Why fuel cell cars don't work
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ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net
The goal is to provide a seemingly credible (but in reality completely unworkable) clean alternative so politicians, car companies and oil companies together can work "towards a clean future" while deep down knowing that it's a stalling tactic to keep the petroleum infrastructure in place.
Any fuel cell funding sucks the oxygen from the real threats to the industry: Industrial/Consumer solar and BEV (battery electric vehicles).
It's analogous to "clean coal": http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/top-5-clean-coal-myths
I'd guess car manufacturers have two economic interests: 1) The less energy for automobiles costs, the more people will use them, and 2) the less economic harm there is from climate change, the more people will use cars.
I could see #1 motivating auto manufacturers to support the oil industry, and #2 motivating them to support clean energy.
Are the energy costs for electric cars higher than those for traditional cars? I thought they were significantly lower.
I don't know if car manufacturers are in league with big oil per se, but I have heard it argued convincingly that the repair and maintenance costs that are implied by the IC engine and its infrastructure in the car are a huge source of revenue for the entire auto ecosystem, and they just cannot give that up.
It's much more subtle than that. I grew up around cars. My dad races them as his hobby. We restored a few, and spent plenty of time wrenching on a car together. It was one of the highlights of my childhood. It's still one of the things we often talk about when we see each other. I'm sure it's the reason I got a mechanical engineering degree.
When I think back to those times, a bunch of fragments of memories pop up. The sound a racing motor makes the first time you fire it up. The smell of gasoline vs diesel vs oil vs brake fluid vs transmission fluid. The grease on your hands. Knowing all the components under the hood, how they go together. How to start a cold engine with a flakey carb. How to fix a flooded engine.
There is real nostalgia around cars, and that means gasoline/diesel engines. I can barely enjoy modern cars with their plastic engine fairings and electronic controls, much less an electric car with just batteries and motors. I love building robots, and I'm a professional programmer now, but electric cars just don't excite me from the perspective of working on them. (Driving a Tesla is a different story).
Layer on top of that nostalgia, which I believe most of the people that work in the auto industry have, is the reality of 100+ years of IC engine expertise. If electric cars are the future, how much advantage does Ford have over a startup? Certainly some, but not nearly as much as they do in gasoline engines. Every bit of the drive train is completely different in an electric car. Not only are you throwing out the expertise in engines, but transmissions and differentials as well.
I can imagine that makes their position less defendable.
What you've written I agree with, but it's a long way off from the OP's conspiracy. Cars have been around a long time, so the affinity is natural result all that history.
It will change. I'm also a "car guy". I recently entered into four-year lease on a new vehicle, and on the drive home I told my significant other it's probable that this will be the last ICE we ever buy (and perhaps the last car that we actually drive off the lot ourselves). It's funny to think about.
Sure. And as a petrolhead, I will miss IC engines when they go. But it's a long leap from "implicit affection for IC engines" to "strategically presenting a build-to-fail engine technology to discredit alternative fuel".
When I think back... I think back to sitting on top of a horse, as we make a journey together. The feel of his hair in your hands as you lean forward. The fun of sitting back while he eats grass. So relaxing and with a sense of bonding.
I mean... who would replace a living breathing horse, who is part of the family, with a smelly machine that breaks?
There is real nostalgia around horses. And phone booths. and Sony Walkman. and CRTs. And... and... and... .. .
People hate change. Just because "cars = gas/diesel" to YOU doesn't mean that a new generation of kids won't break their teeth, and learn to be engineers, with electric or hydrogen or whatever....
Likewise, once incumbent car manufacturers can't promote some of the things that people fondly associate with cars, new alternative car companies are better able to put them out of business.
The best point in your comment is that alternative car companies may be able to generate some of that nostalgia early enough to use it against incumbents - I think this is possible and that for some people, they will be happy to trade petroleum good feelings for electric good feelings while petroleum-based cars are still a sizeable part of the market.
The issue is whether or not the "crown jewels" of EVs will be worth so much (ie, via patented features or trade secrets) that this will allow companies to extract rents. The problem with this approach is that rents only come out from high prices--and this is what tesla is doing--and this won't lead to enough revenues to replicate the infrastrucure of the current (behemoth) chassis makers.
