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posted by on Sunday April 16 2017, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the solved-the-embrittlement-problem,-eh? dept.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars could one day challenge electric cars in the race for pollution-free roads—but only if more stations are built to fuel them.

Honda, Toyota and Hyundai have leased a few hundred fuel cell vehicles over the past three years, and expect to lease well over 1,000 this year. But for now, those leases are limited to California, which is home to most of the 34 public hydrogen fueling stations in the U.S.

Undaunted, automakers are investing heavily in the technology. General Motors recently supplied the U.S. Army with a fuel cell pickup, and GM and Honda are collaborating on a fuel cell system due out by 2020. Hyundai will introduce a longer-range fuel cell SUV next year.

"We've clearly left the science project stage and the technology is viable," said Charles Freese, who heads GM's fuel cell business.

Like pure electric cars, fuel cell cars run quietly and emission-free. But they have some big advantages. Fuel cell cars can be refueled as quickly as gasoline-powered cars. By contrast, it takes nine hours to fully recharge an all-electric Chevrolet Bolt using a 240-volt home charger. Fuel cells cars can also travel further between fill-ups.

Would you rather trade in your gas-guzzler for a hydrogen fuel cell car, or an electric car?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by n1 on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:39PM (10 children)

    by n1 (993) on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:39PM (#494855) Journal

    most people I know, especially ones more inclined to go the electric car route do not have a driveway, often have to park a block or two from their homes. all this charging at home and have an iCE car for longer journeys may be fine in US suburbs, but it's far from practical in European cities or suburbs.

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  • (Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:55PM (9 children)

    by WalksOnDirt (5854) on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:55PM (#494861) Journal

    Either we have to build a hydrogen infrastructure or we have to provide power wherever cars are parked. I'm not sure which is easier but the end result is more appealing to me with EVs.

    • (Score: 2) by n1 on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:26PM (7 children)

      by n1 (993) on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:26PM (#494869) Journal

      I agree... I really don't have a solution, and i'd be very happy to have an EV, but they do not exist for my use case at present, but I also accept i'm not in a normal situation...

      People I know, who i mentioned in my original comment are, but i guess they could install EV charging points into parking meters and you can just scan your CC or do some other type of cashless transaction to pay for it. Now that's a good way for local government to spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure and then extract more money from residents through taxes and charging for the service, that will never see a RoI, no matter how much they put the prices or taxes up to become the greenest city/town in the state/country.

      As i said, I don't have a solution... But for as much as everyone loves to praise the 'pioneers' of the growing EV market, i'm yet to see any real explanation of how we're going to keep up with the supply of lithium and how all that mining, recycling and refining, how that's a step in the right direction from what we're doing in regard to oil right now. I'm also interested in low long these EV's are going to last, I see plenty of average cars from decades ago still being used as daily drivers, i'm inclined to believe that over the long term a simple reliable ICE car that's been on the road for 30 odd years is going to be less damaging to the environment and less impact on the finite supply of resources available than the person who went from an ICE whatever to a Prius to a Lexus hybrid to a Tesla all in the last 10 years.

      If TSLA, as the easiest example was really shaking up the energy market and ready to put the old fossil fuel peddlers out of the market... they'd do what they used to do and shut it down... But what they've done is actually become investors in TSLA... While they are changing the market, they're not actually changing the business models, it's all still based on debt and monopolies of infrastructure and resources. They're going to make as much money out of ICE, and make it last as long as they can because they're aware the world does not live in California... But they're also going to maximize the revenues from the change to EVs and they're going to want to sell/lease you a new one every 4-6 years, and like they do with ICE cars now, the planned obsolesce is done well enough you don't have much of a choice unless you want a repair bill for the same as what you'd get in a trade-in.

      and then battery technology will change.... and we start again with all new infrastructure to accommodate in 2030 as we move away from lithium-ion.

      maybe i'm just cynical, but all the new tech i see now, IoT/smart shit/EVs doesn't even seem to come with a selling point that appeals to me, just a 'you're less of an asshole baby polar bear killer if you buy this' or 'don't think, just buy shiny and we'll do the hard work of collecting your data'... just seems like a lot less freedom and choice for the consumer all around.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by KilroySmith on Sunday April 16 2017, @08:09PM

        by KilroySmith (2113) on Sunday April 16 2017, @08:09PM (#494920)

        Electrek posted a good summary of the elements used in current batteries, and their supply chain:
        https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla-batteries-possible-bottleneck/ [electrek.co]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:12PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:12PM (#494975)

        Now that's a good way for local government to spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure and then extract more money from residents through taxes and charging for the service, that will never see a RoI, no matter how much they put the prices or taxes up to become the greenest city/town in the state/country.

        Is that just anti-government fatalism or is there a reason why you think a public charging infrastructure can't be successful?

        • (Score: 2) by n1 on Monday April 17 2017, @01:51AM

          by n1 (993) on Monday April 17 2017, @01:51AM (#495058) Journal

          Is that just anti-government fatalism

          Probably... I think a public charging infrastructure could work though, and it would be what i'd actually hope given current market/tech constraints... But as someone who lived in London for many years, I can only see how it will put the cost of living up further through parking and council taxes over anything else.... When I first started working, i'd spend more on parking for a day in some parts of town than i'd get in wages. Parking fees has gone up a lot, wages for young people not so much.

