Now I should say, I know basically nothing about battery tech. But unless full charging time can be greatly reduced, by which I mean under 5 or at most 10 minutes, I still feel hydrogen could have the upper hand even if it is more expensive and less efficient.
Really think about the time you spend stationary when stopping for fuel on a road trip. It's not just pumping fuel, you also go to the bathroom, get some food, and stretch your legs.
Extremely fast charging a Tesla trick, Hyundai Ionic 5 (starting around 45K before incentives) can charge 10-80% in 18 minutes, which is enough to travel around 330 km. That's roughly 3 hours of driving in most counties.
I could see hydrogen making sense for fleets with local operation that need to be operated nearly 24x7, like the support vehicles at an airport, city busses, and taxis in cities with strong night life. It also makes sense for heavy industry. Doesn't make sense for passenger vehicles; the cost of batteries has crashed too far and the power grid is way too ubiquitous.
This is not very impressive, and exactly where I see hydrogen have the upper hand. I suppose it's a matter of opinion, but _having_ to stop for 20 minutes every 3 hours isn't ideal at all for me.
Those are three _mandatory_ breaks, that add up to almost an hour, in ideal circumstances. To answer your question, not a whole lot, but in that 1% 6 hour drives aren't uncommon at all.
So if you really want to optimize you can actually do it with shorter 10 min stops. Check out Kyle from inside EV.
And until you can seriously deploy Hydrogen vehicles, it would be a few years down the road. Until then the next generation of battery an charging will be significantly faster already.
Practically speaking most people simply don't drive like that, people need to eat, pie and so on. With an EV you simply stop at a charger do all the things and go back. That usually takes 10ish minutes.
And to be honest, every road trip with at least on other person usually means a break every 3h anyway.
And even more in a day to day application, most people charge over night, so never having to go to a station and having a short break every few hours is vastly preferable to having to constantly go to the hydrogen station.
Of course hydrogen would also be significantly more expensive.
All in all, it simply doesn't make practical sense to optimize everything for this one specific thing.
I don't think I am. Camping vacations in Europe are very common. 1500 km in two days really isn't as uncommon as you might think. For clarity, I'm not saying it can't be done with an EV, I'm just saying the relatively many, long, mandatory breaks aren't nearly as convenient as the relatively few short ones that regular cars, and perhaps in the future, hydrogen cars, offer.
And again, taking a quick break to stretch your legs a bit, is not the same as needing to take a 20 minute break in order to be able to continue your journey. This might seem like a small detail but I really don't think it is.
I have traveled threw Europe all my life and the idea that 15-20min stops every few hours are a major deal-breaker is just nonsense. You want to pie, you want to eat, you want to go to the shop and get some drinks.
Simply stopping, plugging in, going to pie, get a drink in the shop and stretching your legs for 5min already adds enough to drive another couple hours.
And even if you are a case, where you really are driving like that, 1-2 times a year where you do journey like that the extra 30min you spend on the journey are really not the end of the world. I honestly can not describe it any other way then a small detail that wouldn't matter to the waste majority of people.
And even if that is still a problem, a few years from now batteries will be better, charging will be even faster and density will be higher. Hydrogen would not be the right answer.
Here in Canada things are way, way further apart than Europe and car travel to vacation is often many hours or days apart. I have taken a number of EV road trips and I have not had to stop more often or stay longer than I would have in a gas car. Charging speeds and range are only getting better, but they are already well into low/no impact territory.
Okay. I can, and do so a few times a year. Also, the 3/4 hours people keep referring to, is that in a fully loaded car pulling a caravan while occasionally driving through mountain ranges with an average speed of 100 km/h?
And for the last time, wanting to take a 20 minute break is different from having to. We often postpone/skip planned breaks in order to stay ahead of rush hour, or to reach the campsite before closing time, just to name two common reasons. Mandatory 20 minute breaks greatly reduce your freedom while traveling. No matter how little of a problem this is for you personally.
The waste majority, 99.9something people will never drive with a caravan and most don't go threw the mountains.
You simply need to accept that you are representing an expedition, this has been studded. Most cars only very, very rarely do long travel at all. And when they do they don't do it very often. And when they do they stop reasonably often anyway.
You can simply accept that an EV is not for you for the moment because you are apparently a special case. Most people don't stop wanting to pie so they can beat rush hour to a campsite. That is simply not the case for 99.9999% of miles driven.
