Electric cars/hybrids - a dead end?

[Trabi601]

Trabi601 said:

OK, I misunderstood some of the tech - I believed the current setup to be truly 'on demand' - but it appears there is some local storage going on. However, the ambition is true on-demand production which has already been demonstrated in lab conditions (as far back as 2013, too!)

Fill times are the same as LPG at the moment, but the ambition is to fill in seconds - this has been stated as the ambition in a recent TV interview on breakfast news.

I haven't worked out any of the energy requirements, but the current on-site hydrogen production obviously isn't draining that kind of energy.

Assume the future will be blending on-demand production with stored production from off-peak times. But, as we're only just seeing the very first installations on our motorway network, the tech. is still very new, so who knows where it'll get to in 10-15 years? - current predictions are that by 2030, efficiency will equal where pure EV is today - but pure EV development is now slowing to a point of diminishing returns.

Feck, just read the transcript... '3 minutes'... no idea why I remembered '3 seconds'!

[Flooble]

Trabi601 said:

OK, I misunderstood some of the tech - I believed the current setup to be truly 'on demand' - but it appears there is some local storage going on. However, the ambition is true on-demand production which has already been demonstrated in lab conditions (as far back as 2013, too!)

Fill times are the same as LPG at the moment, but the ambition is to fill in seconds - this has been stated as the ambition in a recent TV interview on breakfast news.

I haven't worked out any of the energy requirements, but the current on-site hydrogen production obviously isn't draining that kind of energy.

Assume the future will be blending on-demand production with stored production from off-peak times. But, as we're only just seeing the very first installations on our motorway network, the tech. is still very new, so who knows where it'll get to in 10-15 years? - current predictions are that by 2030, efficiency will equal where pure EV is today - but pure EV development is now slowing to a point of diminishing returns.

In my experience "Ambition" = "Not a chance, but will keep taking the funding for as long as we can".

Please sit down and work out the energy requirements, then post back. That's an honest genuine request, when I do the calculations on the back of envelope for a real station it comes out as utterly hopeless.

The current station at Cobham, when I had a read of the planning documents (rather than the press releases with their "ambitions"), is only scaled to fill three cars a day - 15kg of Hydrogen. That's about 50kWh * 15 = 750kWh. It's easy to do a demonstration on such a small scale - a 750kW generator would fit on the back of a truck. And a 15kg H2 tank would fit in the back of a van.

Scale that out to your more normal 12-pump station servicing 100 cars per hour and ... it all falls apart.

You also need to do the calculation on the end-to-end efficiency of a Hydrogen Car (from making the H2 to using it up). I don't want to feed you numbers, but suggest you start with the maximum theoretical efficiency of a fuel cell and work backwards ... or just use the flowchart someone else posted.

[Trabi601]

I won't even try to do the calculations myself - I've forgotten more than I care to remember about the tech / scientific stuff as I haven't touched it since I did Environmental Chemistry at University back in the early 90s.

There will be 400 hydrogen filling stations in Germany by 2023... that's a significant investment and proof that there is significant belief the technology is going somewhere.

(Cobham is set up for 16 x 5kg fills per day)

[anonymous-user]

Repeat after me everyone:

"Hydrogen is an Energy store"

"Electricity is an Energy source"


Take a look out the window, how much hydrogen do you see?? None, because it's a light molecule any naturally occuring hydrogen has long since gone up into space and been lost. Therefore to STORE energy as hydrogen, we need to convert that energy from some other source first (just like mother nature did for oil, where over the last 200million years she's been capturing solar energy and converting it, with the help of photosynthesis into hydrocarbon fuels)

Today, around 99% of hydrogen is created by cracking it from crude oil, and not from the electrolysis of water!

[Digitalize]

I truly believe the only way to properly clean up our energy use is to convert EVERYTHING to Electricty, no petrol or diesel and no gas supplies to houses, then the grid can be cleaned up and evolve as they discover new technologies to generate the power, without interfering with the end consumer.

Obviously it's a long way off but it will get there I believe. Biggest hurdle is battery technology at the moment, being able to charge them faster without effecting their usable life, and their storage density. As soon as you can get around 400 miles from a battery I imagine most of the smaller EVs will max out around there and then just keep making the battery smaller and lighter, improving their efficiency.

