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Hydrogen vs. Battery

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I was thinking about wildfire season approaching. People often ask me whether I'm worried about getting my car charged during an evacuation (I'm not, I keep the car at a relatively high SOC during red flag events). But what if your only car is a FCEV?

Or, what if you lost your job and got a job offer in another state, where there are no H2 filling stations? Having an FCEV means you're tied to the area that has filling stations, on penalty of being stuck with a car you cannot drive, and probably cannot sell without taking a huge loss.
 
Or, what if you lost your job and got a job offer in another state, where there are no H2 filling stations? Having an FCEV means you're tied to the area that has filling stations, on penalty of being stuck with a car you cannot drive, and probably cannot sell without taking a huge loss.
I know, right... you can be lost in the middle of no where and you're more likely to be able to charge your EV than finding a gas/hydrogen station.
 
I know, right... you can be lost in the middle of no where and you're more likely to be able to charge your EV than finding a gas/hydrogen station.

To be fair, there are plenty of places without a decent charging station. But those places are fairly remote, and more chargers are being installed all the time. There are only a few H2 filling stations in California, not by any means covering the state, and many of them out of service at any given time, and none in the rest of the country. Canada appears to have three.

Outside of a few very limited parts of California, you simply cannot drive a FCEV. As long as you stay on the highways, you can drive a Tesla anywhere in the U.S.
 
To be fair, there are plenty of places without a decent charging station. But those places are fairly remote, and more chargers are being installed all the time. There are only a few H2 filling stations in California, not by any means covering the state, and many of them out of service at any given time, and none in the rest of the country. Canada appears to have three.

Outside of a few very limited parts of California, you simply cannot drive a FCEV. As long as you stay on the highways, you can drive a Tesla anywhere in the U.S.

What I meant is that you can charging your EV anywhere there is electricity, including places with their own off-grid system. Although not ideal, you can camp out for a day and charge your EV with 120v.
 
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This week The Economist published a leader and a briefing on hydrogen. I was expecting the worst... instead it seems fairly well-informed, which made for a pleasant surprise. There's even some discussion of the 'hydrogen ladder", and why FCEV passenger vehicles are a dead-end.



Today’s hydrogen business is, in global terms, reasonably small, very dirty and completely vital. Some 90m tonnes of the stuff are produced each year, providing revenues of over $150bn—approaching those of ExxonMobil, an oil and gas company. This is done almost entirely by burning fossil fuels with air and steam—a process which uses up 6% of the world’s natural gas and 2% of its coal and emits more than 800m tonnes of carbon dioxide, putting the industry’s emissions on the same level as those of Germany.​
The vital nature of this comes from one of the subsequent uses of the gas. As well as being used to process oil in refineries and to produce methanol for use in plastics, hydrogen is also, crucially, used for the production of almost all the world’s industrial ammonia. Ammonia is the main ingredient in the artificial fertilisers which account for a significant part of the world’s crop yields. Without it, agricultural productivity would plummet and hundreds of millions would face starvation.​
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Stairway to heaven​

Near the bottom of Mr Liebreich’s ladder are fuel-cell electric vehicles (fcevs) used as cars. Toyota, a Japanese automobile giant, has longed to build them since the early 1990s, investing billions in the technology. Official visitors were ferried around Tokyo in such vehicles during the recent Olympic games, and the Japanese government has plans to expand the country’s fleet of fcevs, which numbered just 3,600 in 2019, to 200,000 by 2025. The Chinese government says it wants 1m of the things by 2030.​
But as Mr Liebreich and many others point out, this does not seem sensible if the competition is a battery-powered electric car. Fuel cells add to an electric car’s price and complexity while offering no benefit in performance. They are also inefficient. About four-fifths of the power fed into a battery-powered electric vehicle gets used; conversion losses mean that an fcev is likely to manage only half that level of efficiency. A veteran Japanese utility executive whispers that Toyota’s stance makes no sense: “Millions of fuel-cell cars won’t happen. Even Honda gave up. Pride is why Toyota is sticking with it.”​
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I think you are referencing the 'as fast as an ICE' scenario. L2 is everywhere

L2 charging is not really practical for long-distance road trips. It's the supercharger network that makes it practical to drive a Tesla across the country.

My last summer in WA I was able to drive my Model 3 up to Revelstoke, BC, to my favorite hiking lodge (and thence to Golden, BC, back to Revelstoke, and down to Burton) only by going a bit out of my way through Kelowna because there was by then a supercharger there. Without that, I'd have had to hit a level 2 charger in Castlegar, which would have turned the six-hour drive into a ten-hour drive. Which is why before the supercharger was installed in Kelowna I had to drive the Prius on my summer hiking trip.