I agree, and this is what I said in my first post. My entire point is that, for most people, a car needs to meet _all_ needs, not 99% of them. Don't get me wrong, EV's are a great step forward, but perhaps hydrogen can solve some problems EV's can not. They might very well introduce more problems than they solve, fair enough. But it seems silly to just brush off possible solutions in favour of an incomplete one. Yet this is what happens every time hydrogen gets mentioned.
>And when they do they stop reasonably often anyway.
You are ignoring the optional vs mandatory difference. Whether it's a problem for you or me personally is irrelevant, the fact is it limits your freedom considerably.
[edit]
I will soon be diving 1600km. Google suggests the route will take 14h. I expect to make it in 15. Friends with Teslas suggest it would take nearly 20.
Google doesn't account for stops required for toilet breaks, eating and drinking. Of course, you can just not drink, so you don't have to pee. You can eat while driving even though that's isn't a good idea from a safety standpoint. You can skip taking any breaks and get tired, which is also a bad idea from a safety standpoint.
It also depends on the available charging infrastructure, of which I have no clue at your destination.
In my own experience with driving about 1200 km with regular breaks, it took about an hour longer than it did with my diesel. It just took more planning. Most times, a charging stop meant peeing, drinking a coffee and then the car would be finished charging. The biggest issue was that some chargers aren't near a rest stop.
The EV cannonball record was set this winter in a Porsche Taycan at 44 hrs 26 minutes and that included some charger trouble and much less than ideal temperatures. Google's estimate for that route is 42 hours without any stops of any kind.
Here is a route plan for Lincoln, NB to Las Vegas NV. 1989 km with 17:43 driving and 2:29 charging for just over 20 hours total. That's an extra 400 km covered from your rough estimate and includes going up and over some pretty serious mountains.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=71dfd1e1-a134-46c...
2 drivers.
A serious question from someone who knows little about electric cars, and who still thought it would take anywhere between 30-240 minutes to charge, depending on charger type - can electric cars really now charge faster than the < 180 seconds I'd spend refilling with petrol/diesel?
If so, I think the industry needs to make more noise about this, to make it more know.
Over the course of the 50 weeks of a year that I don’t take it on long trips I spend 0 seconds waiting for a charge. I plug it in at night and it’s always full in the morning. A typical errand running day for me is 200+ km and I have more than enough range for that.
The one or two times I take it on a road trip I usually time it with pee breaks and filling my self with coffee.
Net/net I spend less time over all waiting to refuel my car.
Yes, of course this depends on me having a place to plug it in at night.
I roll into a charger and plug in, then immediately head to the bathroom. Grab food if it's a lunch or snack break. Walk around to stretch my legs. By the time I'm ready to go so is the car.
When pumping gas I can't leave the pump unattended, so bathroom time gets added on top of refuel time. With charging the car is adding range no matter what task I happen to be doing while the car is stationary.
The other charge need is daily use. Charging at home is a game changer that absolutely beats gas pumps. It takes me 10 seconds to plug in as I leave the garage. I wake up to a full "tank" every single morning. Daily errands cannot possibly use up my 400 km range, so I never have to think about charge unless I'm on a road trip.
Within reason, this seems like it would be a good tradeoff for many people.
Say you're on a rare long journey and need to stop and charge - minutes-wise how long are we talking about?
* 5 minutes to get synced up with the distance between chargers (it's a very rural route; on more major routes you have plenty of choice about where to stop)
* 20 minutes
* 15 minutes to make sure I can make it back to the charging network since my destination is super rural.
I have made that same journey to visit family many times in a gas car and we stop in the exact same places for pretty much exactly the same amount of time. The first one is in the town my grandmother lives in, so we'd have stopped to say hello anyway. The 2nd is where we have always stop for a meal. The 3rd stop is where we always take a bathroom break.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com
Select a car and enter a route. It will be a pretty accurate picture of the necessary charging. You can play with things like temperature, arrival and departure charge state, and load.
That extra five minutes on road trips is far far far less than the amount of extra time that has cars take day to day, needing to stop at gas stations rather than get plugged in at the garage. The tradeoff is hugely in EVs favor, IMHO.
What's especially frustrating is what happens when I arrive at my destination, where I don't have access to charging and the nearest Tesla supercharger is an "urban" charger with 72Kw max. I'll typically pull into that charger between 1 and 2am and spend nearly an hour there to get the car up to 80% so that I have a charge for trips during the week. The last thing I want to be doing then is sitting in an empty parking garage, waiting for my car to charge when I just want to get some sleep in my bed. I'd love to have a quick refueling option.
