Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The mechanism through which fossil fuel interests work is "grey hydrogen" which is hydrogen produced through processing of fossil sources with no eye towards carbon capture. Grey hydrogen is as polluting as just burning the fossil feedstock but works with an established hydrogen infrastructure.

This lets the producers "green wash" their production pipeline by stating in a lies-through-omission manner that their hydrogen is "clean burning". See no carbon out of the tailpipe! It's clean! It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production. It's just moving the tailpipe somewhere else rather than eliminating it entirely.

There's also "blue" hydrogen that's manufactured with fossil fuels but claims/intends to capture the carbon produced in the process. It can still feed into a hydrogen infrastructure so fossil fuel companies love it due to the same greenwashing.

The only carbon neutral hydrogen is "green" hydrogen which uses a renewable source and electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen. But even that is wildly less efficient on net than just using renewables to charge battery EVs. Electrons are far easier to move long distances than hydrogen or hydrogen feedstocks (including water).

> It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production.

This is just anti-ev propaganda.

First, its kind of a chicken-egg situation:

'its not worth going green for the power grid, all the cars are still ICE' 'oh its not worth building EV cars, the power grid is dirty anyway'.

Second, there are lifecycle analyses that show that even if your powergrid is entirely fossil fuels, EVs are still a win. This is because powerplants are really efficient in ways that a car engine can't be because of scale/weight. iirc the only exception was if your power-grid was still like 50%+ coal?

Not only that, it's completely the opposite: One of the biggest impediments to adding more renewables to the grid is aligning generation with load. EVs are rolling energy storage devices. Put EV chargers in workplaces with a setting that says "just make sure the battery has at least 100 miles of charge by quitting time" and you get a full 300 mile charge from 100% renewable energy whenever it's available, still enough to come back tomorrow if it's cloudy today, and a discount for using the charger where that's what happens.

Then you not only charge the EVs from entirely renewable generation, most of them can curtail their load for about a week because typical EVs have around seven times the average commute in total range, and then when renewable generation is at 25% of normal, the capacity added to charge EVs can be directed to less flexible loads because the demand from EVs can be easily delayed for the right price.

Their existence is what makes a grid with a higher percentage of renewables even work.

> This is just anti-ev propaganda.

It's not. I'm not in any was opposed to EVs. Assuming so is a bit ridiculous on your part.

There's a marketing push to cast EVs as green no matter the prevailing sources of utility power. EVs can be green (like hydrogen) if they're charged from renewables. They also get greener over time since they're as green as their charging source.

In the short term EVs are just moving their emissions from tail pipes to smoke stacks. Contrary to the marketing around them.

I was under the impression that for typical energy mixes in developed nations EVs are strictly better than ICEs and that you have to exclusively charge them for burning lignite to be slightly worse. Only counting climate change impact of course. I think there is a lot of value in reducing local emissions in cities too.

The UCS has been regularly publishing data on whether grid charged EVs or ICE had lower CO2 in the USA. Even their oldest data in 2012 shows a clear improvement, based on the assumption of grids not getting cleaner with non-hybrids being worse everywhere in the US, and hybrids only competitive with EVs in the worst grid areas:

https://www.ucs.org/resources/state-charge

Their updates obviously showed continual progress from there as the grid cleaned up, a process which continues, as does lower carbon footprint batteries (LFP is half the carbon of NCM) and higher efficiency EVs.

https://blog.ucs.org/dave-reichmuth/driving-on-electricity-i...

It would be interesting for them to revisit the old projections with the 12 years of newer grid data and calculate the real numbers and compare them with their conservative estimates.

I disagree it's a chicken-egg problem, nor is it not worth buying an EV (aka "going green").

You can charge an EV with electricity made from several different energy sources. You could even charge it with gas or diesel generator, if such a need would arise. You can't really fill an ICE car with home-brewed gas.

The real issue a) range and b) if your car use maps well to an EV's need to have it plugged in for several hours at a time.

I mean, you can run an ICE on home-brewed ethanol.

You can even use solar to distill it.

You're probably going to want a small farm though...

Distillation requires feed stock. Is it even possible to grow the feed stock by using less energy than you get from the ethanol?

... yep, you could, though I don't think a small farm would cover my yearly needs for gas.

A small roof can cover an EV.

Best thing here is electrons are very pure, no matter the source. Chemicals - not so much. Distilled alcohol still has a significant amount of water, and if you're trying to get biogas, that one needs to be desulfurized. It's just messy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com