Electric cars/hybrids - a dead end?
Discussion
The Spruce goose said:
The thing is the figures never match and people Dont understand power and demand.
Gas turbine plants that are the most used are generally peaky plants used for peak power production.
The existing infrastructure might not be able to supply the extra demand which looks to be surplus, is why they always talk about extra plants needed and they due not run at 100% everyday just peak time.
They are also the most expensive to run so the cost of supply would skyrocket if they could provide all the elecy
Nuclear plants work 24 a day and would suit an EV world.
One aspect is interesting. There are concerns that people getting home from work will plug their cars in, put the kettle, lights and TV on and start cooking. This is expected to produce a massive spike at around the peak load time. This will upset the grid and cause problems. Gas turbine plants that are the most used are generally peaky plants used for peak power production.
The existing infrastructure might not be able to supply the extra demand which looks to be surplus, is why they always talk about extra plants needed and they due not run at 100% everyday just peak time.
They are also the most expensive to run so the cost of supply would skyrocket if they could provide all the elecy
Nuclear plants work 24 a day and would suit an EV world.
One possible mitigation is to use the EV batteries as a buffer, extracting power to the grid for a short time of flatten the peaks. It will require smart chargers and meters though. Could solve a lot of problems.
Let me present a different option, where your EV becomes the solution to a problem and not the cause:
Assumption: A continued reduction in battery costs and increases in specific energy lead to EVs with much bigger batteries, and yet, the average daily UK distance traveled does not increase significantly.
Requirement Work places install green generation infrastructure (ie solar, wind etc)
Result People drive to work, charge at work on cheap, green electricity, then drive home, and have enough energy left over to power their household in the evening / overnight, before returning to work the next day to charge.
This works on many levels:
1) sunny-ist during the day
2) Most private cars are parked up during the day
3) Economies of scale mean medium scale renewable generation is more viable then very small domestic systems
This^^ could be the future. In needs no significant technological change, just a political push to achieve!
Assumption: A continued reduction in battery costs and increases in specific energy lead to EVs with much bigger batteries, and yet, the average daily UK distance traveled does not increase significantly.
Requirement Work places install green generation infrastructure (ie solar, wind etc)
Result People drive to work, charge at work on cheap, green electricity, then drive home, and have enough energy left over to power their household in the evening / overnight, before returning to work the next day to charge.
This works on many levels:
1) sunny-ist during the day
2) Most private cars are parked up during the day
3) Economies of scale mean medium scale renewable generation is more viable then very small domestic systems
This^^ could be the future. In needs no significant technological change, just a political push to achieve!
eldar said:
The Spruce goose said:
The thing is the figures never match and people Dont understand power and demand.
Gas turbine plants that are the most used are generally peaky plants used for peak power production.
The existing infrastructure might not be able to supply the extra demand which looks to be surplus, is why they always talk about extra plants needed and they due not run at 100% everyday just peak time.
They are also the most expensive to run so the cost of supply would skyrocket if they could provide all the elecy
Nuclear plants work 24 a day and would suit an EV world.
One aspect is interesting. There are concerns that people getting home from work will plug their cars in, put the kettle, lights and TV on and start cooking. This is expected to produce a massive spike at around the peak load time. This will upset the grid and cause problems. Gas turbine plants that are the most used are generally peaky plants used for peak power production.
The existing infrastructure might not be able to supply the extra demand which looks to be surplus, is why they always talk about extra plants needed and they due not run at 100% everyday just peak time.
They are also the most expensive to run so the cost of supply would skyrocket if they could provide all the elecy
Nuclear plants work 24 a day and would suit an EV world.
One possible mitigation is to use the EV batteries as a buffer, extracting power to the grid for a short time of flatten the peaks. It will require smart chargers and meters though. Could solve a lot of problems.
Smart charging, or using EV's as load balancers is not even remotely hard.
Flooble said:
Yeah, they keep publishing that article about that station and spinning the same old line about "on site generation". Read deeper and you will find that they claim fifteen cars per day in the PR (which is pathetic in itself) but in the planning only said they'd do three cars per day - which is hilarious.
You need a shed-load of "three cars per day" filling stations - in fact, I did all the maths higher up this thread. Including showing how the amount of electricity needed to generate all that hydrogen on site would require electric cables the size of the channel tunnel to each filling station. Not a little windmill on site.
Can't be bothered to cut and paste all the arithmetic again.
