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Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam' (electrek.co)
Marc Tarpenning, co-founder of Tesla, believes hydrogen fuel cells are a "scam". Tarpenning, who is not with Tesla anymore appeared on Internet History Podcast last week to outline a number of issues with hydrogen fuel cells. He said (via Electrek blog): If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don't want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad. There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It's a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive -- it's bound up into everything. It's bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds. Electrolysis is the most common method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas -- and natural gas is not that easy. And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you'll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues -- and that's only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.Here's the podcast.
And a poor way at that. Cannot agree more with his assessment. I have been saying things like this for years, could never understand why people thought it was a great idea.
"They just have an extraordinarily bad battery."
Also, very interesting and insightful perspective...but does it also account for more efficient processes that are constantly being developed or aimed for?
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
He obviously doesn't know about OTEC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion
What would you expect from a Tesla executive?!? They're in the business of selling cars that use a technology that competes with fuel cells!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Hydrogen is an energy *vector*, not an energy source. The energy must come from somewhere - natural gas usually - and, as TFA's author points out, the efficiency of the entire chain from energy source to the wheels is quite insanely bad.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
He's right about all of the negatives, but even that being the case it doesnt mean that a "really bad battery" still isnt the best thing we have for a use case of converting excess power into storage which can provide long range to cars. Personally I hope batteries win but the argument for hydrogen isnt meritless.
Guy who makes cars using alternative fuel source says other guys fuel source is scam, news at 11...
There have been recent developments in using a catalytic reaction to generate H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) from sea water and sunlight. Hydrogen peroxide is much more reactive (i.e. easier to separate the hydrogen) than water, and much more energy dense at room temperature and atmospheric pressure than hydrogen alone. This is the only promising solution to the hydrogen problem that I've seen.
How much funding and tax breaks are given to ethanol? I haven't bothered to look into the numbers to compare the two, but the amount of land and energy that goes into making ethanol probably makes fuel cells look a lot better. Plus hydrogen doesn't increase the price of food.
Is he suggesting that there are places where hydrogen is *NOT* super-reactive?
Even if you try and take everything else away, since hydrogen won't actually react with anything if there's nothing else around for it to react with, that doesn't really change how reactive hydrogen actually is.
Oh, and as for the energy that it takes to get hydrogen from water... it also takes energy to make fossil fuels... over hundreds of thousands or millions of years, in fact. At least hydrogen is immediately recycled, given the energy to get it out of other substances.
But if you are generating the electricity needed for electrolysis anyways, it probably just makes more sense to transmit that power to where it is needed instead of using it to extract hydrogen and ship that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages. This post seems to list all the disadvantages, and none of the advantages.
As noted, hydrogen isn't an energy source-- it's an energy storage medium. But then, Tesla's batteries aren't an energy source either-- they are an energy storage system that takes energy from somewhere else. Hydrogen can be produced remotely, and shipped to where it can fill up cars in gas pipelines. Electricity can be produced remotely, and shipped to where it charges car batteries by wires. Same principle, different medium. (In principle, electricity could be shipped to the charging station, and produce hydrogen on-site by electrolysis-- but it's probably more efficiency to make the hydrogen remotely.)
Hydrogen's advantage is that it is extremely light: you can react it with air, you don't have to carry the air around, and hydrogen is the lightest thing there is to react with air. Weight-wise, hydrogen is the best possible fuel.
Hydrogen's disadvantage is that it is extremely light: it is hard to store a lot of it because the density is very low. You can do a little better if you go all the way to liquid hydrogen-- but nobody is going to do that for a car (not, at least, until cryo storage gets a lot better)-- and even liquid hydrogen has about the density of the lightest grade of styrofoam. So, the tanks are either big, or high pressure-- or both.
Advantage and disadvantages. This is what makes an engineering trade off.
With current technology, I'd go with batteries. Two or three generations down the line? Your estimate of technology progress is probably as good as mine.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You can apply this kind of analysis to just about and "green" technology and come to the same conclusion.
But at least here we have a start.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Ironic that the same comment can be made for electric cars.
Batteries are just an energy storage device, not an energy source. The energy must come from somewhere -- the same sources that could alternatively lead to hydrogen production.
Oxygen is the heavy half of the electrolysis reaction, by far. If you don't have to lug that around (in the form of O2 or H20 or CO2) that's a huge advantage. Internal combustion has this advantage, otherwise the energy density would only be half as attractive.
This ex-Tesla guy is such an idiot (addition by subtraction?), I can't be bothered to look up hydrogen cells to see what the oxygen cycle looks like.
Gradually I'm learning how to not give a shit about people spreading misinformation on the Internet.
In my opinion,he is wrong.Hydrogen can also be used in internal combustion engines.
The main problem with batteries(and also with fuel cells)is not the efficiency but the cost of the batteries.Batteries have very limited life and the cost of producing them is higher than the cost of electricity that they will store in their entire life.This is why Tesla is offering "free" charge in their superchargers(the consumer has paid the cost of it when he purchased the batteries even if he does not use the supercharger).So in order to overcome the problem better batteries should be created or hydrogen should be used not in fuel cells but in internal combustion engines where the problem of expensive storage and limited lifetime is eliminated.
o The water bill
o The cost of the compressor
o The cost of the storage equipment
o The cost of the fueling equipment
o Licensing and/or type-acceptance, that is, bureaucracy
o Available space
o The amount of time it takes to produce hydrogen via electrolysis
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
Completely agreed that hydrogen fuel cells don't make sense from an energy standpoint (unless you're liberating the hydrogen from a high Gibbs free energy source like methane, or if you're getting the energy from a non-polluting source like nuclear or wind (in which case the hydrogen is basically acting like a battery). The transport argument is more specious. Yes transport and storage is worse than for gasoline (pretty much everything is worse, which is why we use gasoline). But electricity isn't much better - easier to transport, more expensive to store, and much harder to transfer from one storage medium (the charging station) to another (the car battery).
From an energy efficiency standpoint. the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Electrolysis of hydrogen from water is about 65% efficient in the lab, closer to 30% in practice. Efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is close to 90% in the lab, but is closer to 50% for industrial applications like a car motor. Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
H2: 30% * 50% = 15% efficient (did I mention hydrogen doesn't make sense from an energy standpoint?)
So really not that big an efficiency difference between the EV and ICE. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price. Nuclear would be the obvious solution, but the people supporting EVs seem hell-bent on shutting down nuclear.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ. Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles. If more of our electricity production shifts away from fossil fuels and towards non-polluting sources, then that also makes the hydrogen economy more viable. EVs and hydrogen in inextricably linked in this way.
FTFS:
Essentially correct, obviously. There is a very small concentration of hydrogen in the atmosphere, but mechanically extracting it is economically prohibitive.
Utter nonsense. 96% of all hydrogen produced comes from reforming fossil fuels: oil, coal, and natural gas. Only 4% comes from electrolysis of water. Electrolysis is very uneconomical.
