the weight increases road wear 16x… it’s not something we should just ignore.

That car cannot be legally driven in Europe on a B license due to its weight. Phew.

If only we had that kind of sanity in the US… the electric hummer is an absolute monstrosity and should never have been made IMO. I am a supporter of EV’s but, I am increasingly skeptical that legacy US automakers will ever “get it” when it comes to efficiency, and it’s not surprising at all to end up with monster vehicles like the EV hummer. But I do admit the American consumer shares as much of the blame by demanding such large (in size, if not necessarily weight) vehicles in the first place. It’s like GM said “we need an SUV at least this big, and we need at least this much range. Engineers said it’ll weigh 10,000 lbs? Fuck it, nobody will notice, ship it.”

The Hummer is a toy. It sells in toy numbers, and has toy impact on society. It's a distraction. The most popular EVs are just like the most popular ICEVs -- crossovers.

That Hummer also does 0-60 in 3 seconds. Imagine the amount of damage it can do just going all out from traffic lights and crashing into someone...

It's like someone took America and distilled it into an EV :D

> if we’re picking models to support our points, I’d counter with the Hummer EV

I picked the Model Y, which has outsold every other non-pickup vehicle except the RAV4, and it's really close to the RAV4 numbers. It's a good comparison.

How many Hummers has GM sold this year? Couple hundred? That's three orders of magnitude fewer than the Model Y, the Hummer is irrelevant.

You’re absolutely right and I don’t disagree at all, but what worries me is the mindset that produced the Hummer. It feels a lot like GM started with a constraint of “Americans like larger vehicles”, then added “Americans want long range”, then told the engineers to make it happen, and the result is something that weighs 4.35 metric tons. The fact that weight itself didn’t seem to be a constraint guiding the design is worrisome to me, and is a sign that we can expect more superheavy vehicles like these in the future.

I would counter that by saying that the Hummer EV is an exotic car that is not going to be widely available and isn’t intended to be sold in high volume.

GM sold 272 of them last year and only 47 this year.

It’s basically a halo car and technological showcase.

I’m already on board with the urbanist camp that believes car-focused infrastructure is economically and environmentally unsustainable. EVs don’t help the American addiction to stroads and strip malls.

I just happen to also believe that EVs are no worse than the status quo and are almost certainly at least marginally better than any other alternative on the table.

Weight is an air pollution problem - tires and brake pads release fines during normal usage. Regenerative braking helps, but only so much.

https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384

Electricity is easy to transport but very hard to store and it's the storage that's the problem, see batteries.

Well, we have a power grid and not a hydrogen grid.

Hydrogen can be created from water and electricity

It can yes, but the efficiency is laughable. It's only viable when you've got essentially free renewables AND you've filled every battery you can.

Water is quite affordable and so is solar. The efficiency of both solar and electrolysis will likely increase as more research is done.

Obviously. But if you already have the electricity it's more efficient to use it directly.

_You_ don't. We do.

There are 6 over 100kW charging spots under 1km of my house. Although I don't need any of them, because I can charge where I park at 2kW all day and night.

6 is a number an order of magnitude too small unless you live in a desert. If you live in a city, it's probably closer to two orders.

To support 60 assuming ~50% utilization you'll need 1MW per 1 sqkm additional power. This isn't a small number. The grid anywhere is absolutely not ready for such a rapid increase of load. There isn't enough refined copper produced worldwide to upgrade the grid. I mean setting up a copper mine on 16 Psyche is not a batshit insane idea here.

Why does a city need ~100 L3 chargers per km2? People don't need to drive as far within a city, so even home L1 chargers should handle most city residents needs. The L3 chargers seem most useful on highways exiting the city.

>we don’t have infrastructure to charge them at the required scale.

Yeah we do, or to be more precise, we are having no trouble expanding the infrastructure at the same rate people are buying the cars.

About the infrastructure. I've got many ways to recharge my car available today. I've got zero places to fill hydrogen. I don't even have many CNG options.

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