I feel like the risk of freeloaders keeps hotels from installing more of them too.
"Charging" with gasoline is like 2 minutes. With electricity AFAIR it is more like 30 minutes (in case of fast charger or longer in case of ordinary one).
The time difference is huge (e.g. if you travel with kids, every minute counts).
E.g. vacation travel in Poland from south to north (very popular during vacation) takes ~8h (depending where you start), during that time I need to tank gas twice, EV would need at least 2-4 times, this would increase travel time by 1-2h.
E.g. I do cross-Poland travel only to get from the mountains to the sea. And I have two small children -> they best travel when they are asleep -> travel during night.
My car has small tank, so I have to tank twice on the ~700km trip, and in the night it takes literally up to 3 minutes to tank and pay for it.
If I would use an EV (which I would like, very much, but they are prohibitively expensive here, I mean they cost 2-3x normal car) I would probably need to tank every 200-300km, so it would make 2-3 stops that last 30 mins (and that is assuming given gas station has EV charging, if not then I would need to borrow power from someone else and do charging for ~8h from a normal wall socket).
And this is considering that I use teslas superchargers, all other last longer than 30 mins. Not to mention if there is a queue to the chargers (fortunately at night it is not likely), if you have bad luck you would need to wait 30mins for the person before you and 30mins for your own charging - that makes it completely unsable for anyone.
If production ever hits a point where it is not battery supply constrained, I could see tesla offering a battery insurance pool system with swapping capabilities, were they pull any pack under ~85% capacity and turn it into a power wall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0-sHtlCZ7M
https://insideevs.com/news/329836/tesla-battery-swap-locatio...
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0312/Tesla-b...
With gasoline, you have to go weekly for your regularly commute. It can be annoying, but the upside is that you only have to stop for 5 minutes on a long trip!
With EVs, you just charge at home or the office which is really convenient. But the downside, is that those 5 minute stops become 25+ minute stops and you typically have at least 1 more of them. On top of that, the locations aren't as prevalent which increases planning needs.
With Hydrogen, you get the negative of weekly stopping, the negative of fewer locations, and the only benefit is that it can be refilled... almost as well as a gasoline for about the same $$.
So why would I choose hydrogen over either other choice?
That’s expensive as all hell.
With hydrogen you get: fast refuels (if the station has pressurized itself after the last customer), good range, but the cost is redonculous and the distribution is nonexistent in most countries.
There are more Teslas in space than there are publicly available hydrogen refueling stations in Finland :D
That 1% use case should be priced for the externalities.
I'd like to see electric vehicle purchases heavily subsidized by taxes on fossil fuel vehicles and taxes on gasoline. If you really need to pollute 100% of the time you're operating your vehicle just in case you need that extra 1%, it should be priced in a way that really makes you think hard about that 1% scenario and whether there are really no alternatives.
I actually think a lot of people will prefer a 10-20 min fast charge on a BEV (I certainly do). Due to the volatile nature of hydrogen I can’t imagine many places will let you run to the toilet or get a coffee while pumping either; these are all just fine to do with fast charging.
For me the choice between BEV and the alternates is more about availability of home charging - if you can wake up each day with reliably ~250 miles of range already in the car, you virtually never need to fill up/charge on the road anyway!
But when you have near autonomous truck that runs closer to 24 hours per day or have a co driver in cab splitting duty then fuel cell will have an edge
Hydrogen poses some serious dangers as it is odorless and colorless if it leaks. It is very easy to ignite and it is explosive at a wide range of mixtures with oxygen. [0]
An hydrogen leak in an underground parking garage will be a very dangerous situation.
Obviously any dense concentration of energy will be dangerous. The gasoline in a traditional car is also highly flammable (though less likely to be explosive), and lithium reactions also also very hard to extinguish. But with both gasoline and lithium fire, you have some time to get yourself to a safe distance, with hydrogen... not so much.
Building gigantic storage with 1 year cycle is a gigantic waste of resources and even if you assume electricity to be totally free to make it pay for itself the invest most per storage would have to be like 100x cheaper then current grid storage.
Hydrogen in no shape or form will every be used as seasonal storage.
Hydrogen is just another form of battery that would practically have to have a 6h to a few day cycle. And in that case there are better options.
Or think in context of this liquid air (or compressed air) battery.
