4 ms·

There's obviously a lot of complexities here and clear reasons why many in the transport industry think this is the solution. If they didn't Volvo and Daimler w

There's obviously a lot of complexities here and clear reasons why many in the transport industry think this is the solution. If they didn't Volvo and Daimler would be announcing their bet on BEV, right? Unlike oil majors, they have no sunk-cost reason to prefer one over the other and a lot of the technical change is shared between the platforms. A FCEV is just a BEV with a small battery, a small fuel cell, and a big hydrogen tank. That being the case, it feels a bit easy to just say, "obviously this doesn't make sense". However there are a few important differences between trucks and passenger cars that actually reduce some of the issues with EV trucking. A long-haul truck probably needs about 700kWh to 1MWh of battery storage. How long does that take to charge? Some constraints on passenger car charging become less relevant when you're serving a professional audience and can have staff on-site to help. Cable thickness / weight is an ergonomic constraint that can be relaxed if you are serving truckers and not the 99th percentile of the public. You can even mount them on articulated arms on a gantry so that you're not dragging them around. Multiple cables charging in parallel? Inconvenient on a passenger car, perfectly sensible on a truck. Liquid cooling loop to external chiller? Again, that just doesn't work if you're building tens of thousands of chargers for the public, may well be worthwhile on network of truck refilling stations. In the EU, there is already a mandatory 45 minute break every 4 hrs 30 mins. So there is no need for trucks that can drive for 12 hours on a tank. (US rules are in theory laxer but in practice insurance companies also insist on break rules). So the real question is whether you can make the charging process fast enough to get approx. 4:30 extra capacity in 45 minutes. That's probably about 800kWh in 40 minutes of actual charging (assume time to connect and disconnect) or 1.2MW. 350kW chargers are installed and operating now (though I'm not sure how many cars can actually use them at that power) so naively you would think that running 4 of those in parallel would give you the charging tech required to run trucks today. Hydrogen may still be cheaper for truck transport once you work out all the costs and logistics but I don't think it's wildly impossible either. The big advantage that hydrogen has is that the cost of hydrogen tanks scales much more slowly than batteries. If pack price is $100/kWh then you need $70k-$100k worth of batteries. Doesn't seem crazy for a truck but a tank that can hold equivalent H2 at pressure is much cheaper. Takes up a lot of space but trucking is mass limited rather than volume limited.

darksaints 5y ago
Volvo has already bet pretty big on Battery-powered trucks. They've actually started full scale production already, beating Elon's fantasy truck to market: https://www.volvotrucks.us/trucks/vnr-electric/ https://www.volvotrucks.us/trucks/vnr-electric/ For some reason, otherwise intelligent people seem to think that hydrogen and batteries are diametrically opposed and that if you bet on one, you can't bet on the other. The reality is that they're both awesome and have a lot of potential, and they're both worth betting on. But batteries will never have the range that is required of long haul trucking. Their research into hydrogen is entirely consistent with this. BEVs for short haul, FCEVs for long haul. As to the rest of your post, I'm not big on pure hydrogen, but solid oxide fuel cells don't necessarily require hydrogen storage. At least not in the compressed sense. They can easily use any form of fuel you can throw at it. Synthetic fuels are the future of renewable energy for long range use cases. There is an efficiency hit to creating synthetic fuels, and an efficiency hit to converting them back to hydrogen, but efficiency doesn't actually matter...at least not directly. For example, we have had 60% efficient engines for a long time, but we still buy cars with 35-40% efficiency. What matters is dollars per work done. Synthetic fuel production can extremely cheaply be manufactured with off-peak surplus renewable energy. And as we invest more in renewable production, that surplus is only going to grow larger and get cheaper.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Actually, there may be a few reasons why legacy truck manufacturers are pushing this agenda: 1) They've been pushing it for a long time and have already invested a lot. Most of that investment is going to have to be written off unless they find a use for all the hydrogen R&D. I note that it is mainly legacy manufacturers pushing this whereas battery operated trucks have a fair amount of startups in advanced stages of getting their trucks, buses, heavy mining vehicles etc. on the road. 2) Hydrogen trucks and their designs are a lot more similar to current trucks then battery electric ones. These manufacturers have a vested interest in their legacy production facilities and supply lines and milking that investment as long as possible is a goal for them. Their real goal is exactly that: keeping the infrastructure that produces Diesel trucks going for a few extra years. That's also the elephant in the room: their operational cost of hydrogen trucks is going to be much higher than battery electric trucks; or even Diesel trucks. The fuel cost is higher and they have about the same complexity as Diesel trucks. 3) There is a lot of government money flowing into the hydrogen sector and getting in on that action is interesting for big companies. Given future availability of this stuff, and the subsidies, there is going to be a market for trucks that run on it. Even if it is tiny, it might still be interesting. Unless of course battery trucks take off and destroy the business case for this. Like happened to hydrogen cars. Storing 1Mwh of electricity might actually be pretty fast and not necessarily a lot slower than charging a normal EV. A battery contains numerous cells that you charge at the same time. All it takes is a lot of power and temperature control (and thick cables). The answer to how fast or how slow this will be is more or less a function of how much speed is worth to a trucking company. Idling trucks and drivers cost money. But then trucks needing regular maintenance are also idling. And drivers need to take breaks regardless of whether their trucks need charging. And drivers might ultimately no longer be needed if trucks become autonomous. People pay for getting stuff from A to B. The rest is just a means to an end. Trucking cleanly, cheaply, and reliably is what matters. Cost per mile basically. There is a notion of good enough here. E.g. having lots of charging stations and trucks that charge to a reasonable percentage in say 45 minutes might mean that a 45 minute break every 6 hours or so might not be the end of the world for a lot of drivers and trucking companies. Entirely feasible with current battery technology. Tesla is basically pimping 500 mile ranges. That's more like a break every 10-12 hours or so. I imagine that, charging times, and cost per mile might improve quite a bit in the next ten years. Tesla is starting production end of this year apparently. And they are not alone in the market. Getting that break time down might of course be worth something to someone. But the question is how much that is and whether it justifies more complicated and more expensive technology like hydrogen. I suspect not a lot and just no.

