In the long term this may make sense. In the immediate case, there are a number of practical problems. The two big ones are: 1. There isn't an infrastructure to use hydrogen, 2. Hydrogen electrolysis on an industrial scale isn't a well-developed technology (because there's no push for it-- current hydrogen production is by stripping H from methane, and right now methane is very cheap). Since it's not a commercial technology, there hasn't been a development process to make it cheap and efficient.
It depends on to what extent you can adapt your electricity usage to take advantage of excess electricity during the daytime.
In much of the US, peak electrical usage is during the summer, due to air conditioning loads. The worst heating loads are on sunny days at mid-day, and it turns out to be relatively simple to design air conditioners to store cool for a few hours*, so you can adapt the air conditioning electrical usage to use energy in the mid day and then continue cooling houses during the evening and early night. This makes sense if the electrical price includes time-dependent pricing.
For other load profiles, it may or may not make sense.
----- *water has high heat capacity (as well as high latent heat of fusion) and thus stores cool very well; and is both cheap and environmentally benign.
So, basically what you just said is that I was ignoring your points, so in return, you will ignore mine.
OK, whatever.
As America's prosperity has increased, so has its population. How do you explain this?
What I had said is that the rate of population growth decreases as prosperity increases. Therefore, based on that statement, I would "explain this" by saying that as America's prosperity has increased, the rate of growth of population should decrease. And, guess what? It did.
I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
What you're not making sense of is this: if poor people breed like rats, we need more food to feed them.
Right. Hence, it makes sense that is desirable to increase their prosperity, so that they no longer are poor people who are, in your words, "breed like rats"
At a point, we run out of nice, fertile land; instead of just *farming*, we also have to pour on more fertilizer and more irrigation. That means going and finding more people to make the chemicals and to produce energy--more money. Less food comes out of that land, so you need to do this over more land, with more farmers. So instead of 2,000 human labor-hours to produce food for some 180 people, it's now 5,000 human labor-hours, and that means 2.5 times as much wages paid--cost of food goes up.
That's a variant of the Malthusian argument, yes.
Responding to scarcity by slowing breeding is a basic biological process.
That sounds logical. The actual data, however, shows birth rate decreases with prosperity.
Solar power in orbit actually isn't as bad an option as you may think; you simply have to go about it a bit differently. True, PV cells degrade form radiation exposure (as will any electronics used), but you can easily deploy several acres of really cheap mirrors made of aluminized Mylar film to concentrate sunlight on, say, a bimetallic thermopile (generates DC power from junctions of dissimilar metals at different temperatures, simple to make and totally radiation-hard)
Yes, this is known as a thermoelectric generator. The problem with these, however, is that their efficiency is very low-- about 5%
or a Stirling-cycle or steam-driven generator
Stirling generators are indeed more efficient. Nevertheless, you'd probably do better just using solar cells-- concentrators are not as simple as you suggest, and the added pointing requirements for concentrator systems, along with questions about the long-term reliability of generators using moving parts, probably mean that you want to keep the Stirling and Brayton converters for places that really need them, such as converting energy from nuclear sources for deep space applications.
(yes, steam in space sounds utterly wacky, but it gives you a robust, radiation-hard electric generator using low-tech means).
No need to use actual steam for converters these days. Its only advantage is that the raw material to make steam-- water-- is abundant on Earth, so you don't care if it leaks a little.
Or the fact that space is LITERALLY littered with raw materials.
Manufacturing most plastics requires petroleum. You can't get that from an asteroid, it has to be lifted off the ground.
You can manufacture plastic from carboniferous material; it doesn't have to be petroleum.
You could get raw materials to make plastic from carbonaceous chondrites, I expect, if plastic is indeed high on the list of materials you need to make.
Uh, yes, I suppose. Population growth is negatively tied to prosperity: the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have. (This effect is known as the "demographic transition,") So, if you by "scarcity" you mean "poverty," then yes, you could say population growth is tied (negatively) to scarcity.