It's the first of its kind in the UK. There aren't many, as yet, fuel cell cars in the UK. So, 16 car capacity today - but only 3 predicted to use it today. But in 10 years time, where will this be? Look at where pure EV was a decade ago.You need a shed-load of "three cars per day" filling stations - in fact, I did all the maths higher up this thread. Including showing how the amount of electricity needed to generate all that hydrogen on site would require electric cables the size of the channel tunnel to each filling station. Not a little windmill on site.
Can't be bothered to cut and paste all the arithmetic again.
But at least there are people out there looking at a range of solutions, rather than settling for the first alternative a mad American has given us, from a company that is yet to work out how the hell to mass produce EV cars, and more importantly, how to do it without making a loss.
98elise said:
All we need now is for someone to invent the timeswitch and the problem will be solved
Smart charging, or using EV's as load balancers is not even remotely hard.
It was 1954 that the experts said that soon electricity will be too cheap to meter. Smart charging, or using EV's as load balancers is not even remotely hard.
Timing, of course, is everything
BoRED S2upid said:
RBH58 said:
Hydrogen Fuel Cells are going nowhere. All car manufacturers will give up on them within the next year or two. They make no sense. This is why...
...it's simply a terribly inefficient method to "deliver electricity"...that also requires a completely new delivery infrastructure to be built at a cost of trillions of dollars.
Not quite. ...it's simply a terribly inefficient method to "deliver electricity"...that also requires a completely new delivery infrastructure to be built at a cost of trillions of dollars.
Edited by RBH58 on Monday 13th February 11:49
I read an article yesterday about the first hydrogen refuelling station on the M25 in a shell garage the hydrogen is created on site in a mini power station behind the shell garage so the billion quid infrastructure isn't required if they do it like this they just need a s
t load of electricity and water. Oh the article went on to spout something about generating the hydrogen from the windmills, at night when there is excess supply and therefore saving polar bears (is switched off by then).
Trabi601 said:
It's the first of its kind in the UK. There aren't many, as yet, fuel cell cars in the UK. So, 16 car capacity today - but only 3 predicted to use it today. But in 10 years time, where will this be? Look at where pure EV was a decade ago.
But at least there are people out there looking at a range of solutions, rather than settling for the first alternative a mad American has given us, from a company that is yet to work out how the hell to mass produce EV cars, and more importantly, how to do it without making a loss.
I see you do need the numbers posting again then, especially as But at least there are people out there looking at a range of solutions, rather than settling for the first alternative a mad American has given us, from a company that is yet to work out how the hell to mass produce EV cars, and more importantly, how to do it without making a loss.
Trabi601 said:
I won't even try to do the calculations myself
but just to save everyone else who read it the first time: You can't make Hydrogen on-site in the quantity required to service a fleet of vehicles without a nuclear power station per pump (yes, per pump) or large scale on-site storage and the attendant increase in production losses - and massive cabling to provide the GW of power a motorway station would require. Cracking Hydrogen from Water (the "clean" way) requires too much electricity. If you are going to reform hydrogen from methane gas you may as well just burn the methane in the first place and save all the hassle.Anyway, a rerun:
"You can't have it both ways - on site generation "on demand" and high speed fill times. You cannot change the laws of physics - if a car needs 100kWh to "fill" and you don't want to store that 100kWh in a local energy storage medium, then you need to generate it. But 100kWh is, as implied by the units, 100kW for an entire hour. To fill that in a minute (i.e. 1/60th of an hour) means a power rate of 6000kW, or 6MW. I.e. the output from a good sized nuclear power station would just about run 500 pumps (Hinkley C is going to churn out 3.2GW; 3200MW/6 = 533, then allow for transmission losses of around 10%). There are 7.3 pumps per petrol station and 8500 stations in the UK (http://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/downloadables/racf_deloitte-fuel_retail-jan13.pdf) so 62050 pumps in the UK. That means we need 124 Hinkley C powerplants to run "on demand" Hydrogen fuelling (or, indeed, "on demand" electric recharging at a 6MW rate).
...
And don't forget that figure is for one pump, build a nuclear station per pump is not practical for a normal sized filling station for these (which you will need for Hydrogen cars, since they can't fill up at home overnight, unlike battery ones)."
To do the calculations in a different way:
Taking Cobham's highly optimistic 16x5kg fills for a 300-mile range Mirai, that requires, ignoring all losses, 50kWh * 80 = 4000kWh. It's easy to do a demonstration on such a small scale since by definition you only need 16 cars' worth of hydrogen tanks to store the fuel and you only need to run a relatively small (truck sized) 500kW generator for 8 hours to produce the energy needed to generate the fuel.