Hydrogen honestly seems like something that's 20 years too late and mainly being pursued by companies making money. It just doesn't scale up to anything more than a niche product with no benefit over electricity. If it was such a good way to create electricity why wouldn't we have hydrogen power stations instead of coal/nuclear? Oh yeah because it uses electricity to make the bloody stuff!

[Flooble]

Trabi601 said:

I won't even try to do the calculations myself - I've forgotten more than I care to remember about the tech / scientific stuff as I haven't touched it since I did Environmental Chemistry at University back in the early 90s.

There will be 400 hydrogen filling stations in Germany by 2023... that's a significant investment and proof that there is significant belief the technology is going somewhere.

(Cobham is set up for 16 x 5kg fills per day)

Same here, not used the physics since the mid-90s. But it's simple stuff. Give it a go ... go on, please.

Yeah, I know what the PR for Cobham said, but I dug out the planning application where they actually stated they expected no more than 3 cars per day

http://edocs.elmbridge.gov.uk/IAM/IAMCache/2417821...

"the total number of additional vehicle movements at the site is not expected to exceed around three cars per day in the short term."

You'll also note that even for that diddy little station (providing, using the 16x5kg figure and best-case range estimates for the Mirai, a total of 4800 miles worth of fuel per day) they had to install a new electrical substation: http://bit.ly/2lGoyNC)

There's bound to be lots of these stations built, provided it's funded from the public purse. Let's see Shell commit to building them using their own money ...

[Trabi601]

It's not the only solution, but it's part of a range of solutions.

We currently have range extending EVs which use fossil fuels to recharge batteries / provide power for the motor.

A fuel cell vehicle uses much of the same technology as an EV - but you're replacing the battery with a fuel cell. If you have both fuel cell and EV, you have something that works for most people most of the time - which a pure EV cannot do.

[bodhi]

One thing I've never particularly understood is why proponents of the Electric Vehicle get so annoyed when you mention Hydrogen could also be a very good solution? I would have thought that, in a world with limited resources, finding another resource we can use (such as Hydrogen) and developing this to get round some of the inherent difficulties with using it would be beneficial for everybody?

As a purely impartial observer (i.e someone who would rather we stuck with petrol, as it works and appears to have less downsides than the alternatives being discussed), they both seem to have a fairly critical flaw which we have to engineer round in order to be ready for mass consumption - EV's have batteries, Hydrogen cars have Hydrogen production.

I just think having 2 solutions would be the way forwards, rather than putting all our eggs in, say, the EV basket, then finding out 15 years down the line Lithium production is an environmental disaster, then we are back to square one.

[Trabi601]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

How do you fuel all those cars parked on the road, rather than on a drive?

How do you charge up 2 cars from a single parking space, aside from swapping over part way through the night, assuming one on the drive, one on the road, as is the current build spec. for many new houses.

What about all those who travel for much of the week to meetings? - where you'll go through more than one charge in a day and stay in a hotel? - does every parking space at a hotel (or most of them) need a charging point?

Pure EV isn't the solution. It's part of the solution for some people. But there are still lots of people out there for whom an EV would be such a massive compromise, they couldn't switch to one. Unless it was backed up by some kind of range extending solution - which means fossil fuels or fuel cell.

[Flooble]

bodhi said:

One thing I've never particularly understood is why proponents of the Electric Vehicle get so annoyed when you mention Hydrogen could also be a very good solution? I would have thought that, in a world with limited resources, finding another resource we can use (such as Hydrogen) and developing this to get round some of the inherent difficulties with using it would be beneficial for everybody?

As a purely impartial observer (i.e someone who would rather we stuck with petrol, as it works and appears to have less downsides than the alternatives being discussed), they both seem to have a fairly critical flaw which we have to engineer round in order to be ready for mass consumption - EV's have batteries, Hydrogen cars have Hydrogen production.

I just think having 2 solutions would be the way forwards, rather than putting all our eggs in, say, the EV basket, then finding out 15 years down the line Lithium production is an environmental disaster, then we are back to square one.

I'm not a proponent of electric vehicles, but neither am I a proponent of pouring my tax money down the neck of a dead end

There's fundamental flaws in Hydrogen related to the production, transportation/storage and use. Continuing to pour money into building H2 filling stations won't get around the basic physics.

Equally neither will we see 10MWh Li-Ion batteries in the same size/weight as a fuel tank - so you'll never have a 1000-mile Battery Electric HGV either.