So I don't think its quite cut and dry that upstarts will win out (winner take all) in the long run. It seems most likely whoever wins will M&A their way to global scale by integrating into the existing business structure of the global auto industry.
Look at facebook--they are only making money by becoming the next generation of Madison Avenue. They didn't really change the world in that regards, they simply integrated into the existing circulation system of the media-industrial complex.
Madison avenue doesn't care which blinking screed you stare at for four to eight hours a day, they just want to print money.
Similarly, the auto industry couldn't care less about whether or not you drive a clean or petrol motor. Seriously, all they care about is that you take out a loan from them to buy a box of metal that costs 30 to 50k and make your payments on time.
In other words, the business model will not really change.
The issueas about fly-by wire and the inability to work on your car are already here. It costs $700 dollars to change the battery on a BMW, because its locked down by SW. But that is a superficial level of business model change. Upgrades and spare parts will always be a busienesss line, but the core sale will always revolve around ownership of a block of metal or composites that locks you into the need to maintain it.
The more fururistic car companies of tomorrow are likely going to be something like uber or zip car combined with driverless cars and provided on-demand. But until you get to a system that fundamentally changes the distribution of transportation assets and the service model on that scale, the existing players will not really be obsolete.
Consider the costs that companies such as (solely as) Tesla are having to front to get a refueling infrastructure in place to make their cars considerable.
This is a large portion of why families can't really get one of these vehicles. If I can't take this thing on a family trip, there is no point in even trying to get one.
In such a situation having the paradigm shift happen in the first place is bad news for you, especially if you're a leader of the old paradigm. Microsoft, RIM and Nokia were all laughing off the iPhone in the first few years, so people would stay away from them and keep buying their "old stuff".
So yeah, I can very much see how companies like Toyota and whoever else is promoting the totally unworkable fuel cell car "revolution" would be in bed with the oil industry. They'd rather push for something that barely changes the status quo, but at the same time is seen as "revolutionary" in the media, than go into electric cars.
1 - Nobody will buy alternative fueled cars
2 - They must appear to support ecologically friendly energy sources
Yeah, nobody would ever "conspire" when trillions upon trillions of dollars in economic activity, millions of entrenched (and often unionized) jobs, hundreds of billions of dollars of sunk cost in infrastructure, the economies of entire nations and regions of nations, and generations of established thinking are at stake. That never happens. The parent poster is just one of those conspiracy nuts.
Sorry for the combative tone, but I'm a bit tired of seeing this kind of naivete. Of course people will conspire and engage in stalling and other underhanded political tactics to stop things that are a threat to huge industries and entrenched ways of doing things. They'll do that and more. They will lie, cheat, kill, undermine democracy and foster political corruption, start wars, you name it.
A lawyer friend of mine explained it to me this way (we were discussing shady behavior in the startup world): "There are people who will beat you up or kill you for a smart phone or the contents of your wallet. What will people do for a million bucks?" I sort of got it. Answer is that people will do everything they'll do for your cell phone or wallet and then some, but they'll do it with far more sophistication and cunning. The higher the stakes the more cunning and otherwise sophisticated the crimes.
BTW, the mention of unionized jobs above highlights that it's not just oil companies and car companies we're talking about here. We are also talking about a massive infrastructure for making, selling, and servicing oil-burner cars that employs minimally tens of millions of people in the US alone. All of that is threatened by simpler, more reliable, grid-connected battery EVs. EVs are downright apocalyptic for entire sectors of the economy. Hundreds of thousands of businesses will die, and millions will find their entire skill sets completely obsolete.
It'd be like if suddenly there were computers faster and cheaper in every way than silicon-based ones but that are programmable through some utterly alien abstraction that has almost nothing in common with present-day programming languages. All your skills are now obsolete. Google is done. Microsoft is done. Etc...
That is, car companies would love to be able to sell cars that don't need oil, and so would not (by themselves) hinder such technologies.
Things are not as rational as many think. Huge bureaucracies fight for stasis, as if governed by inertia. It's true even if they are dying. Look at Kodak, Commodore Computer, Radio Shack, etc.