Now remember that the average motorway service station has more than 16 pumps in use all day every day, filling one car per pump every few minutes not one car per pump per day. How many generators are you planning on stacking up? Parking several Nimtz Carriers on the Thames perhaps?
Now come on and do the calculations yourself before posting again about scaling out hydrogen infrastructure.
Edited to include correct figure for Power Station output.
Edited by Flooble on Friday 24th February 11:24
That's based on today, where we've only just installed the first plant of its kind in the UK.
In 10 years, with the research going on using different catalysts, that figure is likely to be very different.
It has taken 100 years to get an electric car to be a proper alternative and it still costs over £50k, or twice the price of an ICE equivalent.
We are comparing a relatively mature tech., with diminishing returns, to a very new tech. (ie. looking at small on-site installations).
Germany will have 400 hydrogen filing stations within 5 years, so there's something in this - so let's see where it goes, rather than blindly following the current fashion for pure EV.
This is going around in circles - some have been completely taken in by Musk and his promise of an electric future - whilst the energy producers are continually looking at how the future will actually look - there's a very firm belief that pure EV is only part of the solution, so we *have* to investigate all the other alternatives.
In 10 years, with the research going on using different catalysts, that figure is likely to be very different.
It has taken 100 years to get an electric car to be a proper alternative and it still costs over £50k, or twice the price of an ICE equivalent.
We are comparing a relatively mature tech., with diminishing returns, to a very new tech. (ie. looking at small on-site installations).
Germany will have 400 hydrogen filing stations within 5 years, so there's something in this - so let's see where it goes, rather than blindly following the current fashion for pure EV.
This is going around in circles - some have been completely taken in by Musk and his promise of an electric future - whilst the energy producers are continually looking at how the future will actually look - there's a very firm belief that pure EV is only part of the solution, so we *have* to investigate all the other alternatives.
Trabi601 said:
That's based on today, where we've only just installed the first plant of its kind in the UK.
In 10 years, with the research going on using different catalysts, that figure is likely to be very different.
It has taken 100 years to get an electric car to be a proper alternative and it still costs over £50k, or twice the price of an ICE equivalent.
We are comparing a relatively mature tech., with diminishing returns, to a very new tech. (ie. looking at small on-site installations).
Germany will have 400 hydrogen filing stations within 5 years, so there's something in this - so let's see where it goes, rather than blindly following the current fashion for pure EV.
This is going around in circles - some have been completely taken in by Musk and his promise of an electric future - whilst the energy producers are continually looking at how the future will actually look - there's a very firm belief that pure EV is only part of the solution, so we *have* to investigate all the other alternatives.
No, it's basic fundamental physics - you can't magic energy out of thin air. The numbers I calculated for filling the car with 100kWh of energy on-demand were massively, incredibly, generous to Hydrogen as I basically ignored all losses (i.e. some magic future where you can make Hydrogen with a magic catalyst "for free"). In 10 years, with the research going on using different catalysts, that figure is likely to be very different.
It has taken 100 years to get an electric car to be a proper alternative and it still costs over £50k, or twice the price of an ICE equivalent.
We are comparing a relatively mature tech., with diminishing returns, to a very new tech. (ie. looking at small on-site installations).
Germany will have 400 hydrogen filing stations within 5 years, so there's something in this - so let's see where it goes, rather than blindly following the current fashion for pure EV.
This is going around in circles - some have been completely taken in by Musk and his promise of an electric future - whilst the energy producers are continually looking at how the future will actually look - there's a very firm belief that pure EV is only part of the solution, so we *have* to investigate all the other alternatives.
A Tesla needs a 100kWh battery in order to get around with 90% efficient motors; hence it is axiomatic that you need the same amount of energy to be stored in whatever other medium you choose (assuming you can convert that energy to forward motion at the same 90%+ efficiency as the Tesla's motors).
100kWh is a huge amount of electricity if you are transferring it in the 3-5 minute "fill time" people are used to with petrol.
It isn't just Hydrogen; for exactly the same arithmetic I am leery of Porsche's claim to be planning 800kW charging of its battery electric cars. If you are wedded to a model of people filling their non-fossil fuel vehicle up at a "filling station" in very short time-spans, you run into the fundamental challenge that anything other than a fossil fuel requires electricity to be transferred to that filling station. A 12-bay Porsche electric charging station would need 12 * 800kW = 9.6MW of power. So two nuclear stations going full pelt. Unless they store the energy in a gigantic battery buffer.
