I think there is a future in hydrogen fuel cells, but not for personal transportation.

Heavy machinery operated in remote areas like farming equipment have pretty intense energy needs and downtime for charging could ruin a harvest. Batteries are also very heavy and soil compaction is a real issue for modern farming.

I think we're approaching a time where the marginal cost of energy will be 0, but there will still be costs associated with using energy at a specific time or place. I would like to see a lot more dollars being spent on technology and facilities that can ramp their energy consumption up and down extremly quickly to absorb extra power on the grid. Hydrolysis seems like a fantastic candidate since the process is highly interruptible and the result is portable.

Trains too, there are some experimental fuel cell lines replacing diesel locomotives in germany and they ordered more, so it seems to be working. Presumably it's cheaper than electrifying branch lines.

Battery electric trains also greatly reduce the cost of rail electrification. They can charge when running under the wires, then use battery power on unnelectrified sections and branch lines.

I’d imagine you would only need a relatively short section of powered rail around each station, plus maybe some boosters for long inter-station runs or hills. I’m surprised this approach isn’t more common.

As an EV owner who also owns a 7klb Kubota CUT diesel is still ideal here for a few reasons. First it's easy to handle and transport, hydrogen has no shortage of issues there. It has a heck of a shelf life, my understanding is hydrogen will leak out and is a massive pain to store.

Unless you're doing serious ground work an EV based platform could be fine with solar. JCB already has a few electric excavators and they work pretty well.

I also with there was more focus on biodiesel, that has the aspect of being carbon neutral while working with a lot of existing infrastructure.

Biodiesel doesn’t solve air pollution, which is a huge health issue in many cities.

Admittedly it’s not such an acute problem for farms and rural areas, though, where biodiesel does make sense.

Yeah, that also depends on how modern your diesel is. The Kubota is much, much better on the particulate scale vs out old Ford thanks to a substantial DPF filter.

Newer diesels, when not modified are much better than they used to be.

This is a good article on zero carbon farming utilizing hydrogen and ammonia powered tractors, using solar to produce the hydrogen.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-retired-jpl-e...

> I think we're approaching a time where the marginal cost of energy will be 0

I strongly believe that we will continue to find arbitrary uses for available energy, e.g. Bitcoin mining. I can buy that current normal household energy use will approach 0 cost, but I think there will be players that scale use in such massive amounts that marginal costs will still matter to them.

Some alcohol probably makes more sense in a near zero cost energy world than hydrogen. It's easier to store and blah blah blah.

It's much easier to add some carbon into your hydrogen than it is to deal with all the problems that hydrogen bring.

This might be a dumb question: what if you could build a reactor that electrolyzes water but then also converts it into methane? If the electricity used for the process was derived from renewable sources, the process would still be carbon neutral, yeah?

I'm assuming the carbon itself could be harvest through non-fossil fuel means (biological perhaps? burn cellulose?).

Pilot “methanation” plants are already producing synthetic methane from hydrogen and CO2:

https://www.uniper.energy/news/methanation-plant-in-falkenha...

Theres also this thing: https://www.slashgear.com/hydrogen-fuel-cell-ev-charger-afc-...

I have no idea if the economics of that actually will work.

I've always wondered why you couldn't just string a wire from a tower down to a combine, tractor, or other piece of farm equipment and run it right off the grid. Using very high voltage could allow the wire to not be that heavy.

Because farms are huge, and any given unit of area needs to be touched relatively infrequently.

Cables can be thin and long. Look at high tension wires which carry vastly more power. It stands to reason that a much thinner lighter cord could run a combine.

I won’t even use a corded lawn mower. I highly doubt I’d put up with dragging a wire behind a combine through a 400 acre field.

Not dragging but way overhead from something about the height of a radio tower. There could be one about every square mile in a grid. It could have a smaller battery too to permit driving between them. Drive up, hook on, unhook, go to next.

It occurs to me that because I’ve operated farm equipment, maybe one should ignore my poo-pooing. Seriously, sure, I can tell you eight ways to Sunday this won’t work, and some smarty-pants can show me how I’m wrong. But right now I’m just stuck in a mode of “that’s more hassle than filling it with diesel and being done with it”. I might be right, but that’s not where innovation comes from, so I’ll be quiet.