While perhaps not quite at the same scale as gas-powered cars, I've been up close & personal with two very large industries going from world-dominating to patent-fire-sale in a very short time. Smith Corona used to be the most recognized brand on the planet, dominating the typewriter market alongside IBM; then the PC showed up, "word processing" became a thing, and after a brief attempt to compete by putting databases/spreadsheets/games on typewriters, that industry evaporated fast. Kodak was, subsequently, probably the most recognized brand, dominating photography & imaging; then the digital camera showed up, resellers (using the film/processing/prints model for foot traffic) were confused with customers (actual final buyers), a half-baked attempt at supporting digital was made, and ultimately the photosensitive chemical consumables market evaporated in favor of digital imaging capital equipment.
Core infrastructure industries can, do, have, and will disappear almost overnight. Interesting history.
Oil companies don't like electric cars for obvious reasons.
Car companies on the other hand have a different reasons: electric cars hardly require maintenance, and a large part of the money car companies make is by selling replacement parts. Car makers were perfectly happy with the current situation, and the new-one threatens part of their business model, and nobody likes to switch from a working proven business model to a new-one.
However, the difference between car companies and the oil industry is that the latter cannot adapt to this new situation. Car makers could just postpone introducing pure electric cars, or introduce even more complex 'hybrid' solutions under the pretense of being environmentally-friendly, while selling even more replacement parts and maintenance - which in my opinion was always silly.
They could hold the boat off as long as nobody else tried to make a real production-ready electric car. So it's no surprise that it was a new-comer to the market that made it first. Suddenly, a lot of car manufacturers jumped the electric train: Renault, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, ... You really think none of them thought of making an electric car before? GM did, just check out the "who killed the electric car" documentary. I don't believe for a second not every single car maker saw what was inevitably coming, but why kill the goose that lays golden eggs? It would be really hard to explain that to shareholders at a time when the industry is going through a very harsh period.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-25/toyota-to-...
“As people probably know, I’m not the biggest fan of fuel cells -- I usually call them ‘‘fool cells,’” Musk said this month at Palo Alto, California-based Tesla’s annual meeting. In a speech to employees and enthusiasts at a service center in Germany last year, he called fuel cells “a load of rubbish.”
Renewable hydrogen from water is 2-3x as expensive as making it from natural gas†. It simply can't compete at the pump. People won't pay $9/gal equivalent when $3/gal is available right across the street (or across town, for that matter).
† releasing just as much CO2 and fugitive methane, and still being wholly unsustainable
Daniel Nocera has been arguing for years that using solar energy to split water into hydrogen (ie. the "artifical leaf") is the best strategy. Not even nuclear can scale to meet global demand[1]. But solar devices can be mass manufactured and distributed to the point-of-use (leap-frogging the need for massive infrastructure investment).[2]
1. http://web.mit.edu/professional/pdf/DGN_Daedalus.pdf > "Delivering this TW-value with nuclear energy would take the construction of eight thousand new nuclear-power plants. In other words, over the next forty-five years, we would have to construct one new nuclear-power plant every two days."
Yes, we'll need a lot of energy, but note that that figure is for the whole world. I think it's doable. Hell, it's the best alternative so 'doability' doesn't really matter, but I guess we'll see how close we'll get (with nuclear+solar). Note that china alone has 200 nuclear plants in project right now [1].
[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/china-could-build-200-nucle...
Even the organization of Formula Zero, who had a pretty strong foothold in the fossil business through their renewables programmes, didn't get any attention from fossil fuel anything.
And this barely changed when the competition dissolved into Formula Student. Even though this is one of the biggest student competitions in the world, it doesn't get nearly as much sponsorship from big oil as e.g. the Shell Ecomarathon. If they were really interested in getting enthusiastic, almost evangelistic people on the case to promote hydrogen as the next big thing, they would sponsor Formula Student.
An all-electric car could have as few as a hundred moving parts. A few motors and connecting rods, some suspension componants, fans and a couple manual controls. You just don't need the thousands of tiny metal bits necessary to keep a gas/diesel engine ticking over. Better yet, those parts you do need can be generic. Electric motors are nothing special, nor are batteries. Since they do not mechanically interact they don't need to be as engine/vehicle specific as parts today. Once EVs become the norm, and the teething problems of EVs are worked out, aftermarket replacements will be everywhere.
Build a car from non-rusting carbon fiber, fill it with easily replaceable generic parts, and you've got a recipe for vehicles lasting decades. THAT's what the car companies really fear.
