Comment by cpprototypes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpprototypes | Hacker News Reader

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Tesla is interesting, but there may be an upcoming battle between EV and fuel cells since it seems Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are supporting fuel cells instead of EV. But Tesla is not alone (Nissan, BMW) so this may be a battle that will split the industry. A big part of this fight will be infrastructure. Currently, gas powered cars have these advantages:

- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)

- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)

- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)

EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.

The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of advantages.

Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not be true.

The petrochemical industry would absolutely love for hydrogen fuel cells to become viable instead of EVs because they already have a massive amount of infrastructure and the easiest/cheapest way of getting hydrogen is to capture it from hydrocarbons.

Musk is right though, steam reforming hydrocarbons to generate hydrogen doesn't make any sense, nor does electrolysis. Using that amount of energy to generate a fuel so that you can fill up at the pump quickly is just plain nuts. We're better off using higher voltages, better batteries and super capacitors.

Fuel cell fillers are slower than gas and not much faster than quick-charge stations.

EV charging stations are ubiquitous. Fuel cell fillers are outrageously expensive.

All US cars can charge with J1772. CHadEMO and SuperChargers have the same power output, so adapters will be possible and reasonable.

Oh, and hydrogen-fueled cars are far less efficient wells-to-wheels than electrically-fueled. We can't afford to be paying more for fuel.

A (comically large) CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter will be available for about $1000. CHAdeMO has a maximum output of 500V/100A or 50 kW, whereas Tesla Superchargers are presently 120 kW.

http://shop.teslamotors.com/collections/model-s-charging-ada...

If you know, could you expand on the capital costs to convert a typical petrol station to, or augment it with, hydrogen capacity? I strongly suspect there's rather a lot of hardware (insulated tank and plumbing, major refrigeration, etc) required, and I suspect there are in some states at least rather restrictive (post-hindenburg) laws about hydrogen storage. Much higher costs than a Tesla superstation, no?

I own an RV with a propane tank, and propane storage and filling equipment is more complicated than the petrol equivalent, and a propane fill is always done by a trained person -- no self-serve allowed! Hydrogen would be many times more complex.

Also re standardization, there is a standard electrical plug use at all EV charge points, it fits my Toyota plug-in hybrid, a Nissan Leaf, or a Tesla. I am looking forward to stopping at a Tesla superstation with my Prius, I can probably get a full charge in 5-6 minutes...

Tesla uses a proprietary electrical plug. A J1772 adapter is included with their cars to charge at level 2 charging stations. A CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter is also available for about $1000.

This means you cannot charge non-Tesla EVs at a supercharger. Sorry.

It'll be interesting to watch.

A year ago I was thinking biofuels might be the way to go, I've since concluded that the capacity for production simply fails in any conceivable scenario to meet present levels of demand.

I do see liquid hydrocarbon fuels as attractive, though, based on energy density, flexibility, storage stability, and the very large level of installed base and technological familiarity in their use. For those reasons, the US Naval Research Lab's electricity-to-fuel synthesis relying on seawater for both hydrogen and CO, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, and producing fuel at a $3-6/gallon price estimate (I suspect that will go higher, and at present, crude oil price is about 70% of the final cost of gasoline at the pump), might allow for a continuation of fossil-fuel energy systems in a carbon-neutral and sustainable fashion.

Not cheap by a long shot, but plausible.

I'm expecting CNG to become a lot more prevalent. Domestic supply is abundant and growing. Fleets and long haul trucks are increasingly converting. Natural gas utilities are pretty much everywhere, so the main thing that needs to be build out is the actual refueling stations. Standard refuling fittings are already defined.

Honda sold a CNG version of the Civic here in SoCal for a while. It didn't sell very well because the tank took up most of the trunk and the range wasn't much better than most electric cars (around 150 miles, as I recall).

On top of that, the number of refueling stations is very limited--natural gas pipes are ubiquitous in cities, but they deliver the gas at a much lower pressure. You still need a roughly $2k compressor to fill the tank overnight (which uses about as much electricity as you'd put in an electric car). Commercial stations have more expensive compressors that operate continuously to fill a holding tank which cars are filled from.

It's not impossible. But the infrastructure required to put energy in the vehicle costs the same or more as for an electric car. And you use just as much electricity as an electric car (in addition to the natural gas). And the cars aren't that much cheaper than battery EVs. And the cars have similar range and refilling limitations as EVs.