>> If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible.
Presuming that by "reducing energy consumption" he really means "saving money", he's entirely playing on peoples existing misconceptions that "green" cars are also intended to save the owner money, which is entirely not true.
They're all and only about doing something to reduce emissions from fossil fuel emissions (so don't take into account any extra pollutants from manufacture or recycling of batteries etc). The total cost per mile of ownership of a "green" car is very likely going to be significantly more than say a small efficient conventional gas car like a Toyota Yaris, which is fine if your priorities really are saving the atmosphere not saving money, so please lets get off this stupid misconception once and for all.
Any technology that has to be heavily subsidized by taxpayers could be said to be a "scam". Oh, wait...
Funniest phrase I've heard for years.
But we weren't calling you guys out on them. How long do they last? I bet not 25% as long as a gas engine.
Lets talk about battery life on high drain devices and the stats vs real world performance.
The truth is you don't save anything at this time on electric cars and that's not just because of low gas prices. The technology is fun and neat and cool, but it's the self driving aspects and the greater control that drive by wire cars can give and electric just makes sense for that.
It doesn't have much to do with efficiency or even pollution reduction. Electric cars are just different and cool and have nice automation potential. You could be less efficient and still sell them if you load them up with electronics.
Too bad he can't apply his smarts to his space religion...
but if the newer greener methods aren't financially competitive (either naturally, or in a contrived fashion via tax incentives or artificially elevated fuel costs, etc.) then they will never become the majority of the market. Also, ignoring other pollutants due to manufacture or maintenance in favor of reduction in a more singular pollutant such as greenhouse gasses is a problem.
Stationary Fuel Cell sites are quite efficient with some installations reaching ~90%. But the current infrastructure moguls want to keep their power so they pay big money to keep the mobile fuel cell initiative alive and well. It's interesting that ten years ago home fuel cell devices were coming to market and then suddenly vanished. Had they actually been offered a fuel cell could be installed in the home to generate electricity for the home and the Tesla for less than the local utility. Provided your home had natural gas or a LPG tank.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Water is everywhere. It's more likely easier in the end to produce hydrogen locally, using any one of the many promising techniques that are in research right now, than it is to have wires running everywhere to handle the load of every car needing battery charging.
Hydrogen is also VASTLY faster to fuel a car with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hydrogen energy storage technology is immature. It currently remains infeasible, which is why it isn't used. Work continues in the field because it could *in theory* be made more efficient, cleaner and safer than current battery technology. We'll see... or at least those who keep looking will.
I'm not an expert in the field, but what I want to know is if there are inherent laws of physics and/or chemistry that make HFC's uneconomical, or if we possibly just don't know enough yet.
Do we need more research before we write HFC off, or do inherent properties of the universe doom it no matter what? If the second, how do we know it's a likely dead-end?
Table-ized A.I.
This must be why every single partner left tesla and why they have all teamed up with Toyota or Honda. Because its a bad idea. The whole of the auto industry breaks their partnerships and joins Toyota and they are all wrong. So either we all need extra big tin foil hats or Guy who still owns stock in a company that probably can't produce the 3 in Numbers is a tiny bit biased.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
It’s a scam by the oil companies who want you to be still dependent on them. Everyone has an electric socket at home. But hydrogen can only come from fueling stations and who but oil companies have the least expense to make an extensive hydrogen distribution network, thanks to their existing gas stations?
It's a poor way to store energy the same way nuclear power is a very expensive way to boil water. Fusion is our best bet, our science isn't there yet. Hydrogen can replace hydrocarbons, eliminating reliance on fossil fuels in the near term long before we master cold fusion, matter/anti-matter or (insert random scifi power source) to replace it. If goal is permanent cheap power? it's a not yet result. To remove our dependence and trashing of the environment as well as producing clean water as a side effect? hydrogen is the way to go, for now
~corporate tool, but employed~
Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black.
Not disagreeing, but it does seem like a case of "pot, meet kettle" when you start pointing fingers about the inefficiency of one of these technologies vs the other.
If you're going to charge your electric car from solar panels on the roof of your house, you're talking about panels that are only 20% efficient or so at converting sunlight into power. Then you take that power through an inverter (because you want household AC current from them, not the DC they original output), causing further losses. Then you feed the power into a battery, creating more losses. The only reason people don't seem to mind is because the sun's energy is free to begin with. (But you spent quite a bit on the infrastructure allowing you to harness it, so you've really got to factor that into the equation.)
All in all, I think it's pretty obvious that we'd have an easier transition to electric vehicles than hydrogen powered ones -- but that comes down to the fact that we're already using electricity for lots of other things. I don't know anyone using hydrogen to power their home or what-not.
I totally agree with both your points, however your assessment that they will never become the majority of the market depends on two things:
1) No government intervention to create an artificial market (i.e. taxing the hell out of gasoline/gas cars, or massive subsidies to buy/run "alternative fuel" cars)
2) Despite overwhelming scientific consensus and even direct physical evidence, there' still a general lack of concern and even outright denial in the worlds largest polluters (the US and China), that we have a serious human-caused pollution problem that we need to take significant action on immediately.
No one can fortell the future but I'd be very surprised if both of these areas didn't see large scale changes over the next 10 years.
In principle, nothing. In practice, the cost of the equipment to do it. Plus, your garage hydrogen generator probably won't be that energy efficient. Industrial-scale hydrogen generation isn't super efficient, so I'd bet that your garage hydrogen generator would be even less efficient.
The equipment would probably be heavily regulated, because this is a lot different than simply having a propane tank in your back yard or an electric car charger in your garage. If you're _generating_ (rather than simply storing) an explosive, highly pressurized gas in a residential neighborhood, your neighbors will want your garage hydrogen generator to inspected periodically to ensure that it's in working order. I certainly wouldn't what a ghetto hydrogen generator next door to me.
Electric cars means you charge using electricity and the biggest problem with that is that the charging time is too high. Hydrogen cars can fill hydrogen as fast as gasoline. Also, hydrogen can be obtained without electricity (Iceland hydrogen vent), so it is not necessarily an equivalent of battery either. There are many application of FC (one I know is the forklift usage indoor. Gas based one will cause indoor CO and hence can't be used. Electric requires long charging time. FC fits the budget perfect).
Personally, I hate FC and love electric but that does not mean you accept all lies about FC.
Just scroll down a bit and you'll find plenty of pro-hydrogen, anti-EV posts right here in today's thread.
When a ./ account is shilling for a point, are they considered a person, or are they a paid mouth for someone else's viewpoint?