I can't make much sense of the rest of your argument, but if you're arguing that increasing prosperity caused by space manufacturing will reduce population growth, ok, that makes sense.
Raw materials could presumably be acquired from sources in space-- there are millions of asteroids, including tens of thousands of Near Earth objects, which have relatively low delta-V requirements to bring to orbital locations.
The bad news is that it's not a very secure operating system. The good news is that the hackers are having trouble figuring out how to get the 2600 baud acoustic modems to ARPAnet to download the malware...
I think you should repeat it to yourself as well.;-) Look, I'll try to explain it once more. While you may argue that a fuel cell and a battery are the same, the fact is and remains that *IT COSTS ADDITIONAL ENERGY TO CONVERT WATER OR GAS INTO HYDROGEN*. What part of this don't you understand?
The part about how this is different in any way from batteries.
In a fuel cell, you electrolyze hydrogen oxide to produce hydrogen. In a lithium battery, you electrolyze lithium cobalt oxide to produce lithium. In a nickel-cadmium battery, you electrolyze cadmium hydroxide to produce cadmium. Same thing. They are all an electrolysis reaction; they all cost energy.
It costs energy in a battery; it costs energy in a fuel cell. They are no different in this respect.
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.
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.
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.
The cost of cracking 2H2O into 2H2 and O2 is high. There is no known path to make it cheaper.
Sure there is. That path is known as "catalysis."
The problem is that it can never cost less than what you can get back from burning 2H2 and O2 into 2H2O.
Well, of course not. That's simply the law of conservation of energy. It can never cost less to put energy into a battery than what you can get back out of the battery, either. Lithium batteries store energy in the form of the enthalpy of lithium; hydrogen fuel cells store energy in the form of the enthalpy of hydrogen. Same chemical process, different ions.
Then, you have H2 gas. It's small. It's volatile. The energy density of H2 gas can never be better than a lithium battery or gasoline.
As I said. Hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it's light; the disadvantage is that it's low density. That's why I call it an engineering trade off.
You just slid in an assumption there, which is that hydrogen has to be stored at a gas, by the way.
So again, these are facts, not opinions...
That's not opinion. That's scientific fact.
Telling me over and over that your opinions are "facts" does not change the fact that they are opinions. They may even turn out to be right; I wouldn't bet against it. But your firm certainty that there are no possible technological approaches that allow any possible way to make fuel cells efficient and cost effective is just an opinion, until and unless you have investigated every possible technological approach, including the ones you haven't thought of.
Here's the part we agree on: using today's approaches, fuel cells don't look like a viable competition to batteries for electrical storage for automobile applications. The only part we disagree on is predicting future technologies that can find ways around the difficulties. You're a technology pessimist: you think that if today's technology can't solve a problem, no future technology will, either.
Basically, your statement boils down to "I know so much that you can trust me, I can foresee the future." Sorry, but I fail to credit this. There are significant problems with the fuel cell approach using today's technologies. I agree with that. I wouldn't bet on fuel cell technologies. I agree with that, too. But, that blanket statement that it's absurd to think that there could be possible technology approaches that can address the problems-- well, no. You simply don't know enough to say that. There are a lot of smart people out there coming up with interesting technological approaches to problems. Indeed, maybe they won't find solutions, but I won't make a blanket statement that it's impossible.
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.
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.
I wouldn't invest in it, but converting electricity into hydrogen to store energy does actually work and perhaps could be made as efficient as storing electricity in batteries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Irrelevant. APIs can not be copyrighted, period. End. Of. Discussion.
According to the Federal Appeals Court-- whose opinion is the only one that matters (since the Supreme court declined the case)-- you are wrong. APIs can be copyrighted. End of discussion.
You may not agree, you may not like it, but that's irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
In the long term this may make sense. In the immediate case, there are a number of practical problems. The two big ones are:
1. There isn't an infrastructure to use hydrogen,
2. Hydrogen electrolysis on an industrial scale isn't a well-developed technology (because there's no push for it-- current hydrogen production is by stripping H from methane, and right now methane is very cheap). Since it's not a commercial technology, there hasn't been a development process to make it cheap and efficient.
