this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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There seems to be a general push against hydrogen electric transport recently. I agree that it isn't suitable for small-scale transport, such as cars or even busses, but I do think there is a use-case for large transport.
Ultimately the problem comes how do we get the electricity from the generator to the vehicle where it needs to be. Obviously batteries are more efficient, but they come with their own problems. They weigh a lot, which damages infrastructure, they require rare metals, they have a maximum capacity per unit weight.
Of course they have advantages, but I think as the vehicle gets larger, and the charging time requirements drastically increase, I think there comes a point where hydrogen electric systems are worth looking at. Trains and shipping being the main ones, and potentially trucks.
Of course, if the hydrogen is not generated cleanly then it's moot, but the same is true for pure electric systems as well.
Ultimately, I would like to see renewable generation that turns excess power into hydrogen for a train and coastal shipping fleet.
Recently I saw on Lemmy that California has an excess of power generation. Sounds like a good opportunity to jam it into hydrogen generators.
Or, you know, literally any other means of storage. 25% round trip efficiency is absolutely dire.
Besides, they can sell power to neighbouring states.
Where does the 25% figure come from? This article has it at 38% (it's also an article arguing hard against hydrogen).
One up side is you don't need the rare materials that are needed for batteries, but in the next 10 or 20 years I'd guess a lot will change with batteries anyway. There are already designs that don't need them, just no one can scale them yet.
Also if you tack a few thousand dollars of solar panels onto your shipping container sized hydrogen generator, does the efficiency become less important?
The article is only addressing light vehicles. While I agree the equation seems to favour batteries, truck sized batteries are also obscenely expensive so I'm not convinced it's a clear line. Batteries may currently be winning but that likely comes mostly from scale. All the batteries for electric vehicles plus all the same batteries in our laptops and phones and vapes and other electronics leads to economies of scale. I'd expect hydrogen systems would be a lot cheaper if we built a lot more of them, which would make the cost part of the equation less important.
Absolutely. If there was the political will in this country, we would have an excess of cheap, renewable, power.
it's going badly for light vehicles
Yes, as I said above, this is true because a) hydrogen doesn't currently have the scale to bring the cost down, and b) is more suitable for large vehicles anyway. It's failure to be a viable consumer option doesn't mean it wouldn't work in mass freight transport.
Spending longer filling up than an EV because the pump keeps freezing up, and $200 USD to do so, isn't an issue of scale.
Of course it is, don't be daft.
Price will come down with scale. Currently hydrogen is only produced at a very small scale. As production increases, price will drop. Simple really.
Freezing pumps is a problem I'm certain will be solved. In its infancy, EV charging stations were slow. Look how far the technology has come in a short number of years. As uptake increases and infrastructure is built, I am certain these problems will be overcome.
They won't, because EVs will always be the better option, and the niche applications where an EV simply isn't viable will be served by biofuels rather than hydrogen. It's a mongrel of a product to manufacture, store, transport, and transfer into the vehicle, whereas liquid fuels can be stored in a fuel can, and transported by every means of transport known to man.
Hydrogen has been the fuel of the future for the last fifty years, and it's still not a viable option.
It is technically challenging, I don't disagree, but it has high energy density by weight. It also, of course, has lots of other applications. Steel manufacture being one.
But to be honest, even if it never eventuates and we get carbon neutral biofuels, I'll be happy. Anything is better than what we're doing right now.
EVs won't, because internal combustion cars will always be the better options, and the niche applications where ICE simply isn't viable will be served by bunker fuel rather than EVs. It's a mongrel of a product to manufacture, store, transport and charge the vehicle, wheras liquid fuels can be stored in a fuel can, and transported by every means of transport known to man.
EVs have been the propulsion of the future for the last fifty years, and it's still not a viable option.
This is true if you completely ignore the cost of running a combustion engine vehicle, or the fact that EVs have improved hugely even over the last ten years.
This is true because you wrote a bunch of nothingburgers about EVs being better than hydrogen where those EVs were in the same space barely 10yrs ago that hydrogen is now.
Hydrogen has been in the same place it is now for the last fifty years, it's not happening.
Yeah it comes down to energy density and time to replace expended energy. That's why the most successful electric trucks i've seen basically go to a depot where the entire battery pack is swapped out for a pre-charged one.
Of course there's a whole other piece of calculus that is ignored in New Zealand - and that is energy efficiency. Reducing the size of, and need for, long distance trucking by utilising far more fuel efficient rail & coastal shipping would also reduce emissions; and would allow us to decrease maintenance and new build costs for roads.
I'm all for increasing rail and coastal shipping for cargo. Having lived overseas, it's criminal how much we rely on trucks here.
Yup; and the previous increases to size & weight of freight trucks bought in by National governments is a large factor in the cost of building and maintaining roads now. While at the same time we continue to let most of our rail network degenerate and have done nothing to try to recover coastal shipping from when it was destroyed in the 80s to de-power the maritime unions.