I'd prefer to see my tax dollar spent on basic research which may find "new physics" rather than the current situation where companies are being funded to roll out useless fuel-cell vehicles and pointless hydrogen filling stations. Better to spend that money finding a way to make Hydrogen more efficiently, or break the basic physics that limits the efficiency of fuel cells. Or to find a new type of battery physics.

And as a side-note, I see no reason why we couldn't today switch our fleet to something like a Vauxhall Ampera solution. Battery good for 50-75 miles on electric and a petrol engine for longer journeys (think it's got about 300 miles of petrol range? So 400 miles all told - easily into needing a wee territory for me).

No need for any new infrastructure at all. The vast bulk of people would toddle around their commutes on the battery, charging up at home overnight. Longer trips would use petrol just like today.

Massively reduced petrol consumption, clean air in the inner cities (everyone running on electric) and no worries about finding ways around the laws of physics, all do-able today ... what's the downside?

[dpeilow]

bodhi said:

One thing I've never particularly understood is why proponents of the Electric Vehicle get so annoyed when you mention Hydrogen could also be a very good solution? I would have thought that, in a world with limited resources

You've just answered your own question.


- There is limited renewable energy, so use it in the solution that gets the most mileage from it (EV)

- There is limited money, so invest it in the infrastructure that can refuel more cars per £ (EV)

- There is limited carbon budget, so use it on something that produces less CO2 (EV)


I could go on.

As someone once said, you can show hydrogen is nonsense with high school maths. Why do they keep doing it? Because it is in the interests of oil companies to make you think that 1) something better is just around the corner (and has been for years) and 2) supply hydrogen from methane to you at £50 a fill up. I'll stick to my overnight charge for 96p thanks.

[babatunde]

Flooble said:

bodhi said:

One thing I've never particularly understood is why proponents of the Electric Vehicle get so annoyed when you mention Hydrogen could also be a very good solution? I would have thought that, in a world with limited resources, finding another resource we can use (such as Hydrogen) and developing this to get round some of the inherent difficulties with using it would be beneficial for everybody?

....

.....

There's fundamental flaws in Hydrogen related to the production, transportation/storage and use. Continuing to pour money into building H2 filling stations won't get around the basic physics.

......

And as a side-note, I see no reason why we couldn't today switch our fleet to something like a Vauxhall Ampera solution. Battery good for 50-75 miles on electric and a petrol engine for longer journeys (think it's got about 300 miles of petrol range? So 400 miles all told - easily into needing a wee territory for me)........

even the hybrid while a stopgap solution is backward thinking, in an EV world Petrol stations don't exist, what replaces them are destination chargers, for commercial vehicles and high mileage users battery swap & high throughput chargers will suffice.
EV's require a complete change of mindset, it's like when the ICE came along, this change will have it's challenges and winners and losers, and will take years to become reality, but I suspect will become mainstream very very quickly.
remember for an EV is that the power source can be pretty much anything, we've learnt how to transport large amounts of electrical power safely and efficiently over vast distances.

The alternate energy sources, Solar, Wind etc just add to that perfect storm that will propel the EV to the mainstream and if cold fusion becomes reality, then game over.
The lower running costs will appeal to those who already treat their cars as white goods.

Even the current battery tech, Li-ion battery tech can be supplanted with minimal disruption.

So big picture and small picture all point to the EV being the near future for transportation.

Finally peak oil is real, but that's another discussion.

[Trabi601]

dpeilow said:

You've just answered your own question.


- There is limited renewable energy, so use it in the solution that gets the most mileage from it (EV)

- There is limited money, so invest it in the infrastructure that can refuel more cars per £ (EV)

- There is limited carbon budget, so use it on something that produces less CO2 (EV)


I could go on.

As someone once said, you can show hydrogen is nonsense with high school maths. Why do they keep doing it? Because it is in the interests of oil companies to make you think that 1) something better is just around the corner (and has been for years) and 2) supply hydrogen from methane to you at £50 a fill up. I'll stick to my overnight charge for 96p thanks.

You're falling into the trap that most EV evangelists do - and assume that 96p a fill will not quickly become £50 a fill once mainstream adoption of EVs comes into play. It's either stick the duty on electric used to charge a car, or look at road use charging. Either way, EV looks cheap right now, but won't look cheap once the government needs to recover lost revenue.

