Because a reference never hurts:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...
So, they have "ground breaking tech" in a dead-end technology then? The energy losses required to power vehicles with hydrogen are much greater than losses with electric batteries (there was a recent article on HN that really drove this point home for me). Seems like the only folks pushing hydrogen these days are folks that made bets on what turned out to be the wrong tech (cough, cough, Toyota).
Batteries are neat, but I'm not sure they scale.
Also much of the weight is carbon and oxygen. LiFePO4 also (obviously) is substantially iron and phosphorous.
Li-Ion battery production had been growing at double-digit percentage for decades. I think they've proven you wrong many times over.
Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%. I, for one, am not interested in paying 3x per mile.
The Tesla Model S weights about 2100kg.
The Tesla Model S battery weights about 540kg.
This means that a 1500kg car is forced to pack an additional 540kg to be able to store energy. That's an additional 30% of the mass that you need to accelerate and brake.
People do care about that. In the very least, the battery mass is responsible for an effective drop in energy efficiency of around 30% just to cart someone around.
> Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%. I, for one, am not interested in paying 3x per mile.
This claim has little substance and credibility. For starters, if you factor in how much additional energy you need to waste just to pack along a massive half ton battery, you'll eventually realize that the effective energy waste of a EV is not much different than the hydrogen one.
I mean, the point of a EV is not to have it parked on the driveway, charge a battery, and proceed to boast about how that was very efficient. Your goal is to move around, and moving that massive half ton beast of a battery along with you wastes a lot of energy too.
Also, battery efficiency is around 80%, which naively sounds a far improvement over fuel cell's lauded 40% efficiency. However, a Li-Ion battery weights half a ton and represents around 1/3 of a EV's mass, which also requires energy to be moved around. For reference the fuel cell of a Toyota Mirai is only 40kg, less than the weight of an adult passenger. Once you do your math you'll quickly notice the effective energy use is not that different.
And then there's the cost argument. The typical back-of-the-napkin figure for how much EVs cost to run is around 500€/year. Even if you bump that up to twice the cost, that price is eclipsed by the huge markup that you're already paying for an EV. I mean, a Tesla Model S costs about a century worth of energy bills before it even gets it's tires dirty.
Playing the frugality card with the current batch of EVs lacks any credibility and is, at best, being penny wise and pound foolish.
I think this is the wrong angle to look at the issue.
A 2100kg EV requires 25% of its total mass to support the energy storage, generation and transfer in order to provide a range and performance profile people are generally happy with.
What is the fraction for a new ICE vehicle with similar profile? The combustion engine weighs... how much? Then add the weight of a 60% full fuel tank to allow for roughly the average deadweight haul between refills. Then include the weight of the exhaust system.
And finally, we have to include the weight of the drivetrain. How much of the total weight in an ICE is dedicated to power transfer from engine to wheels? How much in a modern EV?
Energy storage and generation is only a part of the picture, getting it to the wheels is what makes a car actually perform its function. We should include these numbers to get a meaningful comparison.
>> This claim has little substance and credibility.
The efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus battery vehicles is considered in some detail in this video [1]. The conclusion [2] is that, in the best case, the energy efficiency from power generation to road for existing or near future hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is about 25%, compared to about 65% for typical existing battery vehicles.
It's not nearly as simple as that because electric cars have regenerative braking, and because the energy doesn't all go into acceleration. A lot (probably most, depending on how you drive) goes into wind/rolling resistance at a constant speed and that doesn't depend much on mass.
I'm still convinced hydrogen is scam greenwashing natural gas, though.
Mold in a petri dish grows at an accelerating rate, until it doesn’t
My conjecture is that there’s not enough lithium/etc in the world to store the energy the transportation sector requires
small cars, passenger trains, sure. but freight is a different animal. we’ll see.
Whether it seems crazy is evidence of unfamiliarity, not whether it is actually crazy. Is it really any crazier that continually pumping every car with juice made from literal fossils?
At least the battery is continually reusable — and at the end of its useful life, over 90% recyclable.
I have no idea what the CO2 impact would be and don't really care that much ("cutting CO2 will reset the climate to some state we like" sounds like wishful thinking and most of the talk in this space is ideologically coloured I don't even want to pay attention) but the improvement in urban living is going to be undeniable.
When the pandemic arrived here back in March 2020, and nearly everyone suddenly stopped leaving their home, it was eerie: the air where I live (in the middle of a major urban area) suddenly smelled as if I was in a rural area. It was something I wasn't expecting to see so soon; I have for a long time been rooting for EVs to arrive and make the air quality better, but unfortunately EVs are simply way too expensive yet (so far, I only have seen an EV once, and it was an i3 with a range extender; and I do live in a major metropolitan area).
Don’t get me wrong, electric is much better, i’m only nitpicking since you said “eliminating”
There's also the idle engine rumbling noise while waiting at stoplights, which does not exist on electric cars.
These comments show a failure to understand what does hydrogen mean and why did it popped up as an alternative to ICEs to begin with.
Hydrogen is presented as an alternative energy store that is clean, renewable, and can leverage existing infrastructure and, perhaps more importantly, consumer patterns and mental models, with little to no change.