Keep in mind, not all /. users are "real people" - they're accounts, some folks have multiple accounts, some are sold to highest bidders, and others are... managed: http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
(keep in mind, that was 5 years ago, and now there are mulitiple such endeavors to essentially allow more "organic-looking" astroturfing).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
But it's the *second most abundant element* that keeps the concept of fuel cells as "green energy" going.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The main problem with hydrogen fuel cells is that they, for the most part, are not true H2 and O2 fuel cells, but actually a methane air fuel mixture. If we were to set up solar cracking stations along rail lines and used them to crack water (H2O) into constituent H2 and O2, then we would have true hydrogen fuel cells, but more than 80 percent of all "hydrogen" fuel cells use various methane and other more complex (and far more polluting and damaging) storage.
It's not like it's hard to create H2 and O2, it's just hard to store it that way. Most methods involve either complex chemical mixes, which create inefficient pollution, or cooling, or mixing in additives to make it more stable.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I really do think electric will be the way to go, especially if solar power continues to get more affordable.
With a 10KW system, you would effectively be able to recharge a Tesla for free everyday.
A system of the size is cost prohibitive today, but if you can afford a Tesla, most likely you could afford a Solar installation of this size as well.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Presuming that by "reducing energy consumption" he really means "saving money",
They're related, and directly so. We manufacture energy by the application of labor; if you're going to store energy from solar, geothermal, wind, or other source into a different-source medium (i.e. not storing oil as fuel oil), you're going to spend more labor (and thus pay more wages, thus incur more cost) using a less-efficient one. That is to say: If you generate 5MWh of consumable hydrogen using 30MWh of electricity, you're going to spend more money than if you store 23MWh of usable electricity in a battery sourcing 30MWh of electricity.
For an electric car, if its amortized lifetime cost including maintenance is not greater than the lifetime cost of an ICE car plus the savings in energy production, then the electric car will save you money. This can occur if the electric car requires less-complex engineered parts (including batteries), if it requires fewer parts overall, it has lower maintenance cost, if its overall labor efficiency per output unit power is higher than the ICE, or some combination of these and other factors. In other words: if the car costs less over its lifetime, it costs less for the electricity it consumes, or both, then the car is cheaper.
Those factors are not unlikely. Electric cars have fewer and less-complex moving parts; electric motors deliver power from electricity at high efficiency (75% versus 25% for gasoline); and large engines are more efficient at converting feed fuels (oil, coal) into electricity (and may use cheaper feed fuels). In my case, I would spend under $10/month on the electricity to drive a Model S 85kW high-end model, and similar to drive one of the more-reasonable $35k Models 3 vehicles--making the Model 3 comparable to a Lexus or similar, but with 1/6 the fuel cost and likely-lower maintenance costs.
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The reason they're not talking about how you generate the electricity is because you have to do that step whether you use that electricity to directly charge your car, or whether you use it to split water. The loss is the same at that stage between EVs and HFCVs. Where the losses differ is in what the article talks about - splitting hydrogen loses you 60% of your energy, compressing it loses you another chunk, burning it in a fuel cell loses you yet another chunk. It's much more efficient to just store it in a battery.
Electric cars upend multiple industries - from oil services all the way to convenience stores. Change will be fought tooth-and-nail. I just hope Elon doesn't run out of cash before he's had a chance to force the issue on electric cars.
That's why you'll see hybrids first. Hybrids don't completely upset the apple cart and provide a transition technology. Plus you have to remember that there is the electrical grid which provides competing infrastructure to the fossil fuel system. The problem with hydrogen is that unless you can turn it into some sort of liquid form, the existing infrastructure for gasoline refueling is really no better than the electrical grid. Either way you have a substantial build out. Just because hydrogen is a chemical doesn't necessarily mean you can drop it right in place of the gasoline delivery system.
This quote seems oddly familiar:
" There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be."
I distinctly recall reading that Lee Iacocca (or some other big-US-auto-industry maven) said this many years back, but he was speaking about ELECTRIC cars. Not hydrogen.... ?
The time I remember this from was YEARS before fuel cells for cars were even considered a practical thing for cars at all.
I am middle-aged so this could have been quite some years ago. IIRC the person was commenting on the GM Impact program and EVs in general. By 2002 Iacocca was marketing ebikes and NEVs so it would have had to be before then.
It could explain why the idea of hydrogen-powered cars, which offers the best selection of the worst downsides, keeps being brought back out over and over again, if it was a scam. Automakers regularly forget what a terrible idea it was and push for hydrogen, most recently and bizarrely Toyota, which was making major gains in EV technology before they made this baffling decision.
The only situation in which any kind of hydrogen power could make sense is if a fusion reactor were producing excess hydrogen. Even then, it would be worthwhile to use an on-site power plant to turn that hydrogen into electricity to power EVs, just to avoid the nightmare of storing and transporting hydrogen.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Don't think about this like a financial engineer, not a civil engineer. It doesn't matter what makes the most sense from a technical perspective, what matters is not disrupting cash flow for entrenched industries.
Well I am an accountant and an engineer. You are right about progress following the path of least economic resistance but I think you have that path misidentified. Part of the flaw in your argument is in thinking there is just one big industry in the fight here. Basically you will be pitting the electric generation companies against the refining companies. Except not really or at least not immediately.
The least disruptive technology is actually plug in hybrids because it bridges both types of infrastructure. It can behave exactly as current gas powered cars do. As battery technology gets better you'll see the range of the electric vehicles go up and the charging times go down and the charging infrastructure get built out. Eventually you reach a tipping point.where it makes sense to go all electric and drop the second engine. In the mean time the gas station still sells fuel, the electric company gets time to beef up their already existing infrastructure and you don't have to introduce any truly different infrastructure like compressed gas or specialty chemicals.
To make fuel cell vehicles work you have to build out all new infrastructure everywhere all at once and to date they are behind the curve in performance. There is no consensus on what form hydrogen should be distributed in or how it should be implemented on the vehicle. With hybrids you can incrementally solve the problem today. I don't think it is very likely that fuel cells will make some miraculous technological leap that will make building out all that extra infrastructure economically worthwhile in the near future.
Thorium Remix 2016
Even if you don't bother with making cleaner burning synthetic fuels like they mention because LFTRs give you cheap power to do all kinds of fun things, just replacing natgas power plants with LFTRs would free up fuel for natgas powered vehicles. Actually, we have enough natgas to do that now but... Thorium!
And hydrogen infrastructure, local production or remote production, requires a lot more investment & maintenance than gas or electric do.
Not necessarily true with advances in technology.
Gas actually requires a much vaster amount of of maintenance and engineering to work with safely, partly because it has a much bigger environmental impact if it leaks.
Up-frnt hydrogen will require a lot to build up but once you have the equipment it's far cheaper since you are processing water, not oil.
And many local hydrogen generation plants are MUCH better in terms of infrastructure withstanding disasters than gasoline distribution networks which are quite fragile.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, define what your charge scenario is. Is it the extremely rare 0-100%? or something like 30%-90%?
Second, once you've defined your charge scenario - watts, total joules, and such, it's merely a matter of engineering to make a flywheel 'big' enough. Even if it ends up being a stack of flywheels to fit your spot.