Sure, you could argue the interior will wear. Big deal. You'll have interiors you can swap on the power sled (battery + suspension + electric motor). Those sleds should last forever.
The same thing happened with desktop computers, but eventually the performance increases leveled off and people stopped purchasing a new computer ever 2 years.
It's hard for me to see how the car industry will go. Even today, there are people who keep cars running longer by replacing engines, etc., but most people want to replace the whole care before the drive-train gives out. My wife is ready to replace her 10-year old Honda Accord, not because of any drive-train problems, but because the upholstery is worn out, the AC sometimes blows hot air (I think it's some intermittent problem with the blend door, but it's hard to replicate the problem), it has some little dents and scratches, it makes funny sounds, and she's ready for something new. I can't think how any of those things will change with an electric drive-train.
If the computer is broken, replace the computer. Update the self-driving software over the internet. Why would you need to replace the whole car?
Unless, of course, a company tries to integrate points of failure all throughout the body, so that "replacing the computer" of the car or what have you becomes impossible due to the delicate electronic parts. Call me an optimist but at the price of cars today I don't think anyone but the super rich are gullible or decadent enough to fall for something like that instead of a cheaper, more reliable modular alternative. Unless the price of a brand new car becomes similar to that of a new phone, I don't think that future is very likely.
"Every protocol the car uses is proprietary and protected under DCMA / etc. There are chips in every component that don't allow the car to start if any component isn't a first-party part."
We're already seeing this sort of thing. Look at the Tesla. Or the Lightning connector from Apple.
[1]http://forum.roadfly.com/archive/index.php/t-8237302.html?s=...
Sure some of it can be over-the-air as Tesla has already shown, but the same happens on our current tech yet we still update the hardware pretty frequently. A new, better autopilot may not be able to run on a 3 year old car processor. Could you swap out the cars brains? Sure. Would that be lucrative for the car manufacturer? maybe not.
I think the biggest argument against what I'm proposing is that computers/phones have huge form-factor constraints that favor tightly integrated components - it's why RAM is no longer user replaceable in new, thinner macs. Cars, given their physical size, will likely never face that constraint making the modular approach you suggest much more feasible.
Hell I bought my Nexus 5 on release and don't feel the need to replace it yet.
No it's not. Cars today are all basically the same and have been for decades. People aren't buying new cars because the components are failing. Generally it's for a new interior, new technologies e.g. support their new iPhone and lifestyle changes.
[1] http://www.kbb.com/car-news/all-the-latest/average-length-of...)
So today's cars already last for "decades".
It may not have happened yet for that Patrol, but most cars are at that point by then, and it will probably happen soon on that one.
Lots of cars are kept beyond that breakeven point too, either for reasons of nostalgia, or because it's more palatable to spend your money in a continuous stream of small maintenance costs than to put down a big chunk up front.
That's actually borderline miracle considering how complex average car is.
With average new car price going pushing $32,000 mark, people would avoid making large purchases like this even every 10 years.
Sure they would love to change it every 5 years, but it's out of the question for most families.
Car companies fear being commoditized, because it's already a very competitive industry.
With global supply chain, computer aided design, parts sharing, and talent poaching, car business is already commoditized than many realize and it is very difficult to differentiate.
Long gone are the days of unique-company know-hows when a Mercedes Benz was literally 3-4 times better than cars that cost 3-4 times less because it offered many things others weren't capable of producing.
More so than electric vehicle, autonomous vehicle is what car companies fear.
I personally think combination of autonomous + electric vehicle will usher in an exciting era, and there is plenty of time for these car companies to adapt.
Given their track record with hybrids, one would think that they know their battery technology.
None of the anti-hydrogen fuel cell articles that have popped up here lately have mentioned this. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the Toyota strategy from this point of view.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/nanobeads-could-store-liqu...
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/313157701/why-those-tiny-micro...
I feel the same. Of course I'm not an expert, but it seems like many of the issues he lists in the opening are things that can be overcome with improvements in technology (and could have been arguments against batteries or even gasoline at points in history).
Meanwhile, the engineers at Toyota are actually trying to make this work:
http://www.toyota-global.com/innovation/environmental_techno...