It depends on to what extent you can adapt your electricity usage to take advantage of excess electricity during the daytime.
In much of the US, peak electrical usage is during the summer, due to air conditioning loads. The worst heating loads are on sunny days at mid-day, and it turns out to be relatively simple to design air conditioners to store cool for a few hours*, so you can adapt the air conditioning electrical usage to use energy in the mid day and then continue cooling houses during the evening and early night. This makes sense if the electrical price includes time-dependent pricing.
For other load profiles, it may or may not make sense.
-----
*water has high heat capacity (as well as high latent heat of fusion) and thus stores cool very well; and is both cheap and environmentally benign.
So, basically what you just said is that I was ignoring your points, so in return, you will ignore mine.
OK, whatever.
As America's prosperity has increased, so has its population. How do you explain this?
What I had said is that the rate of population growth decreases as prosperity increases. Therefore, based on that statement, I would "explain this" by saying that as America's prosperity has increased, the rate of growth of population should decrease. And, guess what? It did.
Population growth is negatively tied to prosperity: the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
Look at population versus technology.
I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
What you're not making sense of is this: if poor people breed like rats, we need more food to feed them.
Right. Hence, it makes sense that is desirable to increase their prosperity, so that they no longer are poor people who are, in your words, "breed like rats"
At a point, we run out of nice, fertile land; instead of just *farming*, we also have to pour on more fertilizer and more irrigation. That means going and finding more people to make the chemicals and to produce energy--more money. Less food comes out of that land, so you need to do this over more land, with more farmers. So instead of 2,000 human labor-hours to produce food for some 180 people, it's now 5,000 human labor-hours, and that means 2.5 times as much wages paid--cost of food goes up.
That's a variant of the Malthusian argument, yes.
Responding to scarcity by slowing breeding is a basic biological process.
That sounds logical. The actual data, however, shows birth rate decreases with prosperity.
Solar power in orbit actually isn't as bad an option as you may think; you simply have to go about it a bit differently. True, PV cells degrade form radiation exposure (as will any electronics used), but you can easily deploy several acres of really cheap mirrors made of aluminized Mylar film to concentrate sunlight on, say, a bimetallic thermopile (generates DC power from junctions of dissimilar metals at different temperatures, simple to make and totally radiation-hard)
Yes, this is known as a thermoelectric generator. The problem with these, however, is that their efficiency is very low-- about 5%
or a Stirling-cycle or steam-driven generator
Stirling generators are indeed more efficient. Nevertheless, you'd probably do better just using solar cells-- concentrators are not as simple as you suggest, and the added pointing requirements for concentrator systems, along with questions about the long-term reliability of generators using moving parts, probably mean that you want to keep the Stirling and Brayton converters for places that really need them, such as converting energy from nuclear sources for deep space applications.
(yes, steam in space sounds utterly wacky, but it gives you a robust, radiation-hard electric generator using low-tech means).
No need to use actual steam for converters these days. Its only advantage is that the raw material to make steam-- water-- is abundant on Earth, so you don't care if it leaks a little.
Manufacturing most plastics requires petroleum. You can't get that from an asteroid, it has to be lifted off the ground.
You can manufacture plastic from carboniferous material; it doesn't have to be petroleum.
You could get raw materials to make plastic from carbonaceous chondrites, I expect, if plastic is indeed high on the list of materials you need to make.
Economics: Population growth is tied to scarcity.
Uh, yes, I suppose. Population growth is negatively tied to prosperity: the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have. (This effect is known as the "demographic transition,") So, if you by "scarcity" you mean "poverty," then yes, you could say population growth is tied (negatively) to scarcity.
I can't make much sense of the rest of your argument, but if you're arguing that increasing prosperity caused by space manufacturing will reduce population growth, ok, that makes sense.
Raw materials.
Raw materials could presumably be acquired from sources in space-- there are millions of asteroids, including tens of thousands of Near Earth objects, which have relatively low delta-V requirements to bring to orbital locations.