I don't read AC A human right
Uh.. Just to be accurate, that's a battery swap station, not a supercharger. Basically a lift with a robotic wrench - undo all the bolts holding the battery on, remove the old battery(placing it into a charging port), grab a fully charged one and bolt it back on.
A supercharger still generally needs 30 minutes to an hour.
I don't read AC A human right
I think you just spent 3 paragraphs agreeing with me, except that part where you assume electric cars maintenance will be cheaper to the end user.
I do agree in theory it should be, but the fact is that everyone with a car has already accepted and is used to the need to pay $N/month for maintenance just as a part of owning a car, so the price the market will bear has already been set.
You can bet that dealers etc aren't going to let that slip, especially since (according to my friend who works at a dealership) its not selling cars but the after-sales servicing where they currently make most of their profit. All the lack of moving parts will mean is their profit margins will get bigger.
From what I've seen, electric more or less breaks even in terms of energy cost vs gasoline - the cost per mile to charge the battery is tiny compared to the cost to refuel the car. However, the battery itself eventually needs replacement, and isn't cheap. Overall, it comes down to paying incrementally (fuel) or in lump sums (battery).
That said, energy source is only one part of a vehicle's cost per mile of ownership (albeit a substantial one).
Maintenance is an area where electric cars may have a substantial advantage - the number of moving (and wearing) parts is much, smaller for an electric vehicle. You don't have to worry about liquid cooling, oil changes, catalytic converters, mufflers, fuel injectors, spark plugs, camshafts, valve heads, head gaskets, fuel pumps, oil pumps, and most of the transmission (most electrics are direct drive).
Electric cars have quite a number of cost advantages that you'll never achieve with an internal combustion engine.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Everyone in china believes in global warming and evidence that we have a serious human-caused pollution problem is so overwhelming that it is simply obvious to everyone. If your lungs hurt, the sun is blocked by a haze and there is a thin layer of soot on everything you are convinced there is a pollution problem. China is not a free country ruled by consensus. If a small number of people can get rich by causing heavy metal poisoning to millions then that is what happens because the same people who stand to get rich are empowered to choose for the millions they will harm.
I suspect you're right, but I also wonder how much of a "North Vietnam effect" is also happening in China, in that people are either effectively brainwashed by the system, or are too afraid to admit otherwise, so it amounts to the same thing.
So, some maybe future, hydrogen might be possibly safer.
Toyota, perhaps you heard of them? They are working to make that hydrogen future a reality, along with other companies. Willing to bet against Toyota?
As for safer, hydrogen is already safer than gasoline.
Hydrogen requires cold and/or pressure vessels and delivery mechanisms.
Not in the near term, no. Since you are so woefully ignorant I simply stopped reading the rest of what you wrote; you appear to be stuck in the past and woefully ignorant of near-term advances close at hand.
You can respond but what's the point if you aren't basing what you write on reality?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You make a lot of assumptions there. You also made an unqualified statement that doesn't differentiate between current-term market forces and general-term technological growth--i.e. you talked about how electric cars don't save money, rather than about how the current market conditions don't save money.
I've never bought into a maintenance plan. I don't know a lot of people who have, but I know they're popular. They're notably popular among Volkswagen owners, since maintenance plans are pushed heavily by that manufacturer. In all cases, I see no reason to believe people will pay more for maintenance on a given class of car than on any other class; and, in the broad market, when people have to select between various vendors or against inflation, they'll become discouraged by the growing dollar cost (this is how prices become lower: $10 becomes $15, and a $10 good becomes a $12 good).
That is how economics have worked across all of history. There isn't just no reason to think it will change going forward; there is mathematically no way for it to operate any other way. We would come to a technological standstill and then collapse if these behaviors ceased.
Concerning the *current* market, the Chevy Volt is actually a lot cheaper than the Toyota Prius, and the Toyota Prius is a cheap car. A Toyota Prius C has a total-cost-per-year of $5,000 over a 5-year life, while a base-model Toyota Corolla has a cost of $5,250, and a Mazda 3 Hatchback at $7,000. Luxury hybrids tend to cost more than luxury cars, while the TCO of non-luxury Hybrids tends to be lower than their gasoline equivalents.
TCO for an Audi A7 3.0 BiDi Quattro over 3 years is around 46,000 british pounds, with a BMW 740d at 45,000 pounds; the Tesla 85D with sunroof comes in at 40,000 pounds. The Audi and BMW have cheaper purchase prices than the Tesla by a good 5000-7000 pounds, too. There are similar TCO estimates all over the place, some ridiculously comparing the Tesla Model S to SUVs and such.
Amusingly, the maintenance costs are always cited as cheaper.
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Batteries don't run at optimum efficiency all the time either.
What he's basically saying is that with today's technology he thinks that they can make batteries that have higher round-trip energy-storage efficiency than fuel cells. OK. For the particular technologies he chose, probably right. For better fuel cell technologies, maybe, maybe not.
And round-trip efficiency is one thing to design for, but it's not the ONLY criterion of importance. Mass is also an important variable. The lower potential mass of a fuel cell system could be more important than slightly lower round-trip energy efficiency. But only if-- and this is a big caveat-- you can actually realize the lower mass. If your energy storage tanks end up being far heavier than the hydrogen they store, you're right-- fuel cells aren't the optimum solution.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
For a couple of decades I have been shouting into the wilderness.
A Hydrogen powered economy cannot exist without hydrocarbon/Organic reduction
Like the Alcohol economy, a dead loser.
Solar to electric vehicles, with a concentration upon mass transit replacing the automobile, is the only sustainable process
And not all that sustainable either.
Without SiC based solar cell tech to allow passive concentration, we will always be looking for cheaper costs and failing
Forget nukes. So far, no one has shown a way to delete the toxic byproducts in an entire lifetime, much less cheaply enough to render the entire fuel cycle economical.
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
The problem with the 27.8% ICE system efficiency vs 36.3% EV system efficiency is that you forgot a couple of important factors. 1) ICE vehicles in cities waste 15% to 20% of their fuel idling at stop signs. EVs don't waste energy while stopped. 2) EVs recover a large percentage of their braking energy via regenerative braking. ICE vehicles waste it by heating their brake systems. When these factors are taken into account, the system efficiency of EVs is much more favorable than your post suggests.
More short term near sighted fill my profits spewing from the people who benefit the most from it. Electric cars are better right /now/ and in small counties.
1 billion used batteries every ten years. That's for every car on the road.
How do you think that'll stack for recycling and what not? You know a shit ton of it will end up in dumps with toxic liquids leaking out.
Know how expensive to replace those car batteries are? Imagine if every 10-7 years cars required their entire fuel system removed and install with a new one, gas tank, fuel injectors, fuel lines, carbs, the whole works. Yeah, about the same price.
As greedy as those oil infrastructure types are, and in the inefficencies with hydrogen, we know about them, they are true, in the long run, using large renewable facilities gathering solar wind / hydrodam power, even at the 40% efficency, are going to be better in the long run.
