this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Where were BEVs just 15 years ago? These things do not happen all at once. Most arguments against fuel cell cars are outdated and from people stuck in the past.
Where are fuel cells today?
I read my first story about the coming fuel cell cars in 1996, and they were less than a decade from production then, but they never came.
Toyota, the builder of some of the best cars ever made, has spent decades and billions trying to make fuel cells work for cars. If a company with the engineering excellence of Toyota is struggling for so long...
BEVs are not on the road because they are better than fuel cells. If fuel cells could be practically made, they would beat BEVs in every aspect. Range, refuelling, environmental impact
But they don't.
BEVs are not better than fuel cells but they actually work for cars.
BEVs are over 100 years old. In fact, they're older than ICE cars. No one seems to notice that this is the longest development process of any technology in the industry.
Meanwhile, fuel cells are just coming into their own. Most of your arguments are just totally outdated and stuck in the past. You seem oblivious to the fact that FCEVs already exist and are being sold to the public right now. They're already a developed technology, just one that hasn't become popular yet. It is likely dismissing solar and wind energy just as they were taking off. It is just being closed-minded and short-sighted to say these things.
Fuel cells were invented in 1839. What are you talking about? Fuel cells are also widely used in backup generation, and on-site power generation for large consumers of electricity. I've even visited an EV charging station powered by natural gas fuel cells.
Batteries are an even older idea. As a technology that can power vehicles, fuel cells are coming in their own now.
The first real device we'd call a battery was from 1800. So a 38 year head start. The technology of fuel cells isn't the issue with them, it's the fuel part. Well, that and the catalyst plates. But that's not exactly rocket science to rebuild a fuel cell when the catalysts need refurbishment.
The first time we had a fuel cell powered car of any kind was in the 1960s. It is a much more recent technology.
Part of the advancement in fuel cell is our ability to produce hydrogen at a low cost. It is mirroring the progress that photovoltaics went through.
That's the only part, in fact, that needs advancement. And it's in no way mirroring PV cells development path or cost decreases. Our most efficient, lowest cost form of abundant hydrogen is cracking it out of methane / natural gas. And that method will always be more expensive than just generating electricity from the methane because you need to generate high temperature steam as part of the process by burning some of the methane. The only other source of less expensive but not abundant enough hydrogen is as an industrial process byproduct. And that's not even close to producing enough to meet current demands if we could magically capture it and had no refining costs to scrub out other wastes.
Then you are painfully stuck in the past. Your rhetoric is not just a repeat of anti-wind and anti-solar, it is purely climate doomerism. The same argument climate change deniers have continuously made. It's entirely based on the idea that nothing can replace fossil fuels. In reality, this is an infinite resource for all practical purposes. It's long-term cost will be approximately zero, not whatever number you wish it to be.
I guess I'll just say that if you think we're stopping climate change at this point, you live in a fantasy. It's happening, we've already done irreversible damage, and the conversation we're having now is how do we stop making it worse than the catastrophe it's already guaranteed to be. We aren't preventing head deaths or massive climate migrations, that shit's happening no matter what we do.
As for me, I absolutely do not believe fossil fuels are our only way forward. I simply don't believe in magic. The energy required to produce H2 gas isn't free, the energy to compress and chill it isn't free, the energy to truck it around or build and operate pipelines isn't free. What I do believe is that renewable energy will continue to displace existing fossil fuels at an increasing pace. Their LCOE is exceptionally hard to beat with any system that destroys its energy source as part of its reaction. Nuclear is likely off the table due to cost and regulatory issues, but it's perhaps our best bet for base loads.
You are misdirecting. You are effective saying that green hydrogen can never be as cheap as fossil-fuel based hydrogen, which is an absurd argument and is basically climate doomerism.
What you are fundamentally missing is the fact that this does not require limited resources. It's all made from stuff that is available everywhere. It is literally just combining wind, sunlight and water together to create a fuel that can nearly directly replace natural gas. These are basically infinite resources with basically infinite supply. The cost floor is zero because of that. It is exactly the same argument as wind or solar.
In fact, you are repeating the exact same anti-PV argument that fossil fuel people made: That the EROI of solar panels is permanently poor, or that efficiency is simply too low. Which in their minds meant it will never be cost effective. But they never noticed the fact that sunlight is an effectively infinite resource with a cost floor of zero. As a result it simply didn't matter what advantages fossil fuels had. A solar panel can just churn out energy at nearly zero cost, and ultimate that is what happened. Same thing with wind too. And anything that is just an extension of that idea will also have a cost floor of zero. As a result, it is merely a matter of when green hydrogen drops to nearly zero cost. Alternatives will not be able to beat that and therefore they will be displaced by it.
