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Quoting what I said elsewhere: > It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy dens
by _hypx 4y ago
Quoting what I said elsewhere:
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
- stetrain 4y agoThey've had billions poured in, and have been in development for longer than the modern li-ion + AC motor electric car. And yet the cars are more expensive, the refilling stations are expensive to build and only exist in limited geographic regions, the cost to refuel is high, and we don't have infrastructure to provide clean hydrogen in volume to filling stations. Sure these are solvable problems. But at some point if we want it to actually exist it has to actually be built instead of being a California and Japan toy project.
- _hypx 4y agoThen why not pour billions more? We are talking about the potential end of the world, and yet we also proclaim that this cannot motivate us to spend an amount of money that is a tiny fraction of what we spend on military hardware.
- stetrain 4y agoHow much should we spend on Hydrogen vs EVs? How many years and how many billions to create a device the size of a refrigerator that can connect to grid power and refill Hydrogen cars all day long? We have had this for EVs for a decade. Toyota, Hyundai, GM, and others have been putting money in since at least the 90s. Why haven’t they been able to create a compelling product and bring it to market? If hydrogen is just a battery, and someone wants to create an EV that happens to use Hydrogen as the battery, and finds a way to charge that battery off of an AC or DC grid connection, then it can use any of the EV infrastructure we are building today. None of that infrastructure is li-ion specific. It’s for batteries that charge from grid power.
- _hypx 4y ago> How much should we spend on Hydrogen vs EVs? You are aware of what is at stake here? Not even multiple trillions of dollar is a number too high to be unjustified. Anything less than $1 trillion should not even qualify as a serious argument against it.
- stetrain 4y agoBut we have to weigh probability of success. We can’t spend trillions on dropping ice cubes into the ocean just because the stakes are high and we need to try something. I could be wrong but I haven’t seen anyone suggest that there is a path to creating a hydrogen charging network that will be as efficient or effective as a direct EV charging network. More money doesn’t change that. I reject the premise that there is some conspiracy or avoidance to spending money on hydrogen vehicles. Tons of money has been spent and is being spent, with less useful results so far than other battery types. Every vehicle credit, infrastructure plan, or fleet emissions target I have read already calls out hydrogen alongside EV as qualifying. For use cases where the technology fundamentally makes sense, such as Aircraft where infrastructure only needs to exist at major airports and the energy density requirements are much more significant, there is active investment and development with a solid path to useful results.
- _hypx 4y agoSo where is this battery chemistry with even higher energy density? Or comes from a resource more abundant that water? The answer is none that we know of. These are self-evident reasons why we should spend significant resources pursuing this path. Like I said, the arguments against that are just excuses. And no one is implying that this path comes at the exclusion of everything else either. That just seems like another excuse. We can easily fund everything else while also funding this idea too. Existing policies are pretty much rigged in favor of li-ion batteries. People sometimes cite fuel cell tax credits, but ignore the part where the government is heavily subsidizing battery factories or paying for charging networks. It is not remotely a fair comparison.
- 4y ago
- cpgxiii 4y agoThey aren't poor excuses. There are fundamentally hard problems about the distribution of clean hydrogen that have not and likely will not be overcome in a way that is broadly competitive with other technologies. Sure, you can use methane as a "transportable hydrogen", but then it's not clean any more. You can make your hydrogen relatively cheaply from natural gas, but then it's not clean any more. This is not due to lack of focus or funding. Toyota, the largest auto maker in the world, has spent decades trying to make hydrogen-powered cars a reality. And in any honest assessment, it has failed dismally at doing so (indeed, it has spent so much focus and funding on hydrogen that it is woefully behind its competitors in battery electric vehicles).
- _hypx 4y agoThat is the excuse I'm talking about. We are not having a discussion over whether those problems exist, it is about whether we should spend money on tackling them. After all, we are at in dire need of a battery with higher energy density. And yet the answer has consistently been "sure, it may be exactly what we're looking for, but somehow we already know that it is impossible despite spending very little R&D on it."
- cpgxiii 4y agoLots of money has been spent on this front already, and it has gone nowhere. There is no magic way to suddenly make hydrogen a nicely-behaved, high-density storable fuel. Military and space applications, who are willing to work with much more troublesome fuels, have tried to improve on hydrogen on-and-off since the dawn of rocketry. The only practical improvement on LH2 is liquid methane. And guess what, that's exactly the same story with terrestrial transport. Around the world, natural gas powers a lot of vehicles. It is a great storable means of distributing hydrogen - safe enough and well-understood enough that much of the developed world is content at piping it directly into their homes. What it is not is carbon-emission free.
- _hypx 4y agoRead what I said to the other guy. We are not having a conversation over whether those problems exist. It's about the motivation to solve them. And the problems of today should give us massive motivation to do so. Even trillions of dollar is not "too much money."
- k8wk1 4y ago> hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. The devil is in the details - this is only partially right. Hydrogen has absurdly high energy densities when considering weight, however when considering volume it has absurdly low density. The low volumetric density is one of the primary barriers to hydrogen adoption.