Since there seems to be some confusion it is also worth noting that Shell and BP are not "energy producers" they are "energy movers" - they take fossil fuel out the ground and move it your petrol tank. They don't produce any actual energy themselves. This is the same model they plan to use for Hydrogen - drilling for methane, cracking it and shipping it around. The windmill and "on site generation" is just for show.
I would much rather they stopped trolling for government funding of their "clean" technology and instead produced methanol from the methane ... which we can burn just like we do petrol. No dirtier than making hydrogen from methane and means we don't have to spend billions of pounds of your and my money on "research" which is constrained by the basic physics to never get anywhere.
Flooble said:
"You can't have it both ways - on site generation "on demand" and high speed fill times. You cannot change the laws of physics - if a car needs 100kWh to "fill" and you don't want to store that 100kWh in a local energy storage medium, then you need to generate it. But 100kWh is, as implied by the units, 100kW for an entire hour. To fill that in a minute (i.e. 1/60th of an hour) means a power rate of 6000kW, or 6MW. I.e. the output from a good sized nuclear power station.
...
I think you confuse mega and giga there....... ...
You've got a very closed mind, based on what we know today.
15 years ago, when the Prius with NiMH batteries was laughed at, nobody could predict the Leaf or the Tesla. I remember car forums laughing at the idea of anyone relying on EVs as anything other than funny little city cars for eccentrics.
Hydrogen production from water is a relatively new and under-researched technology - yes, we've known about it for something like 200 years, but it's only now we are looking at how we can do it quickly and efficiently.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-efficiency-electroly...
Efficiency doubled by changing the makeup of the catalyst.
Hydrogen from oil isn't the answer. On-site production *may* be the answer. It would be very foolish to put all our eggs into the pure EV basket before really understanding the environmental impact of battery production and recycling, or understanding how we can realistically provide charging for millions of EVs every evening.
There's a huge amount of research money being put behind improving the efficiency of electrolysis - are you going to tell us that all those investing time and money in it are wrong and that a small number of car anoraks on an Internet forum have accurately predicted the future?
15 years ago, when the Prius with NiMH batteries was laughed at, nobody could predict the Leaf or the Tesla. I remember car forums laughing at the idea of anyone relying on EVs as anything other than funny little city cars for eccentrics.
Hydrogen production from water is a relatively new and under-researched technology - yes, we've known about it for something like 200 years, but it's only now we are looking at how we can do it quickly and efficiently.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-efficiency-electroly...
Efficiency doubled by changing the makeup of the catalyst.
Hydrogen from oil isn't the answer. On-site production *may* be the answer. It would be very foolish to put all our eggs into the pure EV basket before really understanding the environmental impact of battery production and recycling, or understanding how we can realistically provide charging for millions of EVs every evening.
There's a huge amount of research money being put behind improving the efficiency of electrolysis - are you going to tell us that all those investing time and money in it are wrong and that a small number of car anoraks on an Internet forum have accurately predicted the future?
Trabi601 said:
You've got a very closed mind, based on what we know today.
15 years ago, when the Prius with NiMH batteries was laughed at, nobody could predict the Leaf or the Tesla. I remember car forums laughing at the idea of anyone relying on EVs as anything other than funny little city cars for eccentrics.
Hydrogen production from water is a relatively new and under-researched technology - yes, we've known about it for something like 200 years, but it's only now we are looking at how we can do it quickly and efficiently.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-efficiency-electroly...
Efficiency doubled by changing the makeup of the catalyst.
Hydrogen from oil isn't the answer. On-site production *may* be the answer. It would be very foolish to put all our eggs into the pure EV basket before really understanding the environmental impact of battery production and recycling, or understanding how we can realistically provide charging for millions of EVs every evening.
There's a huge amount of research money being put behind improving the efficiency of electrolysis - are you going to tell us that all those investing time and money in it are wrong and that a small number of car anoraks on an Internet forum have accurately predicted the future?
I can see I won't convince you with the basic arithmetic regarding energy requirements (and I did make that mistake on 6000kW to MW not GW so can hardly claim to be faultless!). You are quite right that there is a huge amount of research going on - funded by the taxpayer, i.e. me and you. So in a way, I am the one investing money in it 15 years ago, when the Prius with NiMH batteries was laughed at, nobody could predict the Leaf or the Tesla. I remember car forums laughing at the idea of anyone relying on EVs as anything other than funny little city cars for eccentrics.