No, I'm not even engaging in the boondoggle that is "green" versus all the other types of hydrogen. I'm telling you that producing hydrogen from electricity is nonsensical when you can just use the electricity.
No, it's saying this is a stupid solution not that there's no solution.
But Hydrogen, largely, is not freely available. It's found bonded to other atoms, and those bonds require energy to break. The problem you face is that the amount of energy necessary to break those bonds is higher than the amount of energy you can get back out of the hydrogen.
This is pure nonsense and fantasy. You do not have a supply of freely available hydrogen, which means your cost floor is the cost of breaking hydrogen out of its existing bonds. That's like saying the cost floor to charge a battery is zero. It's nonsense. You need to put energy into producing the hydrogen, plain and simple.
The rest of your comment is just nonsense. You're attempting to put words in my mouth and inventing arguments I'm not having. So I'm not engaging with that in any way.
You are still missing the point then. You cannot use that electricity. It is going to be curtailed electricity and is basically lost in the production process.
Taking that unusable electricity making something out of it will drive the cost of hydrogen to basically zero. This is the fundamental reason why solar also became so cheap, despite PVs being "inefficient." You're simply taking something free and making something useful out of it.
Like I said from the beginning, you are just repeating the same anti-wind and anti-solar arguments of the past. You can insist that you didn't actually say that or claim that this is somehow different, but none of that is meaningful. It is just closed-minded nonsense regardless.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
5%. You're talking about 5% of energy transmitted is lost. So you're going to start a hydrogen revolution with 5%?
I get it, you've found a thing you can be a champion for. But you're blinded to the real world by your overzealous fandom.
Because electricity is traditionally sent very short distances. It's too bad that this is going away. Your renewable energy resource may be thousands of miles away in the future.
PS: It was a pipeline that sent natural gas to your local gas turbine power plant. If electricity losses was always going to be 5%, why did that pipeline exist at all?
P.S.: My power plant doesn't burn hydrogen.
I literally said natural gas...
the biggest hindrance to hydrogen is the cost to build a hydrogen station vs out in ev chargers. why would anyone build a hydrogen station when they could install many ev chargers for the same price. maybe trucking and busses, like greyhound not metro or school, could be a usecase for hydrogen going forward.
It's cheaper to install hydrogen stations than it is to build charging stations. That's because it cost 10x less to move hydrogen around compared to electricity.
https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-for-an-electric-grid/
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/21002-hydrogen-fueling-station-cost.pdf
https://futureenergy.com/ev-charging/how-much-do-ev-charging-stations-cost/
https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/evse_cost_report_2015.pdf
or its cheaper to install ev chargers.
More stations more greater economies of scale. At some point this will be no more expensive than a gas station. Also, you have a much greater capacity per station compared to a charging station. It will pencil out to being cheaper than building the much greater number of charging stations. Not to mention maintenance. The cost of maintaining millions of charging stations will be a major challenge.
im no business major but even i can see its a no brainer to go with an 38 ev chargers vs 1 hydrogen station. and the same economies of scale will make it cheaper to build more ev stations cheaper. hydrogen may have a place, trucking and busses like greyhound might make sense for hydrogen but currently it makes no sense to build a hydrogen station for normal passenger vehicles.
Until you realize that 1 hydrogen station can refuel hundreds of cars per day. Economies of scale are in hydrogen's favor. BEV advocates are simply lying about the facts.
and so can 38 ev charging stations.
At 38x time the land area and far greater power consumption. And it does not scale very well either. Double the number of stations and everything doubles in cost. Nor are you getting a full 400 miles if you are assuming fast charging. You're looking at only a 80% max charge in that situation. Meanwhile, with hydrogen, you just need bigger tanks to support multiple stations. Everyone is fully refueled after 5 minutes consistently. It is the same idea as natural gas refueling stations. Once costs drop due to increases production and economies of scale, the hydrogen stations easily wins this argument in a walk.
Again, BEV advocates are simply lying. They are just trying to defend their car purchase. It is completely at odds with economics and physics.
ev chargers can be installed in existing parking lots negating a lot of that space issues. however if a gas station wants to serve both gas and hydrogen theirs only so much room for the tanks needed underground. and if you want bigger tanks thats even less room for other tanks.
have fun waiting for hydrogen, the rest of us are gonna leave you behind.