The superchargers charged my car in the time it took to hit the restroom and have a snack. Charging with L2 would have been a very unpleasant ordeal. To my way of thinking, long-distance travel is not practical in an EV using L2 charging.

That last road trip up to Canada took an hour longer because of the route through Kelowna rather than Castlegar, but driving the Tesla with autosteer for 7 hours was considerably less tiring than driving the Prius for 6 hours. My time at the supercharger was about the same as I normally stopped with the Prius: restroom and a bite to eat. The Tesla was ready to go before I was.

But I believe there are still places in the U.S. that are too far from a supercharger. Probably fewer than there were in 2018.
 
L2 charging is not really practical for long-distance road trips. It's the supercharger network that makes it practical to drive a Tesla across the country.
Practical is in the eyes of the beholder, and L2 and Superchargers are not mutually exclusive. When I venture off the highways with their Superchargers, L2 has been just enough of a supplement to make the trip possible. Not including overnight L2, I think the longest I have charged at L2 during a leg of a trip has been 1.5 hours. Those occasions made for long meals but it was not a hardship.

A good example was our trip from Albuquerque to Carlsbad Caverns to the El Paso Supercharger. A short L2 stop in Roswell (thanks, @nwdiver !) was enough to get to Carlsbad, and overnight L2 in Carlsbad brought us to El Paso. That large swath of southeast NM had no fast charging at the time.

Not ideal, but OK. I'm certainly agree that Superchargers are awesome. I also find value in L2 when I go off the highway system.
 
Practical is in the eyes of the beholder, and L2 and Superchargers are not mutually exclusive. When I venture off the highways with their Superchargers, L2 has been just enough of a supplement to make the trip possible. Not including overnight L2, I think the longest I have charged at L2 during a leg of a trip has been 1.5 hours. Those occasions made for long meals but it was not a hardship.

A good example was our trip from Albuquerque to Carlsbad Caverns to the El Paso Supercharger. A short L2 stop in Roswell (thanks, @nwdiver !) was enough to get to Carlsbad, and overnight L2 in Carlsbad brought us to El Paso. That large swath of southeast NM had no fast charging at the time.

Not ideal, but OK. I'm certainly agree that Superchargers are awesome. I also find value in L2 when I go off the highway system.

The old Hub and Spoke. :)
 
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So instead of using C to hold H, what are they using? And it wasn't clear to me where they were sourcing H from. It seemed to me H is still getting sourced from the same sources we're currently sourcing H from now. How does that tech solve the problem of C?
It may solve two parts of the equation, high compression pressures/explosion risks, and leakage. Those alone could make it more viable for some uses such as grid storage/support and long haul trucking. Still dependent upon excess renewably produced hydrogen of course.
 
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So instead of using C to hold H, what are they using? And it wasn't clear to me where they were sourcing H from. It seemed to me H is still getting sourced from the same sources we're currently sourcing H from now. How does that tech solve the problem of C?
The video mentioned sourcing H2 from water by electrolysis using excess power from wind turbines or solar farms when wind doesn't blow or when cloud cover reduces solar farms' output.
 
Motor Trend laying out the hard truths of life with an FCEV. These issues aren't going to get better with more stations, and it's ridiculous to think that the only solution is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build out stations solely to account for the fact that ~40% of stations are down at any given moment.

Further, I do take issue with this statement:

We're not sure if hydrogen is the fuel of the future, and we'd really like to see it succeed—but right now we're on the cutting edge, and we're the ones getting cut.

FCEVs aren't on the "cutting edge," they've been around in their current form for more than a decade now. What MT is, and everyone else that owns an FCEV, is a victim of a technological dead end that has been advertised as the "fuel of tomorrow" for going on 60 years now.

 
FCEVs aren't on the "cutting edge," they've been around in their current form for more than a decade now. What MT is, and everyone else that owns an FCEV, is a victim of a technological dead end that has been advertised as the "fuel of tomorrow" for going on 60 years now.
I agree with this completely. I am sad that the State of California is continuing to fund hydrogen refueling infrastructure (targeting 200 hydrogen fueling sites state-wide) for light duty vehicles (private cars) instead of putting more funding into EV charging infrastructure. I can believe that hydrogen makes sense for heavy duty trucking and other fleet vehicles, but promoting HFCV for private cars is just foolhardy given the convenience, usability and popularity of BEVs.