We're also assuming that pure EV is the future, but this is only because it is an acceptable substitute right now. Who knows what horrors we'll uncover from EV production in the next decade - it's only a decade ago that diesel was seen to be clean and environmental, now we're looking at taxing it out of existence.

(And we still have the issues of range only fitting some lifestyles some of the time, lots of incompatible charger and battery tech, inadequate and delicate infrastructure etc).

The big question none of the EV evangelists have ever been able to properly answer is... once we've taken fossil fuels off the roads, how do I get to the South of France in an EV? - the answer is very slowly with all current and future projected technology, as charging times don't equate very well with long distance travel.

[Trabi601]

Flooble said:

I'd prefer to see my tax dollar spent on basic research which may find "new physics" rather than the current situation where companies are being funded to roll out useless fuel-cell vehicles and pointless hydrogen filling stations. Better to spend that money finding a way to make Hydrogen more efficiently, or break the basic physics that limits the efficiency of fuel cells. Or to find a new type of battery physics.

And as a side-note, I see no reason why we couldn't today switch our fleet to something like a Vauxhall Ampera solution. Battery good for 50-75 miles on electric and a petrol engine for longer journeys (think it's got about 300 miles of petrol range? So 400 miles all told - easily into needing a wee territory for me).

Hydrogen may not yet be a solution - but this is the testing phase. Get some stations and cars out there, see how it all works. There's work going on to produce hydrogen truly on demand (already lab proven) which may be the future for fuel cell - and as you've noted, range-extending hybrid is a great solution, so why not work out how to make the range extender largely emission free at the point of use?

We shall see how it all pans out - we're putting chargers on forecourts, have the hydrogen plants and have some LNG installs for haulage use. The future may be one, all or none of the above, but if nobody plays with stuff now, we won't have anything in the future.

I quite like the idea of fuel cell hybrids myself.

[Clem2k3]

Trabi601 said:

You're falling into the trap that most EV evangelists do - and assume that 96p a fill will not quickly become £50 a fill once mainstream adoption of EVs comes into play. It's either stick the duty on electric used to charge a car, or look at road use charging. Either way, EV looks cheap right now, but won't look cheap once the government needs to recover lost revenue.

We're also assuming that pure EV is the future, but this is only because it is an acceptable substitute right now. Who knows what horrors we'll uncover from EV production in the next decade - it's only a decade ago that diesel was seen to be clean and environmental, now we're looking at taxing it out of existence.

(And we still have the issues of range only fitting some lifestyles some of the time, lots of incompatible charger and battery tech, inadequate and delicate infrastructure etc).

The big question none of the EV evangelists have ever been able to properly answer is... once we've taken fossil fuels off the roads, how do I get to the South of France in an EV? - the answer is very slowly with all current and future projected technology, as charging times don't equate very well with long distance travel.

The government revenue argument is relatively valid, but it follows for hydrogen too, so its a completely mute point for differentiating between the two.

Horrors of the future applies to hydrogen too, except in many ways its horrors of the now (most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels at the mo and is not clean). I realise this applies to EV too, and we have a solution in renewable energy. That solution applies to hydrogen too I hear you cry, but then why use more of it to achieve the same aim ...

How do I get to the south of france? Ill just leave this here https://evtripplanner.com/planner/2-7/?id=6zxz03p8... There are 3 hours of charging in that route, which sounds a lot, but then are you seriously suggesting you would do a 14 hour trip (thats just the driving) without some breaks?!! Also this is a Model S 90, not the bigger battery 100. This is with TODAYS technology. You are comparing todays EVs and their chargers with your hypothetical Hydrogen setup of the future. Why do you not allow for EV progress, as a technology it really doesnt have as far to go before many cars have 300 mile ranges and fast charging that takes <30 mins. Sure thats not 3 minutes, but we may get there, and even if we never get the charging that fast the positives FAR outweigh the negatives.

[Trabi601]

That's 3+ hours of charging, in a very expensive EV.

Now show me a £15k family EV that could do it? Are we even close to getting a £15k Focus equivalent with a 300 mile range and 30 minute charge (to 100%)?

Yes, there's development coming, but I don't see EV as the only solution. It's part of a package, but EV owners seem to think it's the only solution.

[Trabi601]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

Same old, same old.

