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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Electric Vehicles
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IDK why hydrogen just hasn't captured any mind share. Seems like a great technology.
Someone will be along in a moment to tell me all about embrittlement and blue hydrogen, yet conglomerates are pouring many billions into water cracking infrastructure right now.
Huge energy losses in the conversion of electricity to hydrogen. Also for passenger cars there are no clear benefits. 350kW chargers provide hundreds of kilometers of range in under 20 minutes.
In some places (like Western Australia), solar electricity is very cheap, making the inefficiencies of conversion economically viable.
The benefit is storage and transport of energy.
I've always considered hydrogen cool but ive also assumed it needs huge infrastructure changes so it can be supplied to the general population. Some EVs you can plug in an outlet and putting up charging station is super easy.
I want to get off gas yesterday and EV is simply the quickest way imo.
Sure ok, but we're building infrastructure right now.
Hydrogen is great on paper until you start looking into the details.
hydrogen cars have to store the fuel in 70000 PSI tanks. theres only 2 stations in my major city area that sell it, and they are often unavailable due to maintenance or supply issues. if the car needs service the only place that will touch it is an hour drive away.
It's almost as though you need infrastructure.
Put a 10,000 psi tank of hydrogen in your car, or a tank of heavy, reactive metal hydride. Also, while hydrogen isn't a greenhouse gas, releasing unburned hydrogen into the atmosphere causes more GHG to be formed. Humans are terrible at keeping unburned gasses from leaking.
It’s great science but it’s hard technology.
It almost requires extremely high pressure or cryogenic storage and it diffuses through everything.
Critics of hydrogen cars are repeating the same criticisms of EVs just before they took off. Same can be said of wind power or solar power. In reality, it's just the same anti-green and anti-progress BS you hear about any new green technology. It's all the same story.
Take it easy, it's a bit more complex than that. Slow as it might be, everyone understands you can charge an EV even with just a regular 15A 120V plug. Stuck at your father in laws out in the country? They've still got a plug.
Generally, people are uncomfortable with high pressure explosive gases. I think overall, hydrogen gas a better shot in industrial/heavy trucking markets than consumer transport.
No it isn’t. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s much harder to wire up millions of charging stations with the necessary amount of power, than to deal with high pressure gas. We’ve just normalized the danger of high-voltage electricity. In reality, this is just as safe if not more so, and a lot easier to pull off.
You can plug an EV into an outlet in your garage. No way could hydrogen be easier than that.
You have to have a garage to begin with. People have created a distorted grasp of what infrastructure even is.
Two thirds of Americans have a garage. Roughly zero can refuel hydrogen cells at home.
2/3 is still not 100%. And you can refuel at home if you really wanted. In fact, you can even refuel a gasoline car at home. But in reality this was never a major selling point. It's just the crutch BEV fans are relying on. The refueling infrastructure is the only thing that really matters.
Most EV users charge at home, this is absolutely a major selling point, and they would all lose this ability if they switched to hydrogen. Which is why they aren't switching to hydrogen.
And a lot of people can't charge at home. You will still need public stations.
In the end, this is just the whining of a handful of rich people. If it is more straightforward to get everyone to refuel at public stations, it is the better solution.
You will need public stations with hydrogen, too. But with BEV, you need a lot fewer stations. Which is why switching to BEVs is a lot more straightforward.
You will need millions of charging stations everywhere. Both AC and DC charging stations. It is actually less straightforward once you go beyond home recharging.
That's ridiculous, there aren't anywhere near a million gas stations in the US, and you will need a lot fewer charging stations than gas stations.
Erm, no buddy. Everyone's entitled to their incorrect opinion, and this one's a doozy.
How much big of a tank of H2 do you need to effectively equal the energy capacity of a lithium ion pack? If the tank needs to be reasonably sized, how high is the pressure? How do you ensure hydrogen embrittlement isn't a problem on both the tanks and the transport pipes/storage tanks? How does pressure correlate with exfiltration?
Flying wires is a walk in the park, especially competitively.
"Hydrogen will never work, there are no hydrogen gas stations in my city"
Lordy.
Hydrogen cars have limited performance, are overly complex and there's no infrastructure. For an average consumer they make zero sense
This is a pretty vanilla statement. You could say this about literally any new tech.
Why ask the question if you already know the answer?
The reason it hasn't taken off is because it's a fundamentally very difficult technology to safely build. Embrittlement is a fact of physics, and it's extremely difficult to design around, especially at scale.
And the fact that there is almost zero global capacity to manufacture green hydrogen means that there is little point in subsidising it from an environmentalist point of view.
Hydrogen will have its uses, maybe in niches like aviation fuel where requirements are very specific and it's possible to exercise much tighter control of the infrastructure chain. But it's just not a competitive technology for replacing petrol and diesel in general purpose road vehicles.