If you can get liquid air or compressed air batteries to cost $300/kWh or so, hydrogen in the same container compressed to the same degree can store about 100 times the energy (especially if sub-cooled). So the storage cost (if dominated by the container structure) drops by a factor of ~100. That’s $3/kWh for storage, if you don’t use salt caverns. Not great if only amortized over 20 years (plus the bad round-trip efficiency), but also not terrible if it’s only used for like 5% of the electricity needs.
And that’s the real issue with seasonal storage: no one needs it really until you get to 95-100% decarbonization of the grid. Otherwise, best to use like a few gas turbines or something as backup/seasonal power. So investing a bunch of storage when you haven’t even built out a bunch of solar or wind, yet, is kind of suboptimal. Good to do demo plants, though, so you can get ready with the tech for when you DO need to decarbonize that last 5% or so.
They serve different functions and should all be targeted aggressively.
I agree a Hydrogen car is a long way away though. Many more viable options in the near term.
And electrolysis and plasma based hydrogen from renewable natural gas coupled with renewable energy are going to be cost-competitive with SMR based hydrogen very soon. Faster than anyone thinks.
Effectively all hydrogen currently produced, and this will be true for decades, is from splitting methane.
Green hydrogen is electrolysis based hydrogen that uses renewable electricity OR plasma based hydrogen that uses Renewable Natural Gas with or without renewable electricity.
Anything that is made from Natural Gas is by its very nature grey or blue (per ridiculous color definitions).
The better approach is to use Carbon Intensity values but that is too difficult for the general public (and most professionals) to understand the nuances.
What you are referring to is if it is possible to roll out electrolysis quickly enough using renewable electricity to ensure that our hydrogen portfolio is net zero or at least significantly better than oil and gas as current stands.
LiON batteries can't do seasonal though - short term only.
Distributing all that highly flammable high pressure blow-up juice around the world for consumer use is another matter.
That simply not economical.
In fact several technologies are more likely to be used then hydrogen for grid storage.
Fantasy becomes reality:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190327-the-tiny-islands...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-56279...
I was writing about a less ambitious plan, which simply aims at storing the energy produced by solar/wind powerplants during peak production periods.
Planes will never work well due to hydrogens low energy-to-volume ratio, unfortunately.
But the same tech is necessary for carbon neutral food production anyway. Today's agriculture is fully dependant on fossil fuel energy, both for running the machines and for creating the many inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.
And there is a significant amount of potential optimization left.
Using the batteries as load structures is just one of them, that significantly changes the simplified calculation people do on density. There are many other ideas. The problem is a lot of investment and engineering is needed and to get a passenger plane threw the regulatory process, specially something as new as E-Plane is a gigantic project.
In the future battery tech will get significantly better in the next 10 years and rethinking the plane from the ground up with that technology in mind will do the trick and beat hydrogen.
I think a 30 person plane that can cover the most common routes in populated regions would beat any jet fueled airline in terms of cost.
Remember, people said the same thing about electric cars and they were wrong. This is just history repeating itself. In a decade, no one will seriously try to argue against hydrogen.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...
a lot like batteries and gas tanks
Fossil fuels in general (maybe not shale oil) are sources, since you get more energy than what you spend. So, their energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is positive.
In this regard, we're facing diminishing returns, the low hanging fruit is long gone. This, plus resource scarcity, is going to be a huge limiting factor to growth…
See e.g. https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
What will it take? What are the alternatives?
https://www.caranddriver.com/toyota/mirai/specs
https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/model-3/specs
As far as acceleration, that's just a design parameter, as both are driven by electric motors. I'm surprised the Mirai can't perform better given it's extra weight.
Cheapest way of charging EVs is from fossil fuels.
> You need a large infrastructure to produce and distribute it
But you can reuse gas stations as the delivery mechanism. Versus EVs which require all new infrastructure since the charging time is so much longer.
> It's a huge chicken and egg problem
No different from EVs right now.
> What is more convenient, having a car that can be plugged into an outlet, or a car that needs an extremely specialized hydrogen station
Hydrogen charges a full tank in < 5 minutes which makes it the more convenient solution for most of the world who don't have access to outlets at home.
Fossil fuel electricity is more expensive than wind and solar. Even the most expensive solar, residential, is cheaper than buying from a dirty grid for the vast majority of customers. And the intermittent nature of solar and wind is a perfect match for charging a fleet of EVs.
