EV's by 2030, a pipe dream or

[Workingman]

Which is why the sidelining of hydrogen continues to puzzle me.
OK, I know there are problems with it. You need to use energy to create it, instead of drilling it out of the ground.
But the infrastructure is already there. Just change petrol stations to hydrogen stations - some already have it.
Only marginally slower to fill up as opposed to petrol and with a very similar range. Then look at the time it takes to charge up the EV!
Plus, you can tax it in the same way as you tax petrol.
The government does not need to spend literally billions on building power stations or charging points.
It burns cleanly, you don't need to dispose of millions of used EV batteries every year.

And, that's it!

Mention hydrogen and the EV fanboys slag it off endlessly - it's dangerous, explosive, hard to transport. it leaks, expensive to break a water molecule using electrolysis, it needs special fuel nozzles, special tanks in cars, and what if there's a crash.... and on and on.

Yet they gloss over the practical difficulties with EVs and infrastructure.

Oh, and that (expensive) electricity used to split a water molecule is the same as is used to charge an EV. And they don't go anywhere near the lost fuel tax revenue; the EV magic money tree will sort that out.

[TheOstrich]

With regards to hydrogen powered vehicles, you may be interested in the Hydrogen Bus initiative being pioneered by Wrightbus (well-known Northern Ireland manufacturer) which is now a business interest of Jo Bamford of JCB pedigree. West Midlands Transport is hoping to introduce as fleet of 20 double deckers in April 2021.

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/news/arti ... ext_spring

Mind you, I'm fairly sure they've played around with the concept before. There were 10 single-deckers in Walsall in the late 1990's with a gas pod reservoir on the roof - whether it was hydrogen or another sort of gas, I don't know. They were notoriously unreliable and didn't last more than a few years before being converted back to diesel.

[Workingman]

There were 10 single-deckers in Walsall in the late 1990's with a gas pod reservoir on the roof - whether it was hydrogen or another sort of gas, I don't know. They were notoriously unreliable and didn't last more than a few years before being converted back to diesel.

Ossie, I think that they were butane / propane powered, think camping gaz or old fork lift trucks. Modern hydrogen fuel cells, as in the new buses, are quite a leap of an upgrade. Leeds is also operating a fleet of them made by Optare.

[Suff]

Which is why the sidelining of hydrogen continues to puzzle me.
OK, I know there are problems with it. You need to use energy to create it, instead of drilling it out of the ground.
But the infrastructure is already there. Just change petrol stations to hydrogen stations - some already have it.
Only marginally slower to fill up as opposed to petrol and with a very similar range. Then look at the time it takes to charge up the EV!
Plus, you can tax it in the same way as you tax petrol.
The government does not need to spend literally billions on building power stations or charging points.
It burns cleanly, you don't need to dispose of millions of used EV batteries every year.

And, that's it!

Mention hydrogen and the EV fanboys slag it off endlessly - it's dangerous, explosive, hard to transport. it leaks, expensive to break a water molecule using electrolysis, it needs special fuel nozzles, special tanks in cars, and what if there's a crash.... and on and on.

Yet they gloss over the practical difficulties with EVs and infrastructure.

Oh, and that (expensive) electricity used to split a water molecule is the same as is used to charge an EV. And they don't go anywhere near the lost fuel tax revenue; the EV magic money tree will sort that out.

If you recall I did mention, a few times, that I worked for the company that makes the most hydrogen in the world.

So let's talk about that one.

The best hydrogen cracking cycle we have for generating hydrogen consumes about 1.5 times the energy required to charge a battery.
Then what are we going to do with the hydrogen. The most efficient engine we can stick it in is a gas turbine which is about 65% thermally efficient. But a gas turbine cannot be used on our stop start roads without using more fuel than a normal ICE. Yes, we can put a generator in the vehicle and electric motors, a very small amount of storage and voila, the routemaster bus.