The equipment for hydrogen isn't nearly as toxic, and much more recyclable and reusable. In the end, it is currently the ultimate power storage system, as the byproduct is consumable water.
Should space exploration ever happen in larger scale, having well developed hydrogen fuel cell systems will go a long way as well.
TL;DR -Batteries for a few people seem great. 1 billion batteries per 10 years bad. Most of it will not be recycled. Way worse than k-cups.
Hydrogen less efficient, equipment / left overs more recyclable, less deadly / toxic.
More sustainable long term, like hundreds of years, vs sounds great for the next 50.
It doesn't matter how many generations down the line you go, since there is no magical end-to-end hydrogen infrastructure that will *ever* deliver the same amount of ready-to-use energy as directly feeding that same energy directly into batteries.
Why in the world would you think that?
At the most fundamental level, hydrogen fuel cells and lithium ion batteries basically store energy the same way-- increasing and reducing the oxidation state of the ion by adding and subtracting an electron. I don't see any reason for your certainty in the statement that you think there are always more losses if you use a hydrogen atom than if you use a lithium atom.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It seems to me, lots of our "energy efficient" things are trading efficiency in one category for another aspect that is not environmentally sound: CFLs use less electricity and contain mercury; the HE washers use less water and have longer run times (using more electricity); etc. So maybe going to hydrogen as a fuel is not as efficient in one area but gives us an advantage in another area (like less CO2).
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Scroll down for map of free charging stations.
Click here for another map of locations with chargers.
Scroll further for charging times. It's 170 miles range for 30 minutes charging.
With ranges from 237 to 294 miles per charge. Up to 403 miles at 50 mph.
I.e. Your 400 mile trip is either the same 8 hours at same 50 mph you used OR less than 6 hours at 70 mph, including a full 30 minute stop though less would be needed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So, where do you recharge your H2 vehicle on long trips?
At a hydrogen fueling station:
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fue...
http://cafcp.org/stationmap
Right now, you're out of luck if you're not on the east or west coast. But, if you had an electric car ten years ago you're be equally out of luck.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
That's the point of the article: hydrogen will never be an efficient way to store energy. We know this already.
You're moving from statement 1, "it's not efficient today", to statement 2, "it can never be efficient."
Statement 1 is indeed true. Statement 2 is an opinion. I see no particular justification for it, other than that you seem to be a technology pessimist.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Don't worry much about catalytic converters now. By which I mean they are safe and sound in the garage, ready for the next smog check.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Uh, you are aware that lithium is also highly reactive, right?
That's the definition of a high-energy-density storage medium: highly reactive. If it isn't highly reactive-- you'd use something else that has higher energy.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is the same old hydrogen is actually a battery info. Completely true and it's been true for over a hundred years.
But it is not a bad battery. It's very simple but very clean. What is difficult is industrial standards for safe storage. A little money and dedication toward R&D will help there tremendously.
The truth is everyone of putting a hydrogen tank in a car that will likely crash at some point in it's history. The pressure tank will be heavy but that is complimented by everything else being simpler. Hydrogen vehicles that convert to electricity first are the same as wholly electric vehicles; just extra weight in the tank vs the battery pack.
But hydrogen is indeed wasteful but so is the electric grid itself. Big energy such as industrial solar and nuclear have energy to burn.
What people don't want to accept is nuclear but combined with hydrogen production it doesn't have to be in your backyard.
Wow your whole post is really bullshit.
>> you talked about how electric cars don't save money, rather than about how the current market conditions don't save money.
Of course I did. Given the right market conditions flying to the moon would be free.
>> I've never bought into a maintenance plan. I don't know a lot of people who have, but I know they're popular.
Uhh.. ok...
>> They're notably popular among Volkswagen owners, since maintenance plans are pushed heavily by that manufacturer.
You realise that VWs are notably unreliable and also very expensive to fix when they go wrong?
>> The Chevy Volt is actually a lot cheaper than the Toyota Prius, and the Toyota Prius is a cheap car.
Umm nope: Volt: $33,995 - $38,345 Prius: $25,035 - $30,835 (caranddriver.com)
So no, the Prius is NOT a cheap car. The Toyota Yaris is under 15k.
>> Toyota Prius C has a total-cost-per-year of $5,000 over a 5-year life
Which is right before it needs a battery replacement at a cost of $6000...
Fuel cells are not perfect, nothing is, but it is in no way a 'scam'. Lets go over a few points here:
*Hydrogen products takes power to make.
Absolutely true! On the other hand it doesn't leak away into the non-existence like electricity stored in batteries either. Our batteries don't maintain charge all that well, just ask an electrical engineer, they have the numbers on this stuff and it's not big secret either. You'd think someone from Tesla would know that.
The advantages of using Hydrogen are that it can be stored for a long time, be shipped to somewhere else, and can 'refuel' a vehicle a LOT faster than recharging a battery. (Unless you swap out uncharged batteries for charged ones, but that's a different story the electric vehicle manufacturers don't want to go into.) Also, unlike a rechargeable battery, if you maintain the system, you will almost never have to replace your fuel tank.
Currently, our common processes of producing hydrogen use electricity for electrolysis, and that has a few points on it's own to cover. First, there are some new versions of electrolysis that are more efficient, there is a new method that functions more like photosynthesis (it's a new development, you'll have to hit the science sites to read about it), and there's a mystery device by a paranoid inventor that I don't think has allowed any proper independent verification so this last one probably is an actual scam. Of course all of those methods do have an important quality, they can all be done with renewable energy sources, even those with limited functionality like wind and solar. (If the sun isn't out or the wind isn't blowing, those methods won't generate power, and that's why they are limited. You have to find a reliable way to store the excess for the non-productive times.) We do all agree that getting away from fossil fuels is good, right?
*Hydrogen hydrogen hydrogen... Yes, fuel cells that we have use hydrogen, but not all of them use the gas. Some of them are fueled by hydrogen from another source. Usually a liquid like methanol. (It would be great to use water directly, but that's a pretty tight molecule, and despite some unsubstantiated claims, it's unlikely to happen.) Again, if someone knew anything worth mentioning about fuel cells, they should bloody well know about this!
*Storage. Storing pressurized hydrogen gas is a bit of a pain, but it was solved years ago. In fact, they've designed those types of tanks for cars that are rated as safer than the gas tank your vehicle already has. (If you have an internal combustion vehicle.) And yes, it has a system similar to the traditional fuel station you're used to. Of course, it's totally non-compatible with the gas stations we currently have as it needs completely different tanks & pumps. If you didn't know, it's so expensive to replace those big storage tanks, it's cheaper to build a new station, which isn't something that any fuel company wants to do. They haven't been proponents of hydrogen in any form, they've consistently been opponents, except for a few one shot concept vehicles they've thrown out to mollify certain environmentalists and government types, and to catch a bit of 'environmentally friendly' press out of it. There's a huge history of their obstructionism on this field, go look it up.