Energy efficiency is not a concern with hydrogen, or even a relevant talking point, because the promise of being able to generate it through renewable sources means it has no implication on its carbon footprint or even pollution. Also, it was a topic that was actively being researched and thus, much like photovoltaic panels, its efficiency was likely to go up.
We also need to keep in mind that hydrogen was closest to production and mass adoption a few years ago, and we need to remind ourselves that not so long ago the idea of widespread supercharger stations and affordable electric batteries with enough storage to power a small family car was very close to a pipe dream.
In my opinion, the only reason hydrogen why hydrogen hasn't been mass adopted was the colossal investment in marketing and R&D that a few private companies made in electric vehicles in general and Li-Ion batteries in particular. In the future we might very well look back at hydrogen in a similar way that a few years ago, when ICEs were the only game in town, we looked at the EVs from the late 19th/early 20th century and we wondered why were we so close but still missed the boat.
A few places have tried to build a hydrogen network with. Metal embrittlement is a real problem and storage is not straightforward, even after you've produced it.
https://electricrevs.com/2019/06/11/recent-explosions-shutdo...
Hydrogen hasn't been adopted because it is expensive, dangerous, difficult to store and not as efficient as electric. With advances in batteries in the last few years it is definitely on the way out and electric is the clear winner here.
The point is that energy efficiency is only one factor among all other. For example, it makes little difference if you blindly tag a 80% efficiency tag on a EV if afterwards you have to waste twice the energy to cart along a massive battery.
> If the efficiency is half that of electric, you can power half the cars you could with electric with existing energy supplies.
The point that you're missing is that said cars are also far heavier (the battery on a Tesla Model S weighs half a ton alone which contrasts with Toyota Mirai's 40kg fuel cell), which requires far more energy to move around. What matters is how much energy you actually waste while driving, because that's where all the energy is going.
> Hydrogen hasn't been adopted because it is expensive, dangerous, difficult to store and not as efficient as electric.
I disagree with any of those points, specially as some of them like the safety scaremongering are far-fetched, as they aren't really grounded on the real world.
The critical difference between EVs and hydrogen was that EVs benefitted from a fantastic marketing and PR push, investment in infrastructure and R&D effort from private companies pushing EVs that was able to budge the status quo and made them acceptable to the public in spite of their major drawbacks such as massive cost, autonomy restrictions, and long charging times.
This foot-in-the-door was further compounded by the way some states decided to invest heavily in EV subsidies and public infrastructure, which was completely absurd, unrealistic and politically impossible in the recent past.
EV's recent mass adoption acceptance is not a technical feat but a social and political one which happened to leverage a specific technology.
I'm not sure about Tesla, but according to specs I found, but Kia e-Niro with 400 km range is 1737 kilograms, 400 km range Hyundai Kona Electric is 1685, 500 km range WV ID3 is 1730 ... while Toyota Mirai is 1825 kg and my ICE Jaguar is 1950 kg.
Long story short, I'm not convinced it's so simple.
Hydrogen is an energy store. It doesn't typically exist by itself in nature and must be produced.
Thus the answer for your question is any and all renewable energy sources.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/hydrogen-clean-flexible...
Neither electricity nor pre-charged Li-Ion batteries exist in nature by themselves, thus it's precisely the same problem.
I know hence the question.
to answer my question, which is also in the article you've kindly posted:
"Currently, most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, specifically natural gas"
Which is the point I'm getting at. Its cheaper to split natural gas than it is to do electrolysis.
What I have discovered is that state of the art electrolysis is about 80% which is far higher than I had remembered. Alas, fuel cells are still 40-60% efficient, so we could still be looking at terrible round trip efficiency.
Hydrogen might one day be the storage medium of choice, but its not yet. I suspect we'll have working fusion before we have practical grid scale hydrogen, let alone wide scale hydrogen cars.
I think it's safe to say that Rivian had the resources to go finish bringing its products to market.
They’re already starting out at 10% of Tesla’s market cap and a valuation higher than most auto companies. Let’s say they become the next Tesla in a decade. That would be 25% growth per year which is good, but comes with a lot of risk compared to Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.
Tesla also launched before the rest of the industry was shipping competitors. Rivian will be facing near immediate competition.
Does Rivian have secret sauce others can’t replicate? I haven’t followed them so I truly don’t know. Tesla has massive battery manufacturing, a great brand, a supercharger network, and a decade head start. What makes Rivian special compared to what Ford will be shipping in its F-150 Lightning? Or what so many companies will be shipping in the coming years?
Third, they don't really compete with Ford, they compete with Land Rover and Jeep and they are the first brand to bring something to that segment of the market that's electric.
Plus I've seen the car and it's an awesome vehicle, I have no crystal ball but I'm willing to bet they'll do well.
I know folks are saying Trevor and Nikola Motors have some sort of ground breaking hydrogen tech - but some of these other folks, despite their market caps, seem like so much trash and hype.
Not sure these folks will turn out better, but at least there seems to be something of some substance here from folks with some experience.