          Personal transport is going to only become more and more of a luxury for city dwellers -- and everyone else -- the push towards EV's is going to help with that. Of course hiring/ride sharing and public transport variations will still be an option, but we are shifting away from the autonomy of travel people have enjoyed through recent years, when you could buy a serviceable used car for $1000 that would go for another 5 years and 100,000 miles with minimal maintenance.

          This is obviously all not explicitly to do with the topic and hand of this article, but in larger metropolitan areas I do expect a big reduction in personal car ownership in the coming years, and the death of the cheap used car in, which will remove some freedom of movement for people on lower incomes.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 17 2017, @12:47PM (3 children)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 17 2017, @12:47PM (#495220)

        they could install EV charging points into parking meters and you can just scan your CC or do some other type of cashless transaction to pay for it.

        The financial problem is they're going to be smaller scale and more expensive than paypal and the minimum paypal expense is equivalent to more than two hours of charging off a 15 amp circuit.

        The EE problem is I googled the upscale local mall and it has 5086 parking spaces. Now a power plant sized nuclear reactor could output about eight million amps of 120 volt service (to one sig fig) and eight million amps of service divided by five thousand parking spots is about 1500 amps. A Tesla "supercharger" or "hypercharger" or wtf its called can draw 120KW per car and charges the car rather quickly although it doesn't take a math PHD to calculate that 120KW/120V is about 1000 amps of 120 volt service. So the point I'm making is to install and operate a Tesla Supercharger at every parking spot at the local mall will, to one sig fig, take the entire output of a modern nuclear reactor.

        There is a financial and EE combined problem where the whiteopia suburban county I live in, has half a million people and hosts this nice upscale 5000 person shopping mall and takes one nuclear reactor to power it. The population of the USA is about 318 million plus or minus illegals so as a very rough guess to provide a supercharger port per person would only require the construction of 600 nuclear reactors to power it. Of course not everyone needs to charge at the same time (although I'm sure the demand spikes just after 9am and 6pm will be impressive) and not everyone owns a car etc. Or if you'd like a 5000 person mall in each of 3000 USA counties then we'd need about 3000 or so nuclear power plants although many counties are not heavily populated.

        But it gives you sort of a scale of the problem, that a "large shopping mall's worth" of fast chargers takes about one nuclear reactor to power it.

        Electric cars are a very stereotypical macro vs micro problem where on a micro scale when electric cars are a rounding error approaching zero, they're incredibly cheap to "fuel" but we as a nation simply can't afford to replace a significant fraction of cars with electric; we simply don't have enough generating capacity by at least one order of magnitude, maybe two. Its almost exactly the same problem as running every diesel engine on the continent off McDonalds fryer grease biodiesel, in that its practically free when no one does it but we can't run a significant fraction of engines on biodiesel because it takes more diesel to make the biodiesel than it would just to burn the diesel straight (see ethanol for a similar problem) and we simply don't eat enough french fries and fish fries to generate enough used grease.

        Hydrogen has a similar problem where we make a heck of a lot of H2 out of natgas but we don't have enough natgas to make enough H2 to replace all of gasoline production. And why would we make H2 out of natgas anyway instead of just burning the natgas directly or slightly refining it into propane and burning that?

        • (Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Monday April 17 2017, @02:36PM (1 child)

          by WalksOnDirt (5854) on Monday April 17 2017, @02:36PM (#495266) Journal

          Electric cars give you a demand management resource. At times of high electricity demand you turn off some or all of the free or subsidized chargers. If you really need your car charged up right away you go to a fast charger and pay perhaps three times as much.

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 17 2017, @04:20PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 17 2017, @04:20PM (#495308)

            Oh I agree with you there are interesting alternatives.

            Another idea you didn't mention is culturally we're only "cool" with filling up a car tank all the way.

            There's no technological reason against, and probably several for, slow partial charging.

            So if the average mall visitor is 5 miles away they'll slow charge maybe 5 miles per hour plugged in. That instantly drops the wiring expense from 120 KW * 5K spots to something like christmas tree wiring. Chargers operating at that low of a rate might use less electricity than the parking lot light poles, I'd have to run the math. At that point the capex of the chargers starts getting higher than the cost of the energy they use...

        • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:56AM

          by Whoever (4524) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:56AM (#495642) Journal

          The financial problem is they're going to be smaller scale and more expensive than paypal and the minimum paypal expense is equivalent to more than two hours of charging off a 15 amp circuit.

          Easily worked around by requiring an account that holds credit and funding is added in $25 units when the credit held in the account falls below a certain level. Fastrak (bridge tolls) works like this, so does Chargepoint (largest charging network in the USA).

          So you don't use a credit card, but you have some other kind of card that identifies your account. That's the way EV charging mostly works today. You don't even need one card per charging network: the cards can be associated with multiple charging networks.

    • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday April 16 2017, @08:14PM

      by Whoever (4524) on Sunday April 16 2017, @08:14PM (#494923) Journal

      Either we have to build a hydrogen infrastructure or we have to provide power wherever cars are parked.

      Since we already have the infrastructure to distribute electricity, I think the answer is obvious.

      Also, there are improvements in fast charging in progress.