*Oh the humanity! How many people that were on the Hindenburg were burned by the hydrogen? Zero. Yep, all those burns were from the diesel that fueled the engines. Ok, some might have been from the burning cabins and junk inside, but it still wasn't the hydrogen. By the way, for the hydrogen to ignite, it was exposed to flames or sparks outside of the gasbags. All in all, the biggest fear people apparently spout over hydrogen is the Hindenburg disaster, which is rather messed up. Even if they'd have had helium instead, the results would have been very similar. Unless the helium outflow smothered the flames on the outer covering, in which case it's descent speed would have been a lot slower, and might have avoided the rupture that spewed
>> Maintenance is an area where electric cars may have a substantial advantage
I strongly suspect dealers across the nation are already figuring out ways to not pass the cost savings on, given how after-sales servicing is where a very large part of their profit comes from,
You can tax Gasoline, Diesel, and of course Hydrogen. But you can't tax Electricity. Especially if you generate it yourself. For fueling stations to survive in the future you will see electric charging station on the property with a state tax slapped on per kW.
And what exactly does that have to do with ANYTHING I just said?
Are you trying to fill a car with lithium at 3000psi?
Are you trying to electrolysize lithium from another reactive and explosive substance?
Is lithium so small it can pass through solid steel such that storing it so difficult you will lose hydrogen and destroy the storage medium?
The answer to any of those questions is NO. Lithium used in a battery is a relatively stable alloy suspended in a electrolyte that involves the transfer of electrons back and forth from anode to cathode. At no point is this reaction at ALL similar to that use to electrolysisize hydrogen from water and then oxidizing the hydrogen in a fuel cell.
Hydrogen is an AWFUL energy storage mechanism. The efficiency of producing and reacting it are terrible and they always will be unless you can change the laws of physics. It will ALWAYS be better to store the electricity in a battery rather than try to store it in raw hydrogen. Hell it would be better to take that energy and make hydrocarbons rather than produce hydrogen because the efficiency is going to be higher than raw hydrogen production and you don't see anyone running around trying to make hydrocarbons because just like hydrogen it's better just to use the electricity directly.
You forgot, only about 0.0000000000001% of the suns energy strikes the earth to begin with so the efficiency isn't even a rounding error above zero.
Oh wait, rereading that post you might have actually been trying to be serious by comparing completely unrelated things.
Well the fuel cell can be refilled in a few minutes by simply add more chemicals, unlike current battery technology, which tends to have safety issues with fast charging causing battery packs to catch fire.
(the above doesn't mean that hydrogen fuel cells are good, just that this is some bullshit coming from Tarpenning)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The Great Elon himself is talking about how it would only take a little square piece of Nevada to power the US with solar. So make 3 little square pieces worth, then use hydrogen for, for example, international aviation and shipping.
Plants are only 2% efficient at photosynthesizing solar energy into usable forms of energy for the plant. They seem to work quite well.
Also, a giant central hydrogen storage facility with electrolysis and fuel cells might very well turn out to be a good way to store a whole country's unneeded night-time wind generation. Ok, so you only get half of the energy back. So what, that's way better than the nothing you get back right now. Right now, in the very definition of insanity, because we don't use something like that, they actually have times in Europe when the price of electricity is negative because there's too much wind power.
They order the wind farms to shut down, and keep the coal fires burning. Isn't that insane? A big hydrogen facility, if you don't have the topography for pumped-hydro, makes a hell of a lot of sense compared to what's going on right now.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Sure, the energy equation for extracting hydrogen isn't awesome (though I suspect if you ACTUALLY boil down ALL the inefficiencies in the electric-car-based-on-LiIon-batteries equation, the actual "joules in to miles traveled" ratio likely favors hydrogen by a long shot). But who cares if the source is, for example, solar, wave, hydro or wind energy from a station close to the sea, which also happens to be a great source of non-potable (therefore not competing with human drinking needs) water?
2,2,4 trimethyl pentane is a fantastic hydrogen storage medium. why try to beat it?
For people interested in personal energy independence, hydrogen is good for storing surplus solar, if the solar system regularly produces more surplus than will charge an affordable battery. Metal hydride storage is cheaper than battery storage when the power storage quantities are large, and the weight doesn't matter if the storage is for a residence rather than a vehicle. If I drive my vehicle to work, I can't charge it up from my home solar during the daytime, because the vehicle isn't at home. So, if I want to store solar energy at home while I'm away at work, I either need enough battery capacity to supply my home and recharge my vehicle through the night, or I want to use some other storage method. So long as home solar owners are tied to the grid and happy with the deal they get from selling power during the day and buying it back at night, batteries may well work better. For independent home solar owners, hydrogen fuel cells may be a better solution.
A scam? Well, consider this. Hydrogen cars, like gasoline cars, store their energy in the fuel molecules themselves and thus don't need to transfer raw power over wires. Thank goodness for that since there's no grid around to charge even a fraction of our cars if they were electric. And this is the point -- and what makes the search for better batteries foolish -- you still gotta charge them. But where? The electric grid is already our Achilles heel.
Consider this. Hydrogen cars, like gasoline cars, store their energy in the fuel molecules themselves and thus don't need to transfer raw power over wires. Thank goodness for that since there's no grid around to charge even a fraction of our cars if they were electric. And this is the point -- and what makes the search for better batteries foolish -- you still gotta charge them. But where? The electric grid is already our Achilles heel.
It's true - H2 is nothing but an energy storage system. I'd completely forgotten about hydrogen as a fuel. There's no need for it any more. Energy storage has moved on since then. The only rational reason to store energy as hydrogen was that it can be burned in an internal combustion engine, and now the progress of electric motors shows that's no longer an issue.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
If only we had a source of energy that was relatively safe to handle, that wouldn't kill life forms with its radiation, that wouldn't electrocute those who service it, that was dense like a liquid, that produced gases with 1/5000 the level of greenhouse level as air conditioner refrigerant, that could be harvested inexpensively, artificially produced with modern hydrothermal liquifaction technology, and which could be contained in steel tanks instead of environmentally disastrous lithium batteries. If someone could come up with such a fuel, I bet it would be a tremendous success.
You realise that VWs are notably unreliable and also very expensive to fix when they go wrong?
VW has consistently been among the top performers in reliability statistics for the last several decades and VWs have the longest average lifespan (source). That is why they are so popular as second-hand cars: a reasonably well-maintained Golf is likely to outlast everything in the same price range. The parts may indeed be relatively expensive (although still cheaper than luxury brands and small-numbers imports), but since repairs are needed relatively infrequently, total cost of ownership is not especially high. They have a well-deserved reputation for building reliable and durable cars.
I don't think it's really fair to compare TCO of a Tesla to cars that are actually well-built. Of course a car is more expensive if you hire people who actually know what they're doing and do some inspections before you deliver it to the customer, but in the end the customer gets a better product. You should compare a Tesla to something equally shoddy, like many mass-market American or Chinese cars, or a 1970s British luxury car.