You will have to tear up all those parking spaces to put up chargers. Meanwhile, those gas stations already exist and it would just mean repurposing them for hydrogen.
Guys like you are just stuck in the past. You'll end up cheering on a dead end because you cannot conceive of progress in the car industry.
a trench a few feet deep vs digging deep enough to put a giant pressure vessel underground. which is harder? theres some work, sure, to install ev chargers but its much less, hince the price difference to install, to run copper wire in a conduit than it is to dig a hole for the pressure vessel to hold the hydrogen.
You'll have to do this millions of times and wire it all up. Cost is going to be north of $1 trillion for there to be enough of them.
And you're wrong about that: It is cheaper to move and store hydrogen than it is to build wires:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-hydrogen-cars-refuse-to-die-2bfd6295
You're repeating too much BEV propaganda. It is just more expensive and that is fact.
well when theres hydrogen stations around me ill admit i was wrong. til then i keep seeing more and more ev chargers. and they arent even at gas stations. and as we replace or renovate buildings itll be easier to add chargers. and yeah copper isnt cheap but you only need to run it once, vs have a truck keep resupplying you with hydrogen. and those truck drivers deserve a good wage. and then you need a gas station attendant, adding to the cost. and then theres is possible cleanup of soil contamination at said gas stations to even build a hydrogen pump. and then theres the fact it needs to be chilled and pressurized, again adding to the cost. vs electricity thats already there.
Moving electricity around only requires aluminum wire and transformers. Incredibly cheap. Moving hydrogen around requires either roads and trucks (already more expensive than high voltage AC transmission) or a pipeline that won't leak hydrogen plus training for emergency response (also more expensive than high voltage AC).
Steel pipes are even cheaper. You are just regurgitating pro-BEV talking points. It is much cheaper to move hydrogen around than electricity.
But it isn't just steel pipe. It's steel pipe precision welded and leak checked, buried under ground, with lots of continual maintenance, pump stations to increase pressure, control systems, etc. More expensive even than natural gas piping, which is already difficult to get installed with municipalities frequently rejecting it for safety reasons.
We've been back and forth on this countless times over the years, you and I, but you keep coming back to these same points. None of which are correct. BEVs use existing infrastructure, and while they are NOT the best solution, they are the best solution people are going to choose. You're flat out not going to get someone to pay more for hydrogen than they would for any any other fuel, producing the hydrogen isn't as energy efficient as charging a battery, and installing an H2 station is significantly more expensive than installing even a DCFC station with four or six stalls and all the complimentary transformers necessary.
And yet that's the same idea as natural gas pipes. It is not any more expensive than natural gas pipes. In fact, natural gas pipelines are 10x cheaper than wires. This whole line of reasoning is just BEV propaganda. Wires are not magic and have huge costs associated with them.
In the end, an FCEV will be cheaper to own and by a huge margin. Hydrogen will be nearly free since it can be made from excess and unused electricity. The infrastructure will be cheaper by a huge margin too. People are just stuck in the past and are refusing to accept change. It is the same rhetoric as anti-wind and anti-solar. It is a doomed argument and its ridiculous to keep on repeating it.
It is, because hydrogen will leak more easily than methane.
Well now I damand you cite your sources, because natural gas pipelines are 5x the price per installed mile compared to high voltage transmission lines. I mean, the amount of material alone should be sounding alarms in your head. And that's from EIA. Even PG&E is citing $2M per mile to bury their high voltage transmission lines in California of all markets. Several markets in the US have absurdly low costs of under $300k per mile installed. So, yeah, I'm going to need to see a source that isn't hydrogenhype.org or something.
My guess is in 20 years time, the cost of buying an FCEV and a BEV will be equivalent. The cost of fueling the two vehicles will still strongly favor BEVs, and the only advantage that FCEV will have is refuel time (5 instead of 30 minutes) and range per kg. Batteries are going to be heavy no matter what the futurism weirdos claim and hydrogen gas is more energy dense per kg no matter what we do.
Here is the source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668
You are simply regurgitating BEV propaganda by denying this. It's just all made-up bullshit from those people. Pipelines are radically cheaper than wires and that is undeniable.
Hell, if wires were really cheaper, why do natural gas pipelines exist at all? Just run gas turbines at a centralized locations and send the electricity to where it needs to go.
In the long-run, BEVs will end up being too expensive to be competitive. In fact, they're not competitive at all even now, and rely entirely on subsidies to be viable. The pathway to zero emissions will reveal these inconvenient facts and likely drive BEVs to a marginal niche. And if the future is not FCEVs, then it will be something like synfuel powered cars.