It probably is more of a hassle but it would also be cheaper and lower emission. Of course I dont know if fuel is a significant cost to farmers.

There may be ways to make it less of a hassle by automating it somehow. I'm thinking of some standard hook on/off system. It's a tough problem though.

Maybe batteries will just keep getting better and lighter and cheaper and we can just go that way.

You're suggesting a large capital investment, with dubious utility, in a leveraged, low margin business with little access to technologically aggressive capital funding.

Furthermore, it's predicated on the supplier developing and marketing a class of equipment for which little demand currently exists.

Against that, the price of diesel seems relatively small.

They should have been well placed to adopt EV's with their experience making the Prius. It's mind boggling to me that they didn't take advantage of that.

The major hurdle for EVs was getting energy density, capacity, and power from batteries, all problems that Toyota's hybrid technology solves with the ICE instead (the Prius battery's primary function is to reclaim braking energy and assist the ICE).

Therefore despite their lead in hybrids, that tech wasn't directly transferable to EVs.

I can see a hybrid vehicle with both batteries and fuel cells as a future option however. I don't think we're doing to slay this problem with just one technology.

> ”I can see a hybrid vehicle with both batteries and fuel cells as a future option”

All fuel cell vehicles already have batteries, of course.

But if you mean plug-in fuel cell hybrids, I don’t think that will happen.

Manufacturers of fuel cell vehicles need to create demand for hydrogen in order for hydrogen filling networks to expand, in turn stimulating demand for more hydrogen cars.

But if you put a plug on the car, owners will prefer to use the batteries for their daily driving, only using expensive hydrogen occasionally as a backup or for long-distance driving. This would greatly reduce the demand for hydrogen, so filling networks would struggle to be viable.

Also, from an engineering perspective, if you’ve gone to the trouble to add a plug and charging equipment, you already have an EV. Why then add expensive, complex fuel cells, bulky hydrogen tanks, huge air filters and all the rest of it? It’s just going to be easier and cheaper to use a bigger battery!

Nope. Hybrids are already starting to phase out.

Unified fully electric on batteries is so much cheaper that once it achieves critical distance (somewhere north of 150 miles per charge), hybrid adds far too much manufacturing and engineering cost.

If we are to do that on a big scale it required massive infrastructure investment. Something we are nowhere near yet. Plugin hybrids offer a useful stepping stone.

VW have been making a lot of noise about their ID range lately but if you look at what they have in the pipeline it's mostly hybrid.

Not as much as people think. The existing grid, in the UK at least, can cope with only minor changes, so long as cars are smart enough to react to pricing signals as they charge. This is quite simple to do as the grid already implements a market system with prices available in real time.

The big challenge will be providing charging for people (in the UK about 40% of the population) who do not have the opportunity to park their car off road. Quite a lot of this demand could be met by simply providing normal domestic sockets with RFID controlled breakers on posts at 6 m intervals along urban streets and in every public parking space. This is relatively simple and scalable and does not need large capital expenditure to get started.

Why on earth was this downvoted?

Because I think that concept already exists as prototypes.

A small fuel cell for example can serve as a range extender.

So for short drives you charge and use the batterie (cheap energywise). For long ranges the fuel cell adds power to charge the batterie. Methan or hydrogen is fast refueld and has a much bigger energy storage capacity compared to batteries.

If you look at the range of Teslas, it is close to the one of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The problem is, that hydrogen pressure tanks are large. Compare a Mirai to a Tesla Model 3. Even the recharging of the Tesla is close to the speed of hydrogen stations. (The refueling with hydrogen is faster, but then there are about 15 minutes in which the fuel pump has to repressure itself)

I am not saying the concept is superior right now. I am saying it is worth thinking about. And when you have the fuel cell only as addition, maybe you don't need the big pressurised tanks.

Maybe a small methan tank.

Maybe even then it is still not worth it regarding the extra weight and cost. I don't know. But I do know that the involved technologies are advancing and combining things makes sometimes sense.

edit: and the market is big. there are also people living in remote areas who sometimes want and need range extension in which case they could pack in some extra tanks.

Why on earth would you need that for a normal car?

Because the power density for fuel cells is pretty meager, so you use batteries as an energy buffer to smooth out the demand.

same reason you'd have a plug in hybrid.

Any maybe you really believe in hydrogen, but you're the ~largest automaker, you can afford to also bet on batteries.