darksaints 5y ago

Volvo has already bet pretty big on Battery-powered trucks. They've actually started full scale production already, beating Elon's fantasy truck to market: https://www.volvotrucks.us/trucks/vnr-electric/ https://www.volvotrucks.us/trucks/vnr-electric/ For some reason, otherwise intelligent people seem to think that hydrogen and batteries are diametrically opposed and that if you bet on one, you can't bet on the other. The reality is that they're both awesome and have a lot of potential, and they're both worth betting on. But batteries will never have the range that is required of long haul trucking. Their research into hydrogen is entirely consistent with this. BEVs for short haul, FCEVs for long haul. As to the rest of your post, I'm not big on pure hydrogen, but solid oxide fuel cells don't necessarily require hydrogen storage. At least not in the compressed sense. They can easily use any form of fuel you can throw at it. Synthetic fuels are the future of renewable energy for long range use cases. There is an efficiency hit to creating synthetic fuels, and an efficiency hit to converting them back to hydrogen, but efficiency doesn't actually matter...at least not directly. For example, we have had 60% efficient engines for a long time, but we still buy cars with 35-40% efficiency. What matters is dollars per work done. Synthetic fuel production can extremely cheaply be manufactured with off-peak surplus renewable energy. And as we invest more in renewable production, that surplus is only going to grow larger and get cheaper.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Actually, there may be a few reasons why legacy truck manufacturers are pushing this agenda: 1) They've been pushing it for a long time and have already invested a lot. Most of that investment is going to have to be written off unless they find a use for all the hydrogen R&D. I note that it is mainly legacy manufacturers pushing this whereas battery operated trucks have a fair amount of startups in advanced stages of getting their trucks, buses, heavy mining vehicles etc. on the road. 2) Hydrogen trucks and their designs are a lot more similar to current trucks then battery electric ones. These manufacturers have a vested interest in their legacy production facilities and supply lines and milking that investment as long as possible is a goal for them. Their real goal is exactly that: keeping the infrastructure that produces Diesel trucks going for a few extra years. That's also the elephant in the room: their operational cost of hydrogen trucks is going to be much higher than battery electric trucks; or even Diesel trucks. The fuel cost is higher and they have about the same complexity as Diesel trucks. 3) There is a lot of government money flowing into the hydrogen sector and getting in on that action is interesting for big companies. Given future availability of this stuff, and the subsidies, there is going to be a market for trucks that run on it. Even if it is tiny, it might still be interesting. Unless of course battery trucks take off and destroy the business case for this. Like happened to hydrogen cars. Storing 1Mwh of electricity might actually be pretty fast and not necessarily a lot slower than charging a normal EV. A battery contains numerous cells that you charge at the same time. All it takes is a lot of power and temperature control (and thick cables). The answer to how fast or how slow this will be is more or less a function of how much speed is worth to a trucking company. Idling trucks and drivers cost money. But then trucks needing regular maintenance are also idling. And drivers need to take breaks regardless of whether their trucks need charging. And drivers might ultimately no longer be needed if trucks become autonomous. People pay for getting stuff from A to B. The rest is just a means to an end. Trucking cleanly, cheaply, and reliably is what matters. Cost per mile basically. There is a notion of good enough here. E.g. having lots of charging stations and trucks that charge to a reasonable percentage in say 45 minutes might mean that a 45 minute break every 6 hours or so might not be the end of the world for a lot of drivers and trucking companies. Entirely feasible with current battery technology. Tesla is basically pimping 500 mile ranges. That's more like a break every 10-12 hours or so. I imagine that, charging times, and cost per mile might improve quite a bit in the next ten years. Tesla is starting production end of this year apparently. And they are not alone in the market. Getting that break time down might of course be worth something to someone. But the question is how much that is and whether it justifies more complicated and more expensive technology like hydrogen. I suspect not a lot and just no.