The people already driving BEVs aren’t going to buy vehicles where they have to go to a damn station to fill up. Hydrogen could be free and I’d still want a BEV.
Hydrogen is just fossil fuels with extra steps. And when green hydrogen becomes a thing, they’ll just be EVs with extra steps.
I beg to differ. I can see lots of people not wanting to deal with the hassle of plugging in for hours. Some people won’t even be able to easily plugin as I’ve said. You guys are talking about apps telling when to charge for sake. Planning things out like you’re a chess grandmaster just to do a formerly simple task. It’s laughable to me.
A fill up with hydrogen will be just like a gas fill up now, no chess moves required. I think people will have an easy time adopting that.
There is nothing simpler than plugging your car in when you get home. It takes seconds. And every morning you have a full charge.
A significant fraction of the US population (likely >50%) already has their own dedicated parking spots where a charger can be installed easily. A significant portion of the remaining can be handled with only modest effort and legislative encouragement, such as dedicated EV parking spots for apartments. And even those with non-dedicated street parking, technological improvements can address many situations. For instance, these pole-mounted chargers:
No street-level footprint required. Of course, this particular case only works when utility poles are available, but it is just one of many approaches that can and will be taken to capture the last tens of percent of drivers.
New BEV drivers quickly realize how dumb and inconvenient it is to visit stations at all. Especially since hydrogen storage has all the same downsides as gas storage, and then some, whereas EV chargers can be installed anywhere.
We can get the hydrogen from green electricity as well, and I’m not really seeing any extra steps. Toyota has an engine that can burns hydrogen directly, no fuel cell needed. Water is the only emission from that.
I’d say a fuel cell is better than the mining of the rare earth elements that are required for BEV’s.
Who’s going to pay for that?
Like I said we can’t even string wires up on the US railroads mainlines. That would be a huge deal if we were really serious about addressing climate change. It would mean a huge reduction in the amount of CO2 per ton of freight moved. We could then move most freight off of ICE trucks and put it on the rails.
But none of this is being done of course, but according to you the gird will just be magically updated without us paying for it, whether you have a BEV or not.
BEVs don’t require rare earth elements. Some of them use small quantities of rare earths, but they are not necessary.
Starting with electricity, the EV is about 90% efficient in converting joules into motion. Something like 5% loss from the battery and another 5% from the motor.
Creating hydrogen via electrolysis is about 70% efficient. Then, burning it, you are probably only getting ~40% efficiency. Transport and other inefficiencies I’ll leave alone, but just between these two factors, the hydrogen car is about 1/3 as efficient in converting joules into motion as the BEV.
Where did I ever say no one will pay for it? In fact I’ve said repeatedly that addressing climate change will be an enormously costly endeavor. But it’s still less costly than doing nothing.
Legislatively, the best thing we could do is root out all the externalities from greenhouse gas emissions and charge for them, investing the proceeds into sustainable energy development and related areas. Unfortunately, it is hard to gain much ground here, because the right is in denial and the left is sensitive to poor people paying these costs (even though they’ll pay for it either way).
How many years ago, and what battery chemistry were they using?
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to say you said no one will pay and I don’t think you specifically said that. I was going for more of the general thoughts on the thread about updating the grid.
I agree with your numbers on raw efficiency for the most part, but I believe the numbers you state are just that raw and do not reflect the true cost of BEV.
I think if we take the whole cost numbers into account, hydrogen comes out looking much better.
Seems like the hydrogen thing is a digression for reasons I don’t really understand (nor much care about).
The claim was that 15 years ago there were widespread claims that all vehicles would be EVs. And that these claims have been repeatedly pushed back.
I still haven’t seen anything backing any element of this claim.
Yeah, sure, whatever you say
The guy who wrote that also wrote an article about the relative efficiencies of FCEVs vs BEVs but unfortunately I couldn’t find it. I don’t remember the numbers, but hydrogen FCEVs were way less efficient than BEVs.
It’s tangentially relevant in that hydrogen is essentially being pushed to keep fossil fuel companies relevant, as well as not disrupting the “station” network too much. Gas stations could conceivably smoothly transition to hydrogen supply. The vitriol directed toward EVs is to a great extent astroturfing by the same entrenched interests, or at least people on the same end of the political spectrum.
My view of course is that ground transportation will largely switch to pure EVs and hydrogen will never make much of a dent. Cargo ships, etc. remain to be seen, but those aren’t consumer products that you can get people worked up about. You aren’t going to find those stupid Facebook forwards from grandpa about electric vs. hydrogen cargo ships.
Of course, hardly anyone 15 years ago foresaw that EVs could not be merely practical but exceed ICE performance and convenience across many axes. The Tesla Roadster wasn’t even out yet. The GM EV1 made a showing but it was widely seen as a nerdmobile. Almost any existing car company could have made a killing in EVs if they had had just a tiny bit of foresight. But no, they gave Tesla about 15 years of runway, which Tesla made successful use of.
The one major failure I’ve heard of is the GG20B “Green Goat:”
It was actually a diesel/battery-electric hybrid, and used lead-acid batteries. Several dozen were made between 2004-2006, and pretty much all were removed from service by 2012 because of crummy reliability. I can’t find my source material right now, but from what I recall, not only were the goats failure-prone, but the manufacturer was ill-equipped to conduct service calls, resulting in long down times whenever a failure did happen.
There are a number of other battery-hybrid shunting locos from other manufacturers out there, many of them with more recent Li-ion battery tech.
EV haters in California better stock up on their dino-mobiles before 2035:
Good. Automakers seem pretty positive about the move, which shouldn’t be surprising–it guarantees a large market for EVs, increasing the odds that their massive investments in battery, etc. factories won’t go to waste. It’s only mildly surprising in light of their long resistance to embracing EVs. Maybe we really have turned a corner.
I can’t quite tell if the ban applies to hydrogen ICEs. Not that I really expect that to be a dominant technology, but it could be considered zero-emission in greenhouse gas terms. They’ll still produce nitrogen oxides, though, so they aren’t quite zero emission.
Yes, and we can cue up the misinformation machines. Yesterday I saw a banner on the evening news, “California to Ban Gas Cars”. Wrong.
Your second statement is true. Right now, it would be a huge pain in the ass to drive a battery-powered vehicle if you live in an apartment building without dedicated parking spots.
But your first isn’t. I used to drive a plug in hybrid. It only drove 20 miles on the battery when new, and that range dropped as it aged.
Damn i miss it. Half our total miles were on battery power. I never had to worry about whether there was gas in the tank. In particular, i never worried about running out of gas, because i started every day with a full battery. Plugging in the car is about as inconvenient as closing the door between the garage and the house. Yeah, you gotta do it. No, you never think about it.
I do like the range of a gas-powered car, with it’s easy refilling. But i rarely need that. (And i have two cars.) My next car is going to be electric, and it’s going to rack up 80% of our total miles, easily.
I’m curious how my neighborhood would adapt to EVs. It’s an older prewar neighborhood of houses (some split into multi family) and some small apartment buildings ). Almost everybody parks on the street; only a few houses have driveways or garages. The only options I can think are to demolish housing for off-street parking (which is asinine) or parking meter style chargers? Or my preferred option of improving public transit so there are fewer cars needed.
Your options are needlessly expensive. I’d just run some conduit + wire to a 120v outlet near the curb, where I’d park my EV.
I feel like ride-share/cabs are part of the “public transit” solution.