Hydrogen is not itself a source of energy. It has to be made from something. Electrolysis of water is more wasteful of energy than putting the same electricity into a battery. Hydrogen from natural gas is possible, but why not just run vehicles on natural gas? That works fine; some bus and truck fleets run on natural gas.
(The same can be said of both electricity and batteries)
When you couple the lack of availability, lack of infrastructure, and inefficiency of production, you are left with a tiny element that is difficult to store and extremely combustable.
It just doesn't make sense vs electricity and batteries.
I'd like to believe that Toyota is making rational choices based on their experience with hybrids. But I'm having a hard time believing that.
Clearly they have either something in the R&D pipeline or have consumer research which suggests that EV isn't the future. We can all disagree with their bet but you would be frankly a complete idiot to ever dismiss Toyota's decisions lightly.
Two generations of leadership bankrupted the company by making irrational choices. Remind me how being the world's largest automaker means anything in relation to ensuring rationality.
And Toyota? You mean the one that just got done going through years of terrible quality control issues that saw their annual sales drop, their profit plunge off a cliff, and their market cap get chopped in half shedding some $100 billion in value. Clearly a company impervious to irrational decisions.
The world largest cellphone maker did.
Does anyone talk about using fuel cells as auxiliary range-extenders to electric vehicles? If they're best at low power, and also highly efficient, they'd should be very good pootling away in the background, topping up a battery from a tank of methanol.
On the other hand, the fact that Toyota has such a long and successful history with alternative powertrains, and they still are not selling a hydrogen car makes me think it really doesn't work. If they of all companies haven't done it yet, what chance is there?
To me, the only argument you need is the infrastructure argument. I can go out and buy an electric car today and charge it in my garage and drive it all over the place without having any trouble finding places to charge. In the world of hydrogen, I can probably still count the number of filling stations on this continent on my fingers and toes, and that's not going to change any time soon.
Actually wait, if you just use a combustion process you can get energy from both the hydrogen and the carbon!
AFAIK there are no other great sources of hydrogen.
Additionally, if there was capacity why not use it to charge lithium batteries?
Cost, weight, and refueling/recharge. Lithium batteries are expensive, heavy, and have a limited lifespan.
I think batteries will win out, but it is not a certainty. Toyota seems to think Fuel cells will win.
...yet. But solar and wind power are becoming the cheapest way to generate electricity. Their naturally variable production will mean that there will be periods of excess power available, and finding a good use for that excess would be nice.
But I agree that batteries, not hydrogen, are the way to go.
There will never be an excess of solar or wind. Even if you continue the dramatic growth in renewables of the past decade there is utterly no chance that renewables can replace fossil fuels. The gap is too great.
You are living in a dreamworld if you think that the path to a sustainable future can be found through technology alone. Sustainability can only be achieved by dramatically lowering our energy consumption rate.
1. Wind and solar energy is currently about 3% of the world's supply, and projected to grow at 6-8% per annum (source: BP Energy Outlook 2015, and others), meaning it doubles every 10 years or so... wind and solar may well become the dominant energy in our lifetimes.
2. There already is an excess of wind power, in some places at some times. Where I live (Perth, Australia) wholesale energy prices go negative several times per month, typically at night when the wind is blowing and power demand is low.
> You are living in a dreamworld if you think that the path to a sustainable future can be found through technology alone. Sustainability can only be achieved by dramatically lowering our energy consumption rate.
I disagree completely - lets see what happens say over the next ten years.
But it's a storage mechanism with the huge downside of being available from natural gas, so with widespread use of hydrogen we be equivalent to widespread continuous pumping of huge amounts of CO2 into oceans and the atmosphere. Something which most people consider foolish[1].
The infrastructure cost is totally different. Electrolysis and immobile storage of hydrogen is very cheap.
We don't have a lot of places where for a significant portion of time when there is excess power from renewables, but we will, in the future.
Edit: To clarify: if you want to produce say 40% of your yearly energy needs from wind and solar, you have to oversize the production since there are many days they produce very little. That then means there are days when they produce more than is consumed. The excess energy could be used for electrolyzing hydrogen from water.
Note no carbon involved. Also the low efficiency doesn't matter, as the energy is "free". Low cost of energy storage method is much more important in this case.