Hydrogen production from water is a relatively new and under-researched technology - yes, we've known about it for something like 200 years, but it's only now we are looking at how we can do it quickly and efficiently.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-efficiency-electroly...
Efficiency doubled by changing the makeup of the catalyst.
Hydrogen from oil isn't the answer. On-site production *may* be the answer. It would be very foolish to put all our eggs into the pure EV basket before really understanding the environmental impact of battery production and recycling, or understanding how we can realistically provide charging for millions of EVs every evening.
There's a huge amount of research money being put behind improving the efficiency of electrolysis - are you going to tell us that all those investing time and money in it are wrong and that a small number of car anoraks on an Internet forum have accurately predicted the future?
We'll just have to agree to differ - but I really do wish that the research could be done without silly fakery like that Cobham "filling station". That's as bad as the EV-1 charging paddle stations that still litter California, rusting away.
Your calculations are based on what we know today. Not what we may know tomorrow.
Again, go back 10,15, 20 years. Hell, go back a little further - when a Ford Cortina would struggle to crack 30mpg. Yet I now drive a 5 series weighing twice as much with 100bhp more that will return nearly double that. In 1977, anyone who predicted a 180bhp diesel in a car the size and weight of a contemporary Rolls Royce would do 60mpg would have been laughed out of the room. But that's what we expect and demand today.
Skip forward 10, 15, 20 years and we have no idea what tech. will be available to efficiently produce hydrogen. But if we don't try and don't research, we end up in a dead end.
Again, go back 10,15, 20 years. Hell, go back a little further - when a Ford Cortina would struggle to crack 30mpg. Yet I now drive a 5 series weighing twice as much with 100bhp more that will return nearly double that. In 1977, anyone who predicted a 180bhp diesel in a car the size and weight of a contemporary Rolls Royce would do 60mpg would have been laughed out of the room. But that's what we expect and demand today.
Skip forward 10, 15, 20 years and we have no idea what tech. will be available to efficiently produce hydrogen. But if we don't try and don't research, we end up in a dead end.
Trabi601 said:
Your calculations are based on what we know today. Not what we may know tomorrow.
Again, go back 10,15, 20 years. Hell, go back a little further - when a Ford Cortina would struggle to crack 30mpg. Yet I now drive a 5 series weighing twice as much with 100bhp more that will return nearly double that. In 1977, anyone who predicted a 180bhp diesel in a car the size and weight of a contemporary Rolls Royce would do 60mpg would have been laughed out of the room. But that's what we expect and demand today.
Skip forward 10, 15, 20 years and we have no idea what tech. will be available to efficiently produce hydrogen. But if we don't try and don't research, we end up in a dead end.
Comparing a Cortina with a 5er illustrates evolution, not revolution. For hydrogen to become viable you first need a way of producing cheap, abundant and green power, lots of it. Probably fusion or a similar technology. Expensive, ans still the twenty years away it has been for the last 70.Again, go back 10,15, 20 years. Hell, go back a little further - when a Ford Cortina would struggle to crack 30mpg. Yet I now drive a 5 series weighing twice as much with 100bhp more that will return nearly double that. In 1977, anyone who predicted a 180bhp diesel in a car the size and weight of a contemporary Rolls Royce would do 60mpg would have been laughed out of the room. But that's what we expect and demand today.
Skip forward 10, 15, 20 years and we have no idea what tech. will be available to efficiently produce hydrogen. But if we don't try and don't research, we end up in a dead end.
For EV to become mainstream, you need batteries to become 10% more energy dense, 10% cheaper and 10% greener every year or two. We have the power to do that.
eldar said:
Comparing a Cortina with a 5er illustrates evolution, not revolution. For hydrogen to become viable you first need a way of producing cheap, abundant and green power, lots of it. Probably fusion or a similar technology. Expensive, ans still the twenty years away it has been for the last 70.
For EV to become mainstream, you need batteries to become 10% more energy dense, 10% cheaper and 10% greener every year or two. We have the power to do that.
You're still assuming that what we know about electrolysis today is what we will know about electrolysis in the future.For EV to become mainstream, you need batteries to become 10% more energy dense, 10% cheaper and 10% greener every year or two. We have the power to do that.
Stop thinking about what we know today, and small gains, but think about what we could know tomorrow. If nobody invests in tomorrow, we will always be stuck with a small evolution of what we have today.
I work for a company which is not only investing in improving what we have today (we're installing charge points as well as hydrogen) - but we're also investing heavily in what might be a solution in the future. If we listened to the experts here, we'd be stuck with relatively environmentally unsound LiON batteries and putting charging points outside every domestic property in the UK. Thankfully, the energy business isn't quite so blinkered.