The bad news is that it's not a very secure operating system. The good news is that the hackers are having trouble figuring out how to get the 2600 baud acoustic modems to ARPAnet to download the malware...
I think you should repeat it to yourself as well. ;-) Look, I'll try to explain it once more. While you may argue that a fuel cell and a battery are the same, the fact is and remains that *IT COSTS ADDITIONAL ENERGY TO CONVERT WATER OR GAS INTO HYDROGEN*. What part of this don't you understand?
The part about how this is different in any way from batteries.
In a fuel cell, you electrolyze hydrogen oxide to produce hydrogen. In a lithium battery, you electrolyze lithium cobalt oxide to produce lithium. In a nickel-cadmium battery, you electrolyze cadmium hydroxide to produce cadmium. Same thing. They are all an electrolysis reaction; they all cost energy.
It costs energy in a battery; it costs energy in a fuel cell. They are no different in this respect.
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.
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.
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.
The cost of cracking 2H2O into 2H2 and O2 is high. There is no known path to make it cheaper.
Sure there is. That path is known as "catalysis."
The problem is that it can never cost less than what you can get back from burning 2H2 and O2 into 2H2O.
Well, of course not. That's simply the law of conservation of energy. It can never cost less to put energy into a battery than what you can get back out of the battery, either. Lithium batteries store energy in the form of the enthalpy of lithium; hydrogen fuel cells store energy in the form of the enthalpy of hydrogen. Same chemical process, different ions.
Then, you have H2 gas. It's small. It's volatile. The energy density of H2 gas can never be better than a lithium battery or gasoline.
As I said. Hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it's light; the disadvantage is that it's low density. That's why I call it an engineering trade off.
You just slid in an assumption there, which is that hydrogen has to be stored at a gas, by the way.
So again, these are facts, not opinions...
That's not opinion. That's scientific fact.
Telling me over and over that your opinions are "facts" does not change the fact that they are opinions. They may even turn out to be right; I wouldn't bet against it. But your firm certainty that there are no possible technological approaches that allow any possible way to make fuel cells efficient and cost effective is just an opinion, until and unless you have investigated every possible technological approach, including the ones you haven't thought of.
Here's the part we agree on: using today's approaches, fuel cells don't look like a viable competition to batteries for electrical storage for automobile applications. The only part we disagree on is predicting future technologies that can find ways around the difficulties. You're a technology pessimist: you think that if today's technology can't solve a problem, no future technology will, either.
I'm not.
Basically, your statement boils down to "I know so much that you can trust me, I can foresee the future."
Sorry, but I fail to credit this. There are significant problems with the fuel cell approach using today's technologies. I agree with that. I wouldn't bet on fuel cell technologies. I agree with that, too.
But, that blanket statement that it's absurd to think that there could be possible technology approaches that can address the problems-- well, no. You simply don't know enough to say that. There are a lot of smart people out there coming up with interesting technological approaches to problems. Indeed, maybe they won't find solutions, but I won't make a blanket statement that it's impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Proponents always resort to this stupid comparison. Tell me, when was the last time that you hopped into a cloud of hydrogen and drove it around?
Right. That's why I followed this in the next paragraph saying that hydrogen's disadvantage is that it is extremely light.
This is the way engineering trade offs work: you look at both what it good, and also what is bad about a particular approach.
If you don't-- if you choose to list only disadvantages, and dismiss advantages-- you're not an engineer, you're an advocate.
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.
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.
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.
That does seem low. Only 488 million?? In a country with eighty billion social posts a year?
I would have guessed a much higher number.
Irrelevant. APIs can not be copyrighted, period. End. Of. Discussion.
According to the Federal Appeals Court-- whose opinion is the only one that matters (since the Supreme court declined the case)-- you are wrong. APIs can be copyrighted. End of discussion.
You may not agree, you may not like it, but that's irrelevant.
http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/...
http://readwrite.com/2015/06/2...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...