Those are an issue since a solution isn't being pursued since there is no incentive because it's the product cost that stops its development. Hydrogen cars are expensive to buy and even more so to run. If they weren't then you'd see a bigger push in innovation of the storage and distribution aspect through incentive to invest to bring the prices of those down. Same thing happened to ev's and now it's getting adopted since it's cost effective and there are tons of charging stations since those are also getting cheaper to implement as a result. There are more manufactures and providers so they're cheaper.
BMW Pilot iX5 EV No Batteries, Recharges/H2 Fuels in less than 4 minutes
- Thread starter alarmguy
- Start date
Remember, Tesla built its own charging network. Who is gonna build out a hydrogen fueling network? You and me?
Heck, apparantly Tesla has to help other EV manufacturers keep their cars viable.
It is a battery, not an energy source.
Fossil fuel is great because you dig them out of the ground and you get massive amount of energy already made for you since millions of years ago. It is just some small amount of work to refine and transport them and you get to use them cheap.
Hydrogen does not exist in natural form as H2 gas. You have to crack it out of a fossil fuel and then use it in a fuel cell. You can do the same with any other method of using fossil fuel like burning it in a gasoline engine, without using a fuel cell. It would be way more simple to just burn the CNG or LNG or propane directly instead of crack them into hydrogen and waste the carbon, except you have to then face the Carnot or Atkinson cycle of a combustion engine. You gain back that efficiency from 40% of Atkinson max to 90% of HFC but you lose them back in the cracking and the infrastructure, the cost of the fuel cell, the battery to buffer the fuel cell output, etc.
Alternative is to use the natural gas directly in a SOFC, get you the 60% efficiency instead of the HFC's 90% efficiency, but you cannot call it green anymore and you lose the bragging right of no fossil fuel or what not.
HFC car is just a stop gap before battery becomes cheap, they were all the rave in the 90s when batteries were NiMH at best and expensive, and can only be used as hybrid instead of a battery EV.
Last edited:
This I disagree.
You don't have to charge everything at night, and people do charge 20 mins to 1 hr at WORK and MALL / Walmart / Target all the time. The amount of energy needed on average per day is based on how many miles you drive and miles per kwh, and the bigger batteries will help you be more flexible which day you want to charge for how long.
This is also not a problem if people are using plug in hybrid instead of pure EV.
There are many ways to solve the grid problems. I've said that before so I'll just sum them up here:
1) swap battery. You keep some old batteries around and during travel season you take them out to swap. You can also keep a set of spare charging while you drive the other set so you don't have to plug in at all. This is how fleet EV should be and I think when technology finally mature most EV should be standardized to take battery swap for long trip.
2) time based electricity: this encourage people to charge at night or at work if solar makes it cheaper, easy to do but will piss off some people.
3) plug in hybrid: it cost more to make and maintain but heck, we already have it and it is proven to work very well. You can modify it enough to make it a generator on wheel for many job sites.
4) there are places on earth that people won't drive too far but they still need a car: small islands like Hawaii, small European nations, Singapore, etc. You don't need every car sold on earth to have 300 miles range, 100 is plenty for many places.
We already did that "force to buy from one source" thing with gasoline. Electricity however have diverse sources like solar (depreciation), coal, natural gas, nuke, wind, geothermal.
First this amount of spending is by no means guaranteed to occur over the next decade. Second, there's a real risk that it will never occur because interest rates are busting the budget (IO payments on public debt have surpassed DOD spending). Thirdly there's no way 180 new reactors would cost this much after cost overruns are accounted for. This also doesn't include the fact that there's no guarantee that the money would continue to be spent. Politically it's a dead end. People won't vote for it. At least not yet.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
I agree on all points, however, it's nice to look at a comparison like that because it shows just how nutty some of this stuff is.
I know several 3 EV households all sharing a single 50 amp connector.
This can provide about 30 miles of range in an hour (model 3 - but lots of models are close to that) and can be divvied up however the household wishes.
The GM volt and subsequent studies show 80% of commutes are within 40 miles so if you can give 3 cars 100 miles each in ten hours you cover a very large percent of commuting.
From a round the clock perspective 30x24x356 single 50 amp plug can support 262K miles in a year, but very likely no one would wish to charge during peak time even if you pull 8 hours out of each day it can still support 175K miles.
I agree EV's arent going to replace a pickup truck or large SUV for towing purposes - but for moving people and some luggage around they are more than adequate for a very high% of consumers today and present a step forward in convenience removing all local fueling trips from a schedule.
Last edited:
I've been very happy having gone full EV. I have had one occasion where I rented a gasser, to a remote trip for Thanksgiving. 1 month's driving an EV over a gas car provided the savings to pay for the rental.
Yes, another joke system like many others. Any time you're decomposing a stable oxide I tend to stop listening. About the most dismal method of energy storage one could imagine.
You would be better off pumping the mains water uphill and then running it back through a turbine and generator.
Can you expand on that?
They describe the low efficiency in that article you linked. It takes a lot of energy to decompose water, and the overall efficiency is low.
Very cool on the plane, I looked into plug power and still do think about it.
We would never get anyplace if people didnt think outside the box.
I believe this reads as BMW is producing its own fuel cells at least that was the plan last year, but my OP is more current and says they bought them from Toyota.
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/ge...pad-Multiima-Hydrogen+1-bproadul-f077aaa953c4
Last edited:
So my last post got deleted? What the hell?
That wasn't me that suggested use of ammonia. I quoted someone who mentioned that commenting on something else they said though. I also saw a thing mentioned of using ammonia directly as fuel. I don't know that the regular public would be ready to deal with ammonia between its smell and the danger level if handled improperly. Instant death in a high enough concentration. This is the biggest example they drill home in railroad hazmat training courses. That and daytime ethanol fires. Both are invisible killers.
Torrid - I read every one of your posts before responding, despite the aspersions you cast on me and my reading. Stop trying to make this personal.
Take your bickering elsewhere.
I‘m out.
You definitely didn't understand what I said then. I wasn't a proponet of hydrogen or ammonia, so if that didn't make sense to you then you misunderstood it. I'm sure we agree alot more than disagree and I don't want friction anyway. I'm sure if we sat down and had a beer we'd have a good time. All love man. Cheers to you and not worth the argument. Much love man.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Yup, hydrogen as an aviation fuel is a heck of a lot more viable than batteries at least, due to the fact that it can be burned directly in a gas turbine and thus creates thrust. It's less energy dense though, so range will be less. Of course this is almost assuredly just methane-derived hydrogen being used here.