Any other reasons than "batteries are more efficient" for downvoting?
Where did you get this idea? You have to keep liquid hydrogen extremely chilled, under extreme pressure, and it inevitably leaks out. Compare to pumped water energy storage, which is at ambient temperature and pressure and has similar efficiency to the electrolysis -> fuel-cell cycle.
Also many places don't have reservoirs and mountains for pumped storage.
I'm not a big believer in the hydrogen economy, but at least incorrect notions should be corrected ("no source of hydrogen besides natural gas to be seen").
There are less than 50,000 miles of interstate highways in the US. If we added a 3rd rail or similar system for powering cars as they traveled range and efficiency quickly become a non issue.
Granted, the interstate highway system would just be the start eventually you would want to cover just about every road. Not to mention safety concerns etc, but it's a real option.
It reminds me of a young child asking:
"If people are so poor in ___________ why don't they move to _______?"
Environmental - a great deal of land is taking out of either agricultural usage or natural usage for sprawl. Large amounts of water are used on lawns.
Economic - Some people can't afford cars or motorcycles, but cars and motorcycles are the only practical way to get around most sprawling cities and towns
Safety - Cars are a dangerous way to get around. They kill half a million people a year. They also make roads even more dangerous for other users, like walkers or people on bicycles.
Social - Social isolation from a lack of interaction with neighbours is a large problem, and being spread out makes it harder to see other people. This is particularly true if you're elderly, can't drive, and don't have other ways of making social connections.
That's just a few. Not every place needs to be the City of London or Manhattan, but there are smarter ways to make suburbs.
I don't see what you think is extraordinary about this. Note the tires on most of these pictures: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
Electrified trolies in mixed use roads are old tech. Some already use hybrid battery backup systems so they don't need constant contact with the power supply. For safety overhead wires are often used, but ground level power supplies that are only on under the vehicle are also safe. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-level_power_supply)
Clearly there would be large adoption and scaling issues, but what about this seemed impossible to you?
PS: There are also plenty of examples of trains using overhead power at far above highway speeds.
* Having a many lane, many cars overtaking each other system. I don't see mechanically how you'd make a system in which cars could, at 70 mph, go from one rail to another in order to pass.
* The distances involved. I don't really know why conventional trains that cover more than a few dozen miles are all energy-on-the-train rather than third-rail, but I know they are. And absent other considerations, I assume there's probably a sound reason for this.
* This quote from wikipedia:
> However, because third rail systems present electric shock > hazards close to the ground, high voltages (above 1,500 V) > are not considered safe. A very high current must therefore > be used to transfer adequate power, resulting in high > resistive losses, and requiring relatively closely spaced > feed points (electrical substations).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail#Benefits_and_disadva...
* And of course just the overall scale.
Look at that ground level system it's designed for mix use in the middle of city traffic. Basically you have a sequence of metal contact plates in the ground to feed power to a passing vehicle. You can even make the plates wider to accommodate less accurate drivers. The trick is there only powered when a designated vehicle crosses over them. This might seem like an issue but we can switch power vary quickly as in it could work at 600 mph not just 60 mph. It's true that it would be unsafe to be under a vehicle, but that's more or less already true.
As to passing, I think you would want a minimum 40mile range while not connected to the system so swapping lanes would generally be a minor issue. And there is no coupling / decoupling as it's all touch contact anyway.
* The distances involved...
There are plenty of long electric runs. At most it's just a factor of traffic levels. Long runs tend to get less traffic so electrifying them is less cost effective.
"In 2006, 240,000 km (25% by length) of the world rail network was electrified and 50% of all rail transport was carried by electric traction."
3rd rail systems are just one path, they work well in subways that don't have to worry about people. I don't think an actual 3rd rail would work for cars. But, inductive coupling or 2nd generation ground level system would be safe for people to walk on or even touch and not an eye sore. The downside would be increased cost vs the cheaper wire systems.
At to cost and scale. Gas costs more than 10x what electricity costs right now so there is ~368.51 million gallons / day * ~(pre tax 1.5$ per gallon) * .9 = ~1/2 billion per day wasted right now. Just charge 75c/kwh for in road electricity and you can fund rapid expansion while saving drivers money. Remember, just electrifying things for a city wide buss system generally saves money so break even is ~100 trips per day. Add more traffic and the savings would be ridiculously huge.