But what then? We've taken 1.5 times the energy to store it and got 65% of the energy out of it again to drive the vehicle. At which time you have to ask the question "why am I wasting all that power turning water into a gas?".

Then there is storage and transport. Hydrogen is almost impossible to store at room temperature because it is so small. Simply put the only seal with a hope of holding in hydrogen is graphene and we've only just got them recently. So then we have the added energy cost of cryogenic storage and transport in cryogenic form.

OK so why don't we just put it in a normal engine and burn it?

Because the Otto Cycle engine from the 19th century is so mechanically inefficient that the thermal efficiency of the engine averages out at around 35%. Very large diesels, with low RPM, can hit around 46% but that's the top. So instead of flushing 35% of the energy down the drain in a gas turbine, we're flushing 65% down an ICE.

To understand this, Toyota used the Atkinson cycle crankshaft to try and increase their petrol Prius engine's thermal efficiency. Normal petrol is around 25%. They got it up to 41% thermal efficiency. But only increased mpg by about 5% because the Atkinson crank delivers even less power than the standard Otto one.

The only place Hydrogen has a major advantage is in power density. It is way, way, more power dense than any battery. So it has a place in the heavy vehicle and marine world where it can reduce the sheer weight of batteries.

But Hydrogen as a source for general cars? Who's kidding whom? There is a huge operations room in Australia where the price of electricity is monitored. When the price drops in one area, hydrogen gas production stops in the more expensive areas and starts in the cheaper area. It is that expensive.

Now we are talking about exchanging billions of tons of fuel, pumped out of the ground and fracked into types; into billions of tons of Hydrogen cracked with electricity, so we don't have to build a charging infrastructure for our day to day EV's and so that "nothing" will really change?

There is a reason why Hydrogen has never taken off for personal vehicles. It's neither practical nor a good use of the power we have.

[Workingman]

For a hundred years or more the motorist has had a choice of fuels, mainly petrol or diesel. They have worked alongside each other, waxing and waning as time went by, but sill giving the option. Yet today the EV fanboys are all for the eggs-in-one-basket approach: you can have any car you like so long as it's an EV - preferably a plug-in one.

And to prove just how bad hydrogen is we get reams on gas turbines, the Otto-cycle, Atkinson-cycle and don't forget the Miller-cycle engines and how inefficient they are..... but maybe forget them all because they are not what is being talked about any more than lead-acid batteries are being talked about in EVs.

The most abundant element in the Universe is Hydrogen. The most abundant molecule on Earth is water. What is being talked about is splitting one from the other and recombining them with air in a fuel cell to produce electricity to drive the electric motor rather than using a battery.

It is true that electrolysis is energy intensive but we could also us photocatalytic water splitting, which is less so. The electricity used would be the same renewable energy as is use to charge EV batteries, so no more and no less expensive.

Transporting, storage and end-user delivery of hydrogen has been going on for many decades with few hitches. It is as safe as houses despite the scare stories. I used it many times when in the RAF and I can confidently say that anyone who can connect a hoselock water system for garden irrigation can hook up a nozzle to a hydrogen fuel tank - no delivery can take place unless the male and female parts are mated correctly. There is room for both systems to operate in parallel if the will is there,

And did I mention that the chancellor can claw back his lost fuel tax revenue from hydrogen in the same way he gets it with petrol and diesel. It's another thing the EV fanboys always, always, avoid like the plague.

BTW there is no such thing as a hydrogen seal as it is the smallest atom of them all. Given time it will all escape any container.... even one made of helium.

[Suff]

I was pointing out that expending huge amounts of energy on cracking hydrogen, only to pour it away on extremely inefficient engines is a waste of time when you can pour that same energy into an EV with a battery which can hold it for up to 1 year if need be, then get twice as much work done with it.

Reducing cost and utilising the renewable energy much more efficiently.

I just gave enough detail to understand why it is pouring that energy away.