Maybe we'll see it for trucks, though.

UPS is already using Natural Gas/Diesel hybrid engines for runs between SoCal and Vegas.

The trucks are driving between relatively fixed points, so it's a simple matter to build CNG stations there. Plus, the cost of a battery scales linearly with the capacity of the battery, while the cost of the CNG tank scales the square root of the capacity. Batteries are also heavier per unit energy, which reduces the truck's legal payload capacity.

So that use case has a strong argument for CNG.

Weight doesn't really matter for a personal automobile, and you can't (easily) make the tank big enough to argue that a large tank is cheaper than a large battery. It's true, but costs unrelated to tank size are still important, and the bigger issue is that the range sucks unless you give up the entire trunk (since you can't make a CNG tank flat (like Tesla) or T-shaped (like GM).

How are fuel cell cars going to avoid these issues? They will be even less ubiquitous than solar charging stations, considering it will cost much more to build one.

Hydrogen will end up being barely cheaper than gas, too. And I don't think it will be that much more environmentally safe than gas. At least electric cars have the potential to be almost fully charged by solar power in the future.

Also, I expect hydrogen-based cars to be even more expensive than electric cars.

The economics of fossil-fuel gasoline will change markedly. I wouldn't use current price points as a reliable guide to future projections.

That's an interesting compare-and-contrast. I don't think the standardization thing is quite right, as the connector is pretty much standard aside from Tesla's, and it doesn't appear that adapters are hard to make (Teslas come with one). The fact that a Leaf can't connect to a supercharger is mainly because Tesla is trying to make them exclusive to move units. Charging stations that aren't actually owned by an electric car manufacturer will use the standard connector.

Ubiquity is being solved rapidly. Electric has a huge advantage here because the necessary infrastructure is almost zero. A charging station costs a couple thousand bucks, and plug it into the grid and you're ready to go. This isn't just theoretical. In my area (fairly affluent but not incredibly techy DC suburb) there are already a bunch of electric car charging stations available. The local Walgreens has one, for some incomprehensible reason. I've never seen it used, but it's there, ready and waiting.

I think recharge time is by far the biggest factor here. If recharging was fast, the rapidly growing network of chargers would make it practical to own an electric car with a Tesla-level range even for someone living in an apartment or similar. You'd have to recharge more often than you'd fill up with a gas car, but on the other hand you could just park in a recharging-equipped parking spot while you go out to a restaurant or go shopping, making it part of your regular routine.

In terms of practicality, it seems that the question is whether hydrogen can attain ubiquity before electric can attain fast recharging times. With only a couple dozen hydrogen stations in the US currently, and at $500,000+ for the necessary equipment, I doubt we'll see ubiquitous hydrogen anytime soon. With Tesla superchargers already providing an 80% charge in 40 minutes, I'd put my bet on fast battery charging winning the race.

"mainly because Tesla is trying to make them exclusive to move units"

I don't think that's the case. I believe the two major reasons are simply:

- superchargers are 120kW, ChaDeMo is 50kW. - Tesla wants to retain the ability to iterate to figure out what works well, and what is required, before standardization

At this stage in the market, electric car companies are much better off co-operating rather than competing. I'm willing to bet that every Leaf sold increases Tesla's sales in the medium term rather than decreases it. The Leaf owner is a first adopter, who demonstrates to their friends and families that electric cars are practical. Not to mention that Leaf to Tesla is a common upgrade path as income, needs and/or family size grows.

So, just for the record, you're betting against Elon Musk himself on hydrogen fuel cells [1]. This is a guy who has stated, multiple times, that hydrogen fuel cells make no sense from first principles analysis, even considering the best case scenario. The efficiency of converting methane to hydrogen, transporting it to (non-existent) hydrogen fuel stations, and converting it to electricity in an inefficient fuel cell just doesn't make any sense. May as well just burn corn ethanol.

Also, just use common sense for a moment. Look how much flak Tesla is getting for their little battery fires. Do you have any idea what destruction compressed hydrogen gas is capable of causing? Not to mention all of the issues with storing hydrogen in the first place (hydrogen cracking).

I'm not a betting man, but I'll take any bets on hydrogen fuel cell cars becoming mainstream.

1. http://youtu.be/MmQb94EF1UY?t=29m40s

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