The answer always is 'install charge points on the road / in car parks / etc' - who pays for this? - how do you ensure we upgrade the power supply to streets to cope? - again, who pays for that, on top of the charging points? - sticking new charging posts on streets of terraced houses is a major undertaking and I just can't see it happening on a large scale.

Same with service areas - look at how busy they are. Even if you take out those starting from full, you still have a heavy demand for public charging - again, who pays for the chargers needed? - we're taking hundreds of thousands of public access chargers, compatible with all systems, here.

Even then, 30 minutes doesn't get you a full charge. Range drops significantly in the winter, too.

We have to think broader than assuming EV is the only future solution - it works for some drivers some of the time, but not all drivers all of the time, as fossil, or fuel cell does.

There is always a time where your EV won't have enough charge to do what you want it to do and you'll be scrabbling around to work out how you're going to make that journey.

[Clem2k3]

Trabi601 said:

That's 3+ hours of charging, in a very expensive EV.

Now show me a £15k family EV that could do it? Are we even close to getting a £15k Focus equivalent with a 300 mile range and 30 minute charge (to 100%)?

Yes, there's development coming, but I don't see EV as the only solution. It's part of a package, but EV owners seem to think it's the only solution.

And where is the £15k 300 mile hydrogen car that can charge in 3 minutes? You are asking things of EVs that you are unwilling to ask of hydrogen, you write it off as "it'll come in the future" for hydrogen but you wont write it off for EV.

Incidentally, you would NEED 300 mile range to bridge the gap that according to this map is the whole centre of France:

http://www.netinform.net/H2/H2Stations/H2Stations....

Yes, Hydrogen will come along but the main (and sole at the moment) advantage is refill time, it really doesn't outweigh the main disadvantage which is round trip efficiency. The round trip requires extra steps, many of which are AC/DC or DC/DC style conversions, these are generic type devices (power electronics) that are used in EVs too, so any improvement in these will go to EV too. So given power electronics devices across the board will be X% efficient, then the less of them the better. EV will always win that argument.

[Clem2k3]

Trabi601 said:

Same old, same old.

The answer always is 'install charge points on the road / in car parks / etc' - who pays for this? - how do you ensure we upgrade the power supply to streets to cope? - again, who pays for that, on top of the charging points? - sticking new charging posts on streets of terraced houses is a major undertaking and I just can't see it happening on a large scale.

Same with service areas - look at how busy they are. Even if you take out those starting from full, you still have a heavy demand for public charging - again, who pays for the chargers needed? - we're taking hundreds of thousands of public access chargers, compatible with all systems, here.

Even then, 30 minutes doesn't get you a full charge. Range drops significantly in the winter, too.

We have to think broader than assuming EV is the only future solution - it works for some drivers some of the time, but not all drivers all of the time, as fossil, or fuel cell does.

There is always a time where your EV won't have enough charge to do what you want it to do and you'll be scrabbling around to work out how you're going to make that journey.

Slow down a minute ...

Paying for EV charging stations across the country is a problem, but paying for hydrogen electrolysis equipment at these same places isnt?! What world do you live in?! Each system requires hefty infrastructure setups (as does petrol, we just did it already), but one of them can piggyback on the existing system, the grid, the other requires electrolysis kit at each station and hydrogen storage. I still dont see how hydrogen wins. In pretty much every case it has all the disadvantages of EV, plus a few of its own, and brings no advantages to the table to pay for them.

Please respond with your proposed advantages of Hydrogen that do not apply to EV.

[Trabi601]

Which bit of 'EV is part of the solution' did you not understand?

EV isn't the be all and end all - other technologies will come in to play as well. Range extending hybrids will always have a place, we need a clean solution to this.

As for paying for the new fuelling technologies - we have a model where you go to a filling station and fill up, the infrastructure is privately owned and built into the operating model.

Implementing this for public charging points, on council owned roads, is a very different game indeed - and we are still a long way from being able to do this. We're nearly 20 years from the launch of ADSL and still have awful broadband in some heavily populated areas - public EV charging is a much bigger undertaking!

Not insurmountable, but a long way from being reality.

But we're comparing a relatively new tech., with a relatively mature tech., which is reaching the diminishing returns point.

I really don't know why there are so many blinkered views when it comes to EVs - they have significant shortcomings which many seem to dismiss without really thinking 'is there a different way to do this?'. I don't see widespread installation of charging points as the answer.