I am continually amazed at the angst it causes many people when you suggest that the current American way of life will have to change. When you say that in 20 years people won't be driving everywhere a lot of folks really freak out.
The arithmetic plainly indicates we simply will not all be driving or riding in cars regularly in the future. Hydrogen vs. lithium batteries vs. gasoline doesn't even enter into it. There simply won't be the joules for everyone to get about that way. People will be walking, bicycling, and riding boring old 19th century speed trains. Peak Oil is now-ish and nothing else is set to provide the joules necessary to power personal vehicles on the current scale, regardless of vehicle power plants.
However, like Tesla's Supercharger idea perhaps a targeted rollout of functionality to connect major centers combined with the existing charging infrastructure would settle the "range anxiety" issues.
[1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/ch...
BEV supporters often assume that everyone lives in a nice suburban home with a garage. But the reality is far from this. Millions live in apartments/condos with parking structures that contain hundreds or even thousands of cars. And there may be a trend of the younger generations favoring denser urban living instead of the suburban living of past generations. Installing a few charging ports in a parking structure that has hundreds of parking spots is not a realistic solution. Will the owners of apartments and condos be willing to install hundreds of electric plugs into parking structures? I think the answer is either no, or they would do it too slowly to determine the FC vs BEV fight.
So for the millions in this situation, there are only these options for the future. BEV battery swapping stations vs Hydrogen stations. Supercharger is too slow compared to hydrogen filling. Only battery swapping is comparable. Which infrastructure is built more quickly will determine if FC or BEV wins. Energy efficiency, pollution, none of that matters compared to this.
Also, for many urban dwellers the choice is academic because they choose to not own a car at all. Instead using car sharing services these services would have no problem ensuring that their cars get charging ports.
Making sure a shared car is charged sounds like a nightmare. The whole point of car sharing is the cars get more use and spend less time parked. Considering how long it takes to charge some of these rigs, I'm surprised that the sharing companies have adopted them. My car share offers three models of battery-electric vehicle, one of them is the ridiculous Scion that only goes 35 miles between charges. Personally I don't understand how the economics works on that.
These things are pretty inexpensive if you already have conduit and room on a power panel.
That's why my local city requires new construction, from single-family up to big apartment buildings, to pre-install conduit etc. such that it's not bad to subsequently add chargers to garages and parking areas. It's pretty cheap to do that at construction time; for retrofitting, the argument revolves around how to amortize the (admittedly larger) cost over the lifetime of the asset.
My city even has street parking and public garages with chargers.
These are not hard problems to solve. The main unknown is whether chargers are going to be actively used for a long time or not.
The FC vs BEV fight doesn't start when FC enters the market, it's already on and FC is losing.
Well, at the moment they can sell to the people who do live like that. If adoption takes off they could then build more infrastructure.
Turbines do have some deployment issues such as outputing enough nitrogen oxides to generate a cloud, etc. But in a hybrid system, they're pretty cool.
Basically you're taking an electric car and a very small electric company natgas peaking plant and putting it in the trunk with a charger.
I already use an NGV(natural gas) car. Using fuel cells means you can get 60%-70% efficiency instead of 40% of thermal engines because you don't have Carnot't limit.
Also, with natural gas lots of people will be able to charge on their home. Lots of people have natural gas pipelines in their houses in Europe.
Today you can use this fuels only on fixed places, but over time we will be able to use it on cars.
But I don't believe this will happen soon. And when it happens it will probably use at least a small battery for getting the benefits of it:regenerative braking and instant responsiveness.
Not really. A fuel cell converts an hydrocarbon to C02. That's it.
A thermal engine like a diesel creates particles like this: http://www.epa.gov/region1/eco/airtox/diesel.html
And the high temperatures creates nitrogen oxides that create acid rain.
When you start a car, the catalyst converter needs 5 to 10 minutes to get enough temperature for starting to work.
You are solving lots of problems:
1-Lots of countries in the world have natural gas(or coal), but very few have oil.Just not depending on the petrodollar is a big plus as it would made countries more self reliant.
2-Reserves of natural gas are way higher than of oil.
3-If efficiency doubles, you need to spend half of it.
