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