Let's take a couple things you've said and compare them to the link you just provided me. You said that the cost of hydrogen pipelines was equally inexpensive as methane / natural gas. Yet in the abstract of your link,
Now how could nat gas be 11x cheaper than electricity but hydrogen is only 8x if they cost the same? That sounds like it's 37.5% more expensive per MWh delivered. Interestingly, to deliver 1 MWh of hydrogen, you only need to deliver 30kg. Of course, the LCOE of that 30kg of hydrogen is hilarious compared to methane gas power plant.
And, of course, the very next paragraph dives into that.
That's only true for DC, not for AC transmission lines which regularly move 900 - 2200 MW of power. Not that it's even a point that matters much, since most power plants don't produce 2200 MW of power at one location. We tend to distribute the generation for reliability reasons at the very least.
Now, are you ready for the kicker? I mean, are you really ready for me to just put the final nail in this coffin for you? What kind of electricity transmission are they comparing pipelines to in this link?
And there it is. The cost of HVDC is overwhelmingly dominated by AC to DC and DC to AC conversion hardware, as noted by EIA in their reports. But, of course, if you compare to AC transmission as I mentioned above, this entire report is so upside down that it's laughable. And that is why we have electric transmission lines rather than natural gas generators at every home and business in the entirety of the US. You should read the whole report, it's really full of a lot of fun tidbits like this.
Here's a fun EIA link talking about HVDC transmission line cost per mile https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36393 and the report linked to from that page, which EIA commissioned. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmission/
You basically picked the highest cost method of electricity transmission with the least adoption, and wondered why piping natural gas was cheaper. The fact that the into to the research said that electricity was hard to move at such high MW levels was the first clue that something was wrong here. That's a rookie mistake for you.
You're just engaging in more obfuscation. 8x and 11x are pretty close to being 10x cheaper. It is sufficient for physicists or engineers to just say it is 10x as a first-order approximation.
AC suffers from more losses at long distances. It is also quite expensive. Both HVAC and HVDC are more expensive than pipelines: https://www.apga.org.au/sites/default/files/uploaded-content/field_f_content_file/pipelines_vs_powerlines_-_a_summary.pdf
You cannot fudge your way around the facts. If HVAC was really that much cheaper, there would never be HVDC connections in the first place.
No, I was building a case. And you very clearly do not understand what's being talked about in that research. Claiming that AC transmission lines are as expensive to build as HVDC is absurd in every way. https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring11_AEP_Transmission_Facts.pdf
Even the EIA link I supplied shows that the conversion electronics are 60% of the cost of HVDC. Now you respond with Australia Pipeline & Gas Association? lmfao Dude. Come on.
Ok, now I know for a fact you don't understand what you're talking about. The only reason HVDC is a thing is to reduce transmission losses on very long runs. Something that we don't really do in the US, and the most popular installations are in Europe where nations sell energy among EU members. The increased cost serves multiple purposes in that case- It reduces transmission losses as I said, but it also allows you to build more compact systems, and you get less capacitance issues in under ground and under water installations. It's honestly crazy you'd even say that.
How about you actually read my link? I clearly stated that at long-distances, HVAC become inefficient and therefore costly. Your link is not comparing them to pipelines.
Yeah, we're done here. You've moved the goal posts so much we aren't even on the same field.
You're completing making shit up and none of your arguments are even relevant to the conversation. Fuck off with your Ludditism.
Making things up, got it. BTW, the luddites were correct. You might want to actually look up what their concerns were rather than just repeat bullshit. Like reading a gas company's research that says piping gas is cheaper than running electricity. BTW, do you find it strange that nearly every structure in the US has electricity running to it, but not gas? Hmm. Makes you wonder. Well, makes me wonder. I'm sure you'll just blame some climate change denial conspiracy.
A huge number of structures have gas piped in. Not sure what you're even arguing here.
I have a photo of GM's fuel cell test vehicle driving on the highway from 2009, some 14 years ago. Most of the arguments against fuel cells are the cost and complexity of hydrogen, and the logistics of getting it around any given country. Those are not outdated, they are absolutely as true today as they were 15 years ago.
GM made a BEV back in the 1990s. They did a lot of things long before they were ready. The point you are missing is that cost is rapidly coming down. An FCEV will be no more expensive than an ICE car to make. People who continue to repeat the "high-cost" argument are just stuck in the past. A total repeat of what people said of BEVs too.