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Comment by linkjuice4all | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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