In contrast, green hydrogen is nowhere near as cheap as fossil fuel hydrogen from steam methane reformation. The dirty secret that no hydrogen fan talks about is that "blue hydrogen" the bridge to green hydrogen, requires carbon capture technology that does not currently exist at scale. And it requires transporting CO2 back to some sequestration site, doubling the amount of transportation of gasses.
Beware of the Nirvana Fallacy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Methane steam reformation is now green?
However, for more than a decade, fossil fuel companies have said carbon capture and sequestration will be easy, and then failed to execute on any of their industrial size projects. Plus, what is that captured carbon used for? Extracting more fossil fuels. Plus the sequestration requires transporting carbon long distances, and somehow making sure that the sequestration lasts on geological time scales.
So any mention of methane for hydrogen should raise huge red flags and discredit that path. There's only one path for hydrogen in the future, and that's electrolyzers, and making them go through exponential price drops over the next two decades.
1. That it requires something energy consuming like cold-temperature electrolysis.
This is no longer true. We have ways of generating Hydrogen much cheaper from water vapor - which is a very common by product in many industrial processes and which is often simply vented. The new methods also use Nickel instead of the very expensive Platinum electrodes which reduces the cost drastically.
https://www.maritime-executive.com/features/norwegian-team-d...
UNSW Team has demonstrated ways of generating Hydrogen using very cheap metals (Nickel, again) using a catalytic coating which are orders of magniture cheaper than using Platinum electrodes.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-scientists-cheaper-hydrogen-en...
2. Storage of hydrogen is very complicated and dangerous.
This is also being addressed by various teams - including the storage of Hydrogen in activated carbon etc instead of storing it in very high pressure in tanks.
https://phys.org/news/2011-09-method-inexpensive-carbon-mate...
Hydrogen's energy density gives it a big advantage over EV technologies - and if it is also stored using the newer technologies, it allows for much lighter vehicles.
And most of the costly infrastructure already exists. Its called the grid. Adding charge spots is incredibly cheap compared to adding hydrogen stations everywhere, even if gas stations already exist.
We have yet to see these lighter vehicles. Batteries can be made as a structural part of the car and the weight compared the normal structure we have now is actually pretty damn low. I don't see how hydrogen can beat that.
BEV are currently and the distance between the two technologies will grow, not shrink if you look at all the improvements rolling into BEV over the next years.
Solar is now cheaper to install than it costs to operate existing coal and oil power stations. That's a startling fact that really inverts some traditional intuition on carbon emissions.
The site perhaps, but the hardware is completely different.
nope
>Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car.
Nope, 350kw charger -> loss
>Let's not forget that the cheapest way of generating hydrogen is from fossil fuels. Electrolysis is very inefficient.
no, newest one >95%
>Any concern there might exist for the effect on the electrical grid coming battery powered cars multiplies for hydrogen due to the inefficiency.
Nope you get more energy with less area used via pipeline than grid lines
> In the end, a hydrogen car is ultimately electric. What is more convenient, having a car that can be plugged into an outlet, or a car that needs an extremely specialized hydrogen station?
home hydrogen station exist
> IMO the only excitement from hydrogen is for fossil fuel companies, because that's what the vast majority of it is made from, and because it'd be a fairly natural fit into their existing infrastructure.
wrong fossil fuel companies still want to sell fossil fuels. we have to deal with emission inside cities. hydrogen cars cleaning the air while driving. battery cars still emit emissions.
That said, I'm not sure that calling out astroturf is appropriate on HN.
* The efficiency compared to battery tech is horrendous.
* Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car.
* Let's not forget that the cheapest way of generating hydrogen is from fossil fuels. Electrolysis is very inefficient.
* Any concern there might exist for the effect on the electrical grid coming battery powered cars multiplies for hydrogen due to the inefficiency.
* You need a large infrastructure to produce and distribute it.
* It's a huge chicken and egg problem -- a hydrogen car needs hydrogen, and there's nowhere convenient right now to get it from.
* In the end, a hydrogen car is ultimately electric. What is more convenient, having a car that can be plugged into an outlet, or a car that needs an extremely specialized hydrogen station?
IMO the only excitement from hydrogen is for fossil fuel companies, because that's what the vast majority of it is made from, and because it'd be a fairly natural fit into their existing infrastructure.
There may be some niches where hydrogen could be the better solution -- hydrogen trucks might be viable because there you can have well defined routes, and trucks have a weight limit which may not play well with batteries. But for normal cars I don't really see it.