From ::
This article has some excellent recommendations at the end that we should all be doing.
Here are quotes from this article inside
<< >> with my replies.
<< Fuel (fool) cells for light vehicles: Using fuel cells to make electricity from hydrogen made great sense for the Apollo moon mission, and they may make sense for international shipping, midrange aircraft, and possibly long-distance trucking. But they make no sense for light-duty vehicles compared to batteries. Charging and discharging a battery is 90% efficient. By the time you make hydrogen using electricity via electrolysis, compress it, store it, transport it, fuel a car with it, and turn it back into electricity using a fuel cell, you have gone through a process that is much less than 50% efficient. >>
The gasoline powered vehicles called ICEVs (internal combustion engine vehicles) are less than 25% efficient yet there are billions of them working just fine. But there is the mandatory replacement of all gray hydrogen with green hydrogen made from renewables, not fossil fuels. Green hydrogen must be made in huge amounts to be used for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for other industrial processes. Green hydrogen will be mixed with natural gas to cut back on greenhouse gasses. The huge amounts of green hydrogen needed to be generated will bring the costs of green hydrogen down to less than other forms of energy storage including batteries. The efficiency of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will not be an issue when the costs of green hydrogen transportation are cheaper than the costs of fossil fuels. The green hydrogen will be made from water electrolyzed by electricity from renewables.
<< Furthermore, it cost me only $120 to convert my garage to charge my electric car for all my local driving. >>
This type of charger requires many hours for a full recharge – that’s why he said “for my local driving” which will take much less time to recharge after a short trip. If you want a fast full recharge after a long trip you will have to go to a charging station which will cost you more. Or if you want to fast charge at home it will cost thousands of dollars for the equipment and installation.
<< A commercial EV fast charging station costs about $10,000. >>
The station itself may cost that much. But that’s not counting the costs for installing higher power electrical service to the charging station. And if the charging station is ‘green’ then it will have a rooftop solar array and battery storage, which will cost more. There have been estimates that the electric grid will have to supply one third more electricity when all vehicles are electric. So there are hidden costs that the author has failed to include in the $10,000.
<< The estimated cost of state-of-the-art hydrogen fueling stations is $2,600,000 — that’s 2.6 million dollars each. The idea of building a nationwide system of hydrogen fueling stations approaching the number of gas stations we have now boggles the imagination. >>
I assume that $2.6 million is for a completely new hydrogen fueling station. There will be some of those at first. But gas stations and compressed natural gas stations will be converted to hydrogen. The costs of land and some infrastructure will be avoided so the overall cost will be less than $2.6 million. And as the number of hydrogen stations grows, the costs will follow the S curve of Wright’s Law and the costs will drop dramatically. Hopefully less than 10% of $2.6 M, especially with the compressed natural gas stations where much of the infrastructure is already there.
<< Only Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are working on fuel cell electric cars, and they are only doing it to postpone the conversion of our light vehicle fleet from gasoline to electricity. It is not just undesirable or unwise to subsidize hydrogen propulsion for light vehicles, it is a stupid thing to do. >>
Not “Only Toyota, Honda and Hyundai” are working on fuel cell electric cars. BMW and Nikola are another two and there are several other companies which have been making hydrogen fuel cells for a long time. The experts have said that the heavy transportation must use hydrogen because batteries are too heavy for propelling heavy vehicles long distance. So the routes that trucks take will require hydrogen fueling stations.