I think they see the writing on the wall for their services business with solid state tech and wanting to fight the trend. Or, building engines are just such a core part of their company that they’re essentially petrol heads looking for a replacement as near as possible. But I’m low information on that and just speculating.

Fuel cells are neat tech though. I also understand the argument they made with respect to using nickel hydride batteries over lithium. See their CFOs recent remarks.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells are electric.

Yes, and they wear out and must be replaced. The drive train is powering an electric motor. Toyota might be expecting to get more service work out of fuel cells than batteries. Just throwing things at the wall for their motives though.

> Yes, and they wear out and must be replaced.

Doesn't everything? Some production fuel cells have a service life of >50000 hrs. That's way more than you can expect out of batteries.

>Someone high up at Toyota bet on fuel cells 20 years ago and can't back down now without losing too much face

That's it exactly. At the time li-ion batteries were pretty poor, so fuel cells seemed like a good bet. Since then batteries have progressed much faster than fuel cells, and now are way ahead, and no doubt that will continue in the future.

Many observers have commented over the decades that Japanese corporations have great difficulty admitting they have made a mistake, and this seems to be another case of that.

Germany, Korea, Australia and China are also all over hydrogen.

I don't see much of hydrogen here in Germany. Volkswagen, the biggest car manufacturer has clearly set the bets on battery electric. Mercedes has a hydrogen car, but only leases it out, doesn't sell it. Of course, everyone who missed the battery electric car market so far is still talking about hydrogen as "the future".

How many hydrogen charging stations are there in Japan and all those countries combined, as compared with how many electric charging stations?

Li-ion ev's outsell hydrogen ones about a hundred to one, and the numbers are going to greatly increase in the coming years. Hydrogen for cars has never gone anywhere and it never will.

Does Australia even have a car industry?

It did. It died.

That's not the Toyota way. From a Westrum "Three Cultures Model" perspective Toyota would fall into the Generative classification, not Pathological or Bureaucratic.

Based on the discussion in the article I think Toyota is saying they've learned EVs are not scalable and are not a solution to all customer needs Toyota currently services. They're betting hydrogen is the solution.

Part of the reason that Toyota continues to pursue hydrogen fuel has to do with a Japan’s energy needs. It’s a pragmatic approach that acknowledges that energy needs to be stored and shipped long distances in order to avoid generating fuel in-country. Also, the idea that Toyota isn’t all over battery tech is a complete misunderstanding. All one needs to do is read their public strategy, which is available. They’ve been working on personal and ultra compact EVs, people movers, trucks, etc. They tend to release domestically first and move thoughtfully (cf. Tesla), as US consumers have proven to be very fickle, prone to nationalism, and so on.

> Hydrogen just doesn't make sense from any engineering viewpoint other than "make sure there are still gas stations and a fuel distribution network no matter the cost."

There are gas stations and a fuel distribution network, so it makes sense to use the existing infrastructure.

Our current fuel containers are completely unable to hold hydrogen. Neither can the fuel transportation infrastructure.

Fuel cells might be able to compete in that small slice of the market that needs deep-cold compatible vehicles. There are millions of people who live in places like Edmonton or Novosibirsk where temps can drop below -40. I don’t know if current HFCs can handle that but since gas solubility is higher at low temperatures it seems like a possibility. Lowering battery operating temperatures seems to be a hard problem.

Battery management systems deal with this by using some energy to heat the pack. So dealing with cold temperatures is just a measure of insulation and some vampire drain. While driving, or parked in a garage, there are no issues of course. Note that Norway is the European country where Tesla cars are most popular, so the problem seems to be nonconsequential in practice.

Norway is rather warmer than Novosibirsk. Annual average temperature in Drammen is 6 C, Novosibirsk 1 C. January average in Drammen is -3.6 C, Novosibirsk -17.3 C. See https://en.climate-data.org/asia/russian-federation/novosibi... and https://en.climate-data.org/europe/norway/buskerud/drammen-9...

But generally speaking you are correct. My Tesla S 70D has active battery temperature management and can be set to precondition the battery and heat the cabin at set times every day so that it is ready to go when you commute to work.

A problem with that idea is that the total numbers would be so small that there would never be any real economies of scale, and so the cars would be too expensive for most people to afford.