Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
That’d be my big concern; where tf would you re-fuel it?
There one single hydrogen fuel station in each of the two major cities near me.
They just announced they’re shutting down some in California.
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To be fair, EV’s had that same obstacle, and have pretty much overcome it.
I disagree, EV are the exact opposite. Electricity was EVERYWHERE even before the EV were a thing.
A regular plug can charge an electric car and for few thousands $ you can install an 11 or 22kW charger.
Hydrogen on the other hand is extremely hard to store and transport. Unlike electricity the hydrogen production is very limited right now and full of unknown.
I don’t think they’re the same at all. Electricity distribution is practically everywhere already. Even if you need fast charging, setting it up in comparison to setting up a petrol or especially a hydrogen station, is extremely easy and extremely cheap, relatively speaking.
One hydrogen station cost millions to install. People assume based on the appearance that they’d be like a petrol station, but it’s actually a fair bit more of an engineering challenge. Plus there’s shitloads of costly red tape surrounding them (because hydrogen go boom if you’re not careful).
As did ICE vehicles when they came on the scene. People seem to get really upset that manufacturers are exploring multiple possibilities rather than all of them collectively deciding on a single option as if everyone in the country drives the same car and has the same needs.
Most Hydrogen fuel is still made from natural gas. It’s greenwashing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/climate/hydrogen-fuel-natural-gas-pollution.html
it is however extremely easy to make from water. Making the switch to green easy and seamless, and it will surely happen if there’s demand.
It might be theoretically easy, but the massive power demands (and loss) make it pretty hard in practice.
And most electricity is still made from fossil fuels. The point is that it doesn’t have to be, unlike gasoline.
That’s not true, Gasoline doesn’t have to be made from Fossile fuels either. It’s pretty easy to make actually - there are a number of European companies doing it and with the Co2 Taxes, it will be a viable option by 2028.
Gasoline is made from petroleum.
It is certainly synthesisable by some method without using petroleum. But the person you replied to probably meant Power-to-Gas.
Biogasoline is a thing, although I’m not aware of anyone really pushing it as viable fuel above biodiesel, ethanol, and bioLPG.
In the near term, it’s pretty clear that zero-emission, light-duty vehicles will need to rely on batteries. So why are Toyota and Honda (and Hyundai and others) still so bullish on hydrogen?
To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.
Why is this article so agressively angled?
While it’s clear the infrastructure isn’t there right now, isn’t hydrogen in the long term a clearly better alternative than ev’s? The biggest problem with EV’s being the battery, with all the horrible chemicals that go in to making them.
Shouldn’t hydrogen, in the long term, be the obviously greener alternative, or am I missing something?
Hydrogen is incredibly inefficient compared to using electricity directly. You have to first use the electricity to make the hydrogen, this is very inefficient in itself. then you have to “burn” it to drive the vehicle, which wastes most of the energy just like ICE vehicle. So you need several times the initial energy generation to drive a hydrogen vehicle the same distance compared to using electricity directly.
Of course the batteries is then the issue when it comes to EVs, so they’re not a magic bullet. But I wouldn’t say hydrogen is the obvious better choice either since it is so wasteful with the energy.
In a conference that in attended, they talked about usbhavimg to look at energy sources like a flow of energy and not as limited sources.
Currently, wind turbines are imtemtionally stopped, when there is so much wind that the generated electricity becomes too cheap to sell!
Instead, you could run them and use the electricity to convert the energy into hydrogen. Yes some energy is lost but it would be lost anyway as wind
With wind, sun, wave energy, we can look at energy in different ways that we usually do with fuel and coal. It’s there and it just keeps coming.
Yes but the overhead we have is nothing compared to the energy needed to make everything hydrogen powered. we would need an absolute absurd amount of overhead to generate all the hydrogen from overhead alone.
It’s kind of dumb to intentionally waste 75-80% of the total electric energy initially generated to power hydrogen vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea, it should absolutely be done ASAP…but it’s not a solution to hydrogen powered vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea
A factory which only runs some of the time will be really expensive. From what I’ve seen it’s way more cost effective to rely on batteries for surplus electricity.
So far grid scale battery storage only scales to stabilizing the grid. It’s better than anything else at that, but it’s not cost effective to for example power a town overnight until solar is back
For personal vehicles, no, that is not at all clear and many of us would say clearly the opposite.
However there are more heavy duty applications where batteries are unlikely to ever scale. I don’t think we have a clear winner yet so hydrogen is likely still in the running for things like aviation, shipping, construction and farm equipment, industry, maybe even grid scale energy storage
Crash it and you have your own private Hindenburg.
What do you think gasoline does when it’s set on fire?
Not really. Hindenburg had hydrogen at air pressure.
Pressurised hydrogen tends to fail in a much safer way (or just not fail). A regular fossil fuel car fire is much worse.
The thing is you’re not just burning hydrogen (or gas). You’re also burning oxygen in the atmosphere and how bad the fire is depends how the gas mixes with the oxygen. The mix has to be just right or it won’t burn at all (Hindenburg was just right).
Gasoline tends to burn quite slowly which is particularly catastrophic as it generates heat over a long time which causes everything else in the car to also catch fire, while still burning fast enough that you might not be able to escape the car before it the fire gets dangerous.
I don’t have a single hydrogen station here in Michigan. (There might be one in Detroit.) Meanwhile, I can plug in my electric car at home, or go to a public charger 10 miles away. Hydrogen’s good as dead. At least to me, anyway.
Hydrogen was as good as dead for years because compressing it is so wasteful