Hydrogen will never go anywhere as a fuel. Not because of people like me, but because people like you will never pay for it if there is a much cheaper and more effective solution.

Hydrogen and EV is like VHS and Betamax in reverse. EV is a more effective use of the power, already in place, easier to deploy and faster to deploy. Hydrogen is more difficult, a worse solution and more expensive. Hydrogen is going nowhere.

[Suff]

In fact if you want to see a classic example of Hydrogen and where it is going, just look at Nikola trucks.

Once that scam is finally over and done with Hydrogen will have such a bad name nobody is going to trust it.

Giga Texas, major levelling required, Day 116

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPP0_9jZhBg

Nikola, flat field, Day 113

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8lNyH3IIJw

How to give Hydrogen a bad name. I didn't have to say a word about it, they did it all to themselves.

[Workingman]

Charging is only cheap at present because you are paying, on average, the UK price of ~14p per kWh. When the chancellor loses his £40 bn in VED, VAT and fuel duty that is going to rise substantially. Who says? Sunak says. The halcyon days of £6.50 for a 30 min, ~100 mile charge will be over, then you will be paying the real price.

He will not be putting the price of ALL electricity up and hit industry and homes (heating, lighting and cooking, he is not that stupid, so he IS going to find some way of recouping his loses and, as he mentioned the other day, it could be through pay-per-mile or pay-as-you-drive. You can bury your head in the sand as deep as you want to go with this but he WILL be charging (pun) you EVers a lot more for the electricity you use specifically for your EV than you pay now. He might even get you to pay the real costs for your magic infrastructure as well.

C'ya.

[Suff]

You know that the cost of wind energy goes negative when oversupply is there? Hence why you see so many wind turbines shut down.

EV's will be able to take and use that oversupply. Which balances things out a bit. Using technology to charge when power is plentiful and cheap is what it is all about. You don't just plug an advanced EV into the grid and it starts sucking power unless you need it to. It's not a kettle. There are scheduling options and as the whole grid/power/charging infrastructure evolves, demand scheduling will become part of the architecture.

Of course there are plenty of dumb EV's out there which act like a kettle. But the mainstream are already producing more EV's in a quarter than Nissan sold in the last 10 years. So the current "dumb" EV's will only play a small part in the future demand.

As I have said several times. This is not today, tomorrow or even 3 years from now. Major demand will start to kick in about 5 years from now and the peak demand will surface around 12 - 15 years from now.

12-15 years is a millennium in the age of modern EV technology and power infrastructure. It is hardly as if we're dealing with pushing fuel to physical bricks and mortar buildings with fixed sized tanks in the ground. Our grid is far more flexible and incremental upgrades will play a large part. Charging technologies are also in their infancy.

Already the penetration of EV into society has started to spawn solar charge banks in all sorts of places.

Society will have to change. But not as much as it will when CO2 hits 500ppm and the climate starts on a long climb to destruction of our liveable biosphere. It has to start somewhere and the challenges will only get larger the longer we wait. These kind of changes are not really optional.

It is worth remembering where the driver for this is coming from. Fully 1/3 of our emissions come from transport. This chart is after Kyoto, Copenhagen, Paris, etc. Working? Not!



That looks bad enough. Now let's put that in real context.



This is not a choice thing. We don't have a choice. We just have to damned well get on with it.

[cromwell]

There is a reason why Hydrogen has never taken off for personal vehicles. It's neither practical nor a good use of the power we have.

I can't argue the science with you Suff, you know way more than me about that.
I was thinking of convenience. For the consumer, time to fill up and range. For the government, ease of taxation and crucially, no need to spend epic amounts on upgrading the electricity infrastructure.

But the decision seems to have been taken, even if Honda, Toyota (who have just released the new Mirai) and Hyundai (making a hydrogen truck) are hedging their bets a little.

For what it's worth I have no intrinsic animosity towards EV's. If it works, I'll drive it; and the increase in battery range in a few short years has been very impressive. We'll have to see.