(Don't forget that pure EV works for some people in a small and densely populated country. It doesn't really work for most people in bigger and less densely populated countries - so what may be the perfect solution in the UK isn't the perfect global solution, what we'll get in the future is a best fit for the majority of the world, not the best fit for some people in the UK)
Trabi601 said:
You're still assuming that what we know about electrolysis today is what we will know about electrolysis in the future.
Stop thinking about what we know today, and small gains, but think about what we could know tomorrow. If nobody invests in tomorrow, we will always be stuck with a small evolution of what we have today.
I work for a company which is not only investing in improving what we have today (we're installing charge points as well as hydrogen) - but we're also investing heavily in what might be a solution in the future. If we listened to the experts here, we'd be stuck with relatively environmentally unsound LiON batteries and putting charging points outside every domestic property in the UK. Thankfully, the energy business isn't quite so blinkered.
(Don't forget that pure EV works for some people in a small and densely populated country. It doesn't really work for most people in bigger and less densely populated countries - so what may be the perfect solution in the UK isn't the perfect global solution, what we'll get in the future is a best fit for the majority of the world, not the best fit for some people in the UK)
Perfectly valid view. However EVs are in production by most major manufacturers, work pretty well and are improving. Hydrogen is at best immature in its development, standards and cost effectiveness.Stop thinking about what we know today, and small gains, but think about what we could know tomorrow. If nobody invests in tomorrow, we will always be stuck with a small evolution of what we have today.
I work for a company which is not only investing in improving what we have today (we're installing charge points as well as hydrogen) - but we're also investing heavily in what might be a solution in the future. If we listened to the experts here, we'd be stuck with relatively environmentally unsound LiON batteries and putting charging points outside every domestic property in the UK. Thankfully, the energy business isn't quite so blinkered.
(Don't forget that pure EV works for some people in a small and densely populated country. It doesn't really work for most people in bigger and less densely populated countries - so what may be the perfect solution in the UK isn't the perfect global solution, what we'll get in the future is a best fit for the majority of the world, not the best fit for some people in the UK)
It may well have mass market appeal, assuming someone invents something that improves it vastly. Its niche, assuming it becomes practical, will suit HGV type applications, I suspect.
eldar said:
Trabi601 said:
You're still assuming that what we know about electrolysis today is what we will know about electrolysis in the future.
Stop thinking about what we know today, and small gains, but think about what we could know tomorrow. If nobody invests in tomorrow, we will always be stuck with a small evolution of what we have today.
I work for a company which is not only investing in improving what we have today (we're installing charge points as well as hydrogen) - but we're also investing heavily in what might be a solution in the future. If we listened to the experts here, we'd be stuck with relatively environmentally unsound LiON batteries and putting charging points outside every domestic property in the UK. Thankfully, the energy business isn't quite so blinkered.
(Don't forget that pure EV works for some people in a small and densely populated country. It doesn't really work for most people in bigger and less densely populated countries - so what may be the perfect solution in the UK isn't the perfect global solution, what we'll get in the future is a best fit for the majority of the world, not the best fit for some people in the UK)
Perfectly valid view. However EVs are in production by most major manufacturers, work pretty well and are improving. Hydrogen is at best immature in its development, standards and cost effectiveness.Stop thinking about what we know today, and small gains, but think about what we could know tomorrow. If nobody invests in tomorrow, we will always be stuck with a small evolution of what we have today.
I work for a company which is not only investing in improving what we have today (we're installing charge points as well as hydrogen) - but we're also investing heavily in what might be a solution in the future. If we listened to the experts here, we'd be stuck with relatively environmentally unsound LiON batteries and putting charging points outside every domestic property in the UK. Thankfully, the energy business isn't quite so blinkered.
(Don't forget that pure EV works for some people in a small and densely populated country. It doesn't really work for most people in bigger and less densely populated countries - so what may be the perfect solution in the UK isn't the perfect global solution, what we'll get in the future is a best fit for the majority of the world, not the best fit for some people in the UK)
It may well have mass market appeal, assuming someone invents something that improves it vastly. Its niche, assuming it becomes practical, will suit HGV type applications, I suspect.
What about uranium?
saaby93 said:
For comparison, instead of using hydrogen, if we used the same efficiencies with petrol engines how much fuel would we need?
What about uranium?
The 1958 Ford Nucleon?What about uranium?
http://www.oddlyhistorical.com/2014/07/21/1958-for...
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