> The California Energy Commission (CEC) has invested nearly $166 million and plans to invest a total of $279 million through its Clean Transportation Program to build a network of more than 100 hydrogen filling stations to support the increasingly unlikely surge of zero-emissions fuel-cell electric cars.
For comparison, it has cost Tesla ~$600 million to build out its global supercharger network.
One hypothesis: While Battery Electric Cars seem to have won out in California, it is still unclear what the longer term trend for Trucks will be. Some postulate that Hydrogen might be useful for quick refueling of trucks, and to lower the mass needed to carry (as the trip goes on, increasing mileage), etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNgZ6xL_An4
Electric is a complete non-starter for emergency vehicles. They need to be able to refuel in a grid-down situation, and fill up in minutes instead of hours. Hydrogen isn't as portable as gasoline, but it can be trucked to disaster areas easier than electricity.
If EVs really take off and we start to see gas stations shutting down, it would be nice to have the infrastructure already in place to keep fire trucks and ambulances rolling.
Solar + big batteries can provide electricity when the grid is down.
If you need a backup plan, then a regular gas station and perhaps hybrid emergency fire trucks seems to make more sense. Since all the infrastructure is available for that right now.
Realistically, we're not gonna have enough batteries. Passenger vehicle electrification so far has been paid for by optimism and subsidies. Renewables are great but they require batteries, that we won't have enough nuclear to provide a baseline of energy once we decommission all fossil burning plants is a foregone conclusion at this point.
In short we're approaching things from the wrong end IMO, burning more fossil fuels for energy generation and moving things that need power density and quick refueling to slow, heavy batteries.
That is the gotcha. Do you let peoples houses burn down while your fire truck charges? What happens when 50 fire trucks need to be charged at once? Or the giant battery is the thing on fire?
Liquid fuel (hydrogen, gasoline, etc) is essential. So as EVs take over and gas stations shut down, we either need to provide government subsidies to keep some gas stations operational, or invest in a clean alternative.
Or just provide the infrastructure to charge 50 trucks at once, like we already do with massive fuel stations that have a dozen pumps and the driveways to handle the traffic.
The energy density of a battery is so low though. That means a lot of capacity must be dedicated to batteries instead of cargo. Meaning you need more trucks.
I think what they are trying in Europe with overhead wires for charging on the move allowing trucks to carry lighter batteries will be more successful.
If by worse electric trains you mean electric trains that can solve the last mile problem all in one mode of transit, then yes.
Visual a bus that picks you up at its regular stops, but when it enters the highway of uses a long stretch of overhead wire to use nil battery.
You get the benefits of scale and flexibility of a bus, but at a reduced cost than train infrastructure while still moving many, many more people than a car.
It’s time to stick a pin in the suburbia ponzi scheme and call this failed experiment done. Separating people from their place of work by a forced commute was a great subsidy for the automotive and petroleum industries, but that is over now.
What gives you this impression? What happens to the tens of millions of people who live in suburbia? What happens for those who enjoy living in suburbia?
That's a decent attempt at a back-justification, but to my knowledge the hydrogen program is running purely on momentum from many years ago when the economic superiority of battery-electric cars was not yet perfectly clear.
Hydrogen is not something that could work, it already does work. Battery EVs make a lot of tradeoffs making them unsuitable for a lot of workloads. Hydrogen solves them and does not need much development to make it useful for consumer vehicles.
You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well.
Nuclear to hydrogen is workable and the way I'm imagining it going. There's also options to create hydrocarbons from air using the heat of a reactor.
BEV solve 99% of the problem and hydrogen is not worh investing in for the rest. The battle is already over, and just like with cars 10 ago its totally clear but it will be another 5 years until the hydrogen defenders admit it.
And claiming that hydrogen doesnt need much development is an insane claim given the money put in and the total lack of success.
Most hydrogen is produced from methane and is actually worse than gasoline for global warming because methane leaks and is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
It makes indeed more sense to just use renewable gasoline, e.g. using the Fischer-Tropsch process like VW's eFuel.
Tell that to the person with the Tesla who is trying to drive from one side of Australia to the other and is completely dependent upon the generator powered charging station in the middle of the Nullarbor Plane to complete the trip.
Yep, BEV are great for commuting, but very difficult to use if you need to travel long distances in remote areas or tow a caravan or trailer.
Or we can just use hybrid technology where needed and pure EV elsewhere?
Not much development except for developing generation capacity that doesn't exist (and electrolysis is wildly inefficient, by the way), a distribution chain that doesn't exist, familiarizing everyone from consumers to service staff with a fuel system unlike anything they've used before (CNG only ever took off in mass transit, and only to a limited degree), and oh by the way, it's centered around a gas that is so prone to leaking it leaks through metals and embrittles them in the process.
I can plug in an EV into the wall in my garage and charge it every night without a single change to my house. An L2 charger installation is an hour or two's work for an electrician.
I suspect with enough R&D focused on ease of use the CNG fuel system won't require more consumer intervention than the 1500lb battery pack under the car.
> You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well.
That's exactly it, but maybe not in the way you meant.
Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
> Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
This is not the case, at least over here in Australia. Whenever hydrogen is mentioned as a fuel, it is implicitly Green Hydrogen. It only became necessary to explicitly start saying Green Hydrogen after the fossil fuel spokespeople were using existing production to belittle green initiatives and pilots.
The actual reason hydrogen is being pushed here is because of what happens when you shut down large, centralized coal power plants and shut down coal mining capacity. You end up with rural towns with no jobs, or in the eyes of a politician an electoral district who isn't going to vote for them. Hydrogen means big solar and wind farms connected to hydrogen plants and jobs and votes linked to those jobs, and you can guess where they are going to be built. The elephant in the room is who is going to buy all this hydrogen when in most cases it seems batteries are the better choice for consumers.
Go back? We never left trains. The US rail network moves a tremendous volume of cargo. But it can never be competitive with trucks for really time sensitive goods.
Your not wrong, but we sort of did. Road infrastructure gets the funding. We need to nationalize our train infrastructure. And change our zoning laws to prioritize rail freight instead of trucks.
The amount of land saved from this alone would be huge. Trains are also just way more energy efficient
Department of Energy regulations require hydrogen fuel stations to be able to fuel vehicles at 8-12 gallons per minute equivalent. Gas and diesel pumps (even the hi-flow truck stop ones) are capped at 10 gpm for safety.
Truck stop pumps have much larger nozzles and pump 6-10 times faster than the limit for light vehicles "and that refueling facilities are exempt from the 10gpm requirement if used exclusively to refuel heavy-duty vehicles, boats or airplanes"
Right now the lack of standardization of high pressure, high flow rate pumps for large trucks is a problem that Nikola is working very hard to solve. The pumps that are standardized and in use right now are a major bottleneck.
It looks like current pumps fill hydrogen at a rate of about 1kg/minute. A class 8 truck would take more than an hour to fill. At they point just go BEV.
This assumes that trucks and cars will continue to use "nozzles" and "hoses" rather than the evolution of swapping cannisters of hydrogen.
If Tesla can build a mostly-robotic factory, we can make robotic hydrogen bottle-swapping refueling stations.
Of course, this is a future thing, not a now thing.
For comparison, it has cost Tesla ~$600 million to build out its global supercharger network.
https://supercharge.info/map