4-You can synthesize it artificially if you have C02, water, and energy.
But methane is not. Can fuel cells work with methane? I think so, and if they don't work well, then that's where the research should be directed.
You are absolutely right; PEM FCs - and I glossed over this in the blog post, might want to readdress it in a future part - are the only portable-enough technology for fuel cells and they inherently come with this ion transport problem and by extension cooling problem that is just unsolvable. Which is essentially the root cause of the complexity of an FCV.
Anyway, I feel your jadedness. Until I actually worked with fuel cells, I had absolutely no idea. Nobody had adequately conveyed to me how these things work and what goes into actually building FCVs. Things finally started to click in my head when we had an electric kart on batteries done within days after completing the frame, yet it took many months until the fuel cell worked. And this was a pretty ready-to-go fuel cell in most respects (Hydrogenics HyPM8).
I was too young back then to appreciate how long FC tech has been 'just around the corner' in the media. Now I understand. I built an FCV 7 1/2 years ago! And they're still pretty much at the same point. I wish things were different because I love the tech, but nature wins this time.
However, the actual amount of energy in those ultracaps isn't that much. We're talking a couple tens of kWs or, in other words, all those caps together don't even hold the same energy as one single li-ion cell (18650 size). The energy density is low, thus, the actual safety issue is fairly minor.
That being said, they are in a special Nylon enclosure with polycarbonate sides which provides an effective shield in the case of rupture. But, at the moment that picture was shot we hadn't actually tested that yet :D
Again, students.
Beyond that, what is wrong with green crude-derived fuels (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel) as a medium of energy storage?
It is being produced right now in small quantities after refining green crude made from algae grown into water/sunlight (carbon neutral form).
Some advantages:
* doesn't compete with arable land like corn ethanol
* can be grown in salt water
* no oxygen atoms to oxide your tank/engine
* much less sulfurs or combustion by-products than fossil-crude refined fuels
* can be refined using existing infrastructure
* can be distributed using existing infrastructure
* can be used in existing vehicles and machinery
* recycling combustion engines is much less energy-intensive than batteriesThey have been in operation since 2013, so they seem to work pretty well.
http://www.hydrogenlondon.org/projects/london-hydrogen-bus-p...
http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/newsmedia/_layo...
Odd he claims that a hundred mile range isn't available using "safe tanks" when the Honda Clarity has been around six years and does twice that.
Manufacturers seem to be betting on fuel cells because they have many other uses other than cars. They also will have a weight advantage over battery powered cars
Your reference to 300 miles is probably based on your most extreme situation when you go on a long trip. If the charging network (DC fast charging, in under 30 mins) is there, 300 miles isn't a problem.
I have a Nissan Leaf with 160 km range and it has never been a problem yet. Home charging is perfectly fine, every morning my car is full. I will never need a faster charger at home. Fast chargers are useful on the roads near highway exits for when you do long trips, much like with gas stations.
95% of the time, my travel distance is under 120 km per day so for only 5% of the time I need to plan a recharge or swap car with my parents, sisters or friends or rent a car for very long trips.
For people with a Chevrolet Volt, they don't even have this issue, when they go on long trips, they simply charge when they can and run on gas for most of the trip.
Personally, I am fine with current technology.
And yes, central and the lower states of US are behind in term of sales AND charging options available.
Hopefully this will change!
1) It's really nice that your car is fully charged every morning... sure beats having to visit gas stations on a regular basis. 4 hours is not a big deal if you're asleep.
2) If you want to go long distance, a network like Tesla's supercharger does the trick. (Tesla owners drive SF-LA by stopping twice for 20 minutes, or pay for a 5-minute battery swap once.)
3) While the only long-range electric car today costs 80k+, Chevy and Tesla are both planning on releasing a cheaper long-range car in 2017.
Is it the case that anyone other than cars is betting on hydrogen fuel cells? The only big fuel cells that I've ever heard of are used in the datacenter industry, where Bloom Energy is the main fuel cell company, and they power theirs on hydrocarbons, not hydrogen.
This is an incredibly significant point that continuously gets glossed over in these pro v con lists. I park my car on the street, and that's not particularly uncommon. Should I run an extension cable over the footpath? What if I have to park further away than my cable reaches?