TSLA's about to get their Carbon Credits and Market Share taken over by PHEVs and HFCVs. HFCVs are the next step in "Green"; and much more practical than a TSLA.
TSLA takes 1Hr (quick charge - 50%, was it?) to 4 Hrs(Full conventional) to charge its Batteries. It can't make it from NYC to BOS (or NYC to WAS) in one charge during mid-winter (NYT Article); and I suspect that any trip longer than 200-250 Miles on Highway Speeds (w/AirConditioning) would be pretty risky. Who in the World wants to wait 1 to 4 hours at a time during a Road Trip? Can you imagine people getting stuck on the Road during Thanksgiving or Year End Holidays?
TSLAs are a 3 Season, Warm Weather Commuter. Add the "never reaching their production/sales goal projection" issues, while collecting (allegedly refundable) deposits for an SUV due out at 100K Units on 4Q 2017 with another 400K Units for CalendarYear 2018 - TSLA seems more like a Scam to me than the HFCVs.
USA Sales of Hybrid Cars numbered about 430K, and BEVs only sold 71K (w/ your Fanboi TSLA only selling 25.4K) for the Year 2015. With Oil and Gas Px due to stay low for the next several years (which negatively affects PHEV/BEV Sales), how would any rational person expect TSLA to meet these goals? I heard that there are not enough Lithium Ore to meet that 500K Unit demand, and that their Fremont Plant never produced that much with the Japanese running it (granted, robotics might come to play here).
http://www.hybridcars.com/december-2015-dashboard/
HFCVs, on the other hand, refuels in a few minutes with a Range that matches or extends what TSLAs could offer; and their Range don't vary from exposure to Cold Weather (like TSLAs). Honda(JPN) and Toyota(JPN and here in the USA) are now rolling out HFCVs, with 3 Years' worth of Fuel included with the Purchase. In California, San Diego - Santa Barbara and the SFO-Sacramento-Napa-SiliconValley City Clusters, with at least one H2 Station mid-state, will host H2 Filling Stations - making a San Diego to SFBay or Sacramento trips feasible by Year End 2016.
H2 can be fashioned from Petrol, NatGas, Coal, Water, and from Miscellaneous Industrial Processes. H2 Stations can be adapted to existing Infra, built anew, and even Honda are selling home-filling Units. As H2 Stations start popping up around major Metro Areas (and home unit sales catch on), other Mfgrs who teamed up with HMC and TM, as well as those working on their own HFCVs, will start joining in.
HFCVs may not be the most cost efficient vehicles as of now; but it's far more practical for the driver while being as clean or cleaner (depending on the H2 Source - Enviro burden on Industrial Plants, which it should be better controlled) overall than toting around in a TSLA.
PHEVs(especially those Models that can cover the daily commute for most on battery power) and HFCVs are due to squeeze out the BEVs. One major Brown/Blackout due to Grid Casualties, Fuel Shortages, and/or Market Complexities; and BEV Sales will plummet.
I'm asking if his technical solution is actually scientifically feasible. Storing hydrogen gas in HHO (hydride). This would solve some of the drawbacks I've read here. Here is his hydrogen powered corvette.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfBdPKxk35k
Battery technology is about strip-mining vast areas of so-called "developing" countries (in reality 3rd world coloured countries). Such mining harvests megatons of various minerals and rare earth metals and uses those for the sole benefit of the well-off people, that is 1st world, mostly white automobilists. Every Tesla owes over 1/3rd of its fairly large weight to the built-in rechargable battery cell array. Meanwhile, the 3rd world people are left with cratered moonscapes that cannot be cultivated ever and must drink contaminated ground water. Your Musk is their misery, but of course Calvin teaches the poor are divinely predestined to be miserable, otherwise God would make them rich...
In contrast, fuel cell cars only need about 3 troy ounces of platinum and palladium metal, about 3-5 coin's worth, for the catalyst sieve. Those metals are financially expensive, but the environmental cost (footprint) of such a small amount is much lower. Beyond that, fuel cells only need stainless steel for construction, which is an already well-established and long-lasting industrial product and doesn't carry extreme environmental costs. Therefore, a fuel-cell economy doesn't need to march towards prosperity over piles of dead and sickened coloured people.
I think people are missing the point. The post and many posts cite electrolysis, getting hydrogen from water as the primary source of where all this hydrogen might come from. However from my little understanding it is much easier to get it from coal through gasification. At which point the whole environmental thing makes less sense, but it starts making more economic sense. While perhaps not as bad as a coal burning plant, I expect it isn't all that much better. However with coal plants being decommissioned left and right, you have two things, one is (particularly in the US) an established coal industry and reserves (with lobby etc...), and a source of energy that is literally dirt cheap. So you wrap the environmental flag around the whole hydrogen thing, save your coal industry, and gain some oil independence. Anyway that is how I read the whole "hydrogen" thing. It isn't particularly good as a storage medium for a number of reasons, though it does have a few advantages, but it's bigger usage would be that it can leverage coal. However that is only if they can sell it as environmentally sound, make a few electrolysis plants as a front, then produce the bulk of it keeping the coal industry in the US afloat at the same time.
Everyone know hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis but commercially it is mostly produced from natural gas, oil or coal. Hydrogen is less tightly bound to those hydrocarbon molecules than to oxygen in H2O. Hydrogen fuel cells are a fraud by the fossil fuel industry. Elon should have read the wilipedia article to strengthen his arguments.
And what exactly does that have to do with ANYTHING I just said?
You said: "Your attempt to argue that this is only a limit of current technology disregards the hard chemical fact of Hydrogen, and that is significant chemical energy is needed to shear it from whatever molecule you are trying to remove it from due to it's high reactivity."
The point you tried to make stated that the problem with hydrogen was "due to its high reactivity." Your words, not mine. My point is that lithium is also reactive. Why are you asking "what does that have to do with anything I said?" What is has to do with what you said is that it is a direct reply to what you said.
Are you trying to fill a car with lithium at 3000psi?
You didn't mention that. I did not reply to things you didn't say.
Are you trying to electrolysize lithium from another reactive and explosive substance?
You didn't mention that. I did not reply to things you didn't say. (Uh, and in any case, you electrolyze hydrogen from water, which is not "another reactive and explosive substance".)
Is lithium so small it can pass through solid steel such that storing it so difficult you will lose hydrogen and destroy the storage medium?
You didn't mention that. I did not not reply to things you didn't say.
--Look. I replied to what you posted. Please avoid criticizing me for replying to what you actually did say, rather than replying to things you didn't say.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Given the right market conditions flying to the moon would be free.
Wrong. Flying to the moon still requires human labor, and those humans must be paid. The cost is in (small, possibly now fractional) billions of man-hours. You try making flying to the moon free--even by enforcing some sort of authoritarian dictatorship economy--what you'll get is zero production of anything else and a collapse of the global food system.
