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Of course fuel cells have some applications but they are not exactly dominate in any of these. A large number of these are still small scale pilots and often mo

by nickik 6y ago

Of course fuel cells have some applications but they are not exactly dominate in any of these. A large number of these are still small scale pilots and often mostly government financed. We have seen no massive adoption rate growth and we have seen no massive cost curve going down. We have also not seen a lot of gains in overall efficiency. Battery on the other hand are showing massive adoption, at the same time as falling price and a gigantic amount of private capital. And Toyota is making 10 million cars a year, they have not invested all that massive amount of money in the hope to sell fuel cells into submarine market. Trucks and cars are basically already clearly going battery and that is far bigger market then all the others together. Grid Battery also have not adopted fuel cell tech for the most part. LFP Chemistry seems like the most likely winner for grid batteries at the moment. > - With the current power density level of battery and for the next decade, there is no way you can make a "green" long range commercial plane without a fuel cell technically You can make simple produce a carbon based fuel out of hydrogen and use engines very much like the ones we use now instead of switching to fuel cells. Also, I disagree depending on your definition of 'long range', if you re-engineer planes from the ground up to be electric you can replace a huge number of flights that are domestic, or rather within a continent. That is the majority of flights.

adev_ 6y ago
> We have seen no massive adoption rate growth and we have seen no massive cost curve going down. We have also not seen a lot of gains in overall efficiency. It seems that data says the opposite [1]. I know several datacenters in my region that are currently running fuel cell or/and plan to do so. It was unthinkable 10 years ago. > And Toyota is making 10 million cars a year, they have not invested all that massive amount of money in the hope to sell fuel cells into submarine market. Telsa produces 0.5M car a year in 2020 and still they built their Giga-Factory to generalise Battery technology to other applications than car. The same is valid for fuel cell and Toyota with this move. The article is about 'product' usage, nor about 'car'. For instance, without too much imagination: Seeing luxury yachts switching from diesel generators to fuel cell in incoming decade to avoid a ban due to environmental concern from most touristic regions would not surprise me. This is an application. And it even seem very likely to me. Doing the same with current battery energy density is impossible. > Also, I disagree depending on your definition of 'long range', if you re-engineer planes from the ground up to be electric you can replace a huge number of flights that are domestic I said long range. Excepted if you live in Russia, domestic is NOT long range. Doing a Frankfurt-Tokyo or Paris-New York on an electrical plane today is unthinkable. And it will very likely stay like that for the next decade. But, don't get me wrong: Battery technology democratization is amazing and a proof of hope in our current climate change disaster scenario. However, hoping we can solve every high power usage with battery technology currently is completely illusory and we need to solve these use case too if we do not want to go full speed straight to disaster. [^1]: https://blog.ballard.com/fuel-cell-price-drop https://blog.ballard.com/fuel-cell-price-drop

by nickik 6y ago

adev_ 6y ago

> We have seen no massive adoption rate growth and we have seen no massive cost curve going down. We have also not seen a lot of gains in overall efficiency. It seems that data says the opposite [1]. I know several datacenters in my region that are currently running fuel cell or/and plan to do so. It was unthinkable 10 years ago. > And Toyota is making 10 million cars a year, they have not invested all that massive amount of money in the hope to sell fuel cells into submarine market. Telsa produces 0.5M car a year in 2020 and still they built their Giga-Factory to generalise Battery technology to other applications than car. The same is valid for fuel cell and Toyota with this move. The article is about 'product' usage, nor about 'car'. For instance, without too much imagination: Seeing luxury yachts switching from diesel generators to fuel cell in incoming decade to avoid a ban due to environmental concern from most touristic regions would not surprise me. This is an application. And it even seem very likely to me. Doing the same with current battery energy density is impossible. > Also, I disagree depending on your definition of 'long range', if you re-engineer planes from the ground up to be electric you can replace a huge number of flights that are domestic I said long range. Excepted if you live in Russia, domestic is NOT long range. Doing a Frankfurt-Tokyo or Paris-New York on an electrical plane today is unthinkable. And it will very likely stay like that for the next decade. But, don't get me wrong: Battery technology democratization is amazing and a proof of hope in our current climate change disaster scenario. However, hoping we can solve every high power usage with battery technology currently is completely illusory and we need to solve these use case too if we do not want to go full speed straight to disaster. [^1]: https://blog.ballard.com/fuel-cell-price-drop https://blog.ballard.com/fuel-cell-price-drop