So no, the Prius is NOT a cheap car. The Toyota Yaris is under 15k
I was going by total cost of ownership. You know, gas, maintenance, etc?
Which is right before it needs a battery replacement at a cost of $6000.
Actually, those calculations specifically included depreciation accounting for the battery component's wear and tear.
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Heh. Well... it's a certainty that using electricity to convert water into H2 and then converting it back to electricity for the car is ALWAYS going to be less efficient than just putting the electricity directly into the car in the first place.
But you don't put the electricity directly into the car. You put the electricity into the batteries. It's indeed a certainty that using electricity to convert chemicals into different chemicals, and then converting it back to electricity for the car "is ALWAYS going to be less efficient than just putting the electricity directly into the car in the first place"... but that will be true whether the chemicals you use are hydrogen or lithium. You can think of a "fuel cell" as simply the technical term for a battery that uses hydrogen. In both cases, you're storing and then using energy in a redox reaction.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Would this help make hydrogen a viable option - or is it just hype?
The CRANN breakthrough, recently published in the prestigious international journal ACS Catalysis, has shown that the ruthenium content can be decreased by as much as 90pc and substituted with the Earth-abundant and inexpensive manganese oxide without diminishing the efficiency of the material to split water.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/2016/05/23/hydrogen-breakthrough-fossil-fuels-clean-energy-crann-trinity
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acscatal.5b02069
Commercial hydrogen today is not made with electrolysis, and neither was the hydrogen used in 1806. That hydrogen came from ammonia, and today's commercial hydrogen mostly comes from methane. Since methane has twice as much hydrogen in it as water, it can be converted more economically. Tarpenning is simply showing his bias, and some of his points are valid, but there have been amateur tinkerers running cars on hydrogen since the early 1970's when a college student used to drive his old station wagon around my town using hydrogen stored in rubber inner tubes in the back of the car. At the time I ran my VW van on propane using nothing more than a regulator and an extra nozzle in my carburetor that I installed myself. Neither one of us ever exploded.
The US government sure doesn't think that hydrogen fuel cells are a scam. They are investing a very large amount of money into research for them over at the department of energy.
All of the negatives listed are similar to the ethanol debacle. Yet despite ethanol’s negative energy production, it’s been mandated by law in most States. It proves that common sense, logic, chemistry and math have little to do with energy – it’s all about who has the opportunity to get rich.
A tank of gasoline contains more hydrogen than the equivalent volume of liquid hydrogen. And is a lot easier to deal with.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Hydrogen fuel cells have been around so long it is surprising it took so long to get into the commercial market. Practical hydrogen fuel cells were developed by NASA in the 1960s to power spacecraft.
By 1973, there was a company in San Diego that had a Natural gas - compressed air fuel cell the size of two four drawer filing cabinets that could power a 14 unit apartment complex. I heard about them when I wrote for information for a science fair project. Humorously enough, the tech was bought up by a large utility company and they sat on the design until they trotted it out in 2003 to compete for DOE money as a "new technology". (In our litigious society; large corporate names intentionally left out. Yep, this is a personal anecdotal paragraph.)
What is needed is an inexpensive fuel cell that will run on air and LPG or LNG. But, all the research money seems to be going for hydrogen fuel cells. The storage problem for hydrogen is horrendous. H2 leaks out slowly between the molecules of steel in a pressure cylinder. The focus on hydrogen is nifty but wrong headed if you are talking consumer friendly uses of a fuel cell.
NRRPT/RCT
Repeat this to yourself until it makes sense: "Hydrogen fuel cell" is just a technical terminology for a battery in which the storage medium uses hydrogen.
Thus, for instance: a nuclear plant provides electricity, with that electricity hydrogen is created, that hydrogen is put into a fuel cell, where it's converted back into electricity for the car.
Right. And, "for instance", a nuclear plant provides electricity, with that electricity a lithium cobaltate molecule is electrolyzed to produce a lithium ion; that lithium is in a battery, where it's converted back into electricity for the car.
There's no additional step: they are the same. Fuels cells and batteries store energy in fundamentally the same way: by changing the oxidation state of a storage medium. You're saying "you lose energy because you're oxidizing and reducing something when you store the energy," but that is exactly as true for batteries as it is for fuel cells, because fuel cells and batteries are the same thing.
There's really no need for an alternative system that [add: using current technology] has little to no advantages, but which is less efficient.
Right. Didn't I say that about ten times already? Statement number 1 is true: "it [a fuel cell] is not as efficient today". What I was disagreeing with was statement 2: "it can never be efficient." That remains to be proven.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Now you are making assumptions. I never said anything even close to what you said I did. I never once talked about "fuel cells". I just discussed H2 generation and storage. Nothing else.
I'm sorry: I've been commenting about an article labelled "Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam'".
If you're not talking about fuel cells--the subject of this entire thread--we aren't even talking about the same article.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So in a discussion about cars, if I talk about their fuel, as an isolated system, I'm somehow off topic?
Or you realize you are 100% wrong, and are blaming me for misleading you by being clear and consistent about what portion I was discussing? Yes, I shouldn't have mislead you by only taking about a sub-system. Or, you could start reading, rather than lashing out against all those who don't share the same chip on their shoulders.
You apology is accepted, even if belated.
Learn to love Alaska
Personally, my eye was drawn to the '25km stretch'. Provide service outside of that stretch to spread it out.
Unless you are taking your vacations downtown, charging at home won't cut it.
We're looking at a hypothetical EV future. Charging stations at hotels, motels, restaurants, malls, movie theaters, and such are not out of the question.
Park in a TGIF, Dennie's, or other 'sit down' type restaurant for 45 minutes, come back to a charged car.
I don't read AC A human right
And here's my source: http://www.jdpower.com/press-r...
and another one...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Ah, some American company nobody has ever heard of counting the number of problems of any kind in new vehicles sold in the U.S. Yes, that definitely trumps decades of TÜV reports and ADAC statistics...
Statistics disagree.
Well, as I posted, Tesla supercharger stations are 120kW NOW, and you posited one 10X as powerful. The math is simple...
Tesla is releasing a 100kWh Model-S 'soonish'.
In order to charge it completely, assuming no chemical limitations, it would take 100 kW for 1 hour in order to charge it from 0% to 100%. In reality, it still being at 10% would be offset that the AC-DC transformation isn't 100% efficient, so 100kW into the car might be 110kW into the charging station. Whatever, general figures.
So you want to charge the car in 6 minutes. That will be 1 MW, yes? The situation only becomes worse if the 'chemical limits force slower charging near full charge', because a battery capable of being charged in 6 minutes but with that limit would need MORE power during it's peak charge to keep a full charge at 6 minutes as it's forced to slow when it gets above 80-90%.
So, no, current cars can't take a megawatt when charging. But They could if you switched to a battery chemistry that can charge '20X faster'.
I don't read AC A human right