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Another equally viable title, one which does not involve as much fear, would be: "Norways' gasoline use down 37% since 2013 as over 1/5th of cars now electric"

Another equally viable title, one which does not involve as much fear, would be: "Norways' gasoline use down 37% since 2013 as over 1/5th of cars now electric" Their point of heavier trucks, trains, and planes not going electric yet is true, they're simply higher up the difficulty curve. The electric trucks are starting to roll out, from the bottom of the range and working up.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
Heavy trucks is probably where green hydrogen makes sense unless you want 10 ton behemoths destroying roads annually (considering impact of construction costs etc.)
- bodyfour 3y ago
  and/or add overhead power delivery to major motorways, allowing trucks to have (relatively) small batteries for the non-motorway parts of their journeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Those can already run on batteries. Australia has some electrified road trains that are 165 tonnes, way more than is allowed on roads in most countries. Brutally simple solution with batteries that can be swapped in a few minutes. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/18/australian-miner-to-trial-worlds-first-electric-triple-road-train-with-swappable-battery/ https://thedriven.io/2023/04/18/australian-miner-to-trial-wo... Hydrogen is likely never going to be very popular for road transport. It's way more costly than battery electric to operate and most transport companies deeply care about their margins. Besides that, the infrastructure simply isn't there for hydrogen (never mind green hydrogen). And the battery equivalents are already being used on roads right now in pretty much any weight class. High speed megawatt chargers are already being developed. And with swapping batteries the whole argument against having to wait goes away.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    Economics of road trains plus battery swapping will be disastrous. You will need many times more batteries than even other large BEV trucking ideas. In reality, it's pretty much a guarantee that hydrogen displaces batteries for most cases, and likely all of heavy transport. The mistake critics are making is assuming that this must be expensive. But just like other types of renewable energy, this is actually heading towards nearly zero.
    - jillesvangurp 3y ago
      The road trains I mentioned are diesel truck conversions. It's that simple. Get rid of the original drive train, put an electrical drive train in. Shove in some battery where the fuel used to go. Actually works. On a 165 tonne road trains. Not a hypothetical but in commercial operation right now defying your notions of what is and isn't feasible. Imagine what a truck that is designed from the ground up to do that could do. Probably would do quite a bit better. Paying 2-3x for hydrogen and depending on infrastructure that simply does not exist yet doesn't even sound like the beginnings of a plan. It doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. It's a pipe dream financed by companies reluctant to get out of the diesel truck business. By the time energy really gets that cheap, battery electric trucks will have been dominating the roads for decades and there won't be any point in replacing them with less efficient hydrogen trucks. There isn't one now. There won't be one a few decades from now.
      - _hypx 3y ago
        A hydrogen truck is basically the same idea just economically sane and doesn’t have a huge weight penalty. You’re mostly repeating BEV propaganda and it is mostly just close-mindedness. The point is that hydrogen trucks are actually economically viable in this setting. Not to mention that BEVs are a >100 year old technology, and the idea that something that old can maintain a permanent cost advantage over all possible alternatives is a completely delusional idea. This even ignores the fact that fuel cells are electrochemical systems and don’t have any fundamental disadvantages compared to li-ion batteries. FCEVs are literally just a cheaper type of EV.
    - 3y ago
- occz 3y ago
  Alternatively, we could build more rail and move the shipping done by heavy trucks to trains. Even in their very reduced current form, and with heavy trucks getting their infrastructure for free, trains are still more economical than heavy trucks, so if we remove those factors then trains become the obvious choice.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  I highly doubt that. The end-to-end efficiency, energy density, safety, difficulty in transit and storage, and cost will make it a very dubious choice for anything but the niche of niche cases. I'm pretty convinced that anything that can't realistically be electrified is likely going to end up being biodiesel.
rob74 3y ago
Agree about trucks and airplanes, but electrifying rail is nothing new, and indeed 2644 out of 4109 km (64%) of railways in Norway are already electrified.
- cjrp 3y ago
  I wonder what % of train "movements" are electrified; length of electrified rail is one thing, but I suspect the majority of that remaining 36% of non-electrified rail actually account for a small percentage of movements.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Hard to say. It has been known for years that for very busy rail lines electric is cheaper than diesel, and the American main lines are more than busy enough to cross the threshold. However the long tail of not busy enough rail combined with the logistics of getting diesel to those less busy rail when they are used mean overall diesel is cheaper. (though I suspect the rails are not running honest numbers here, but that is a different debate).
    - crote 3y ago
      The most ironic part is that the vast majority of diesel trains are already diesel-electric and could trivially make use of overhead wires. But instead the rail companies have actually been tearing down existing electrification. There were 3100 miles of electrified rails in the 1930s, but now it is down to a tiny fraction of that.
  - rjmunro 3y ago
    Yes and no. I know nothing about Norway's rail system, but it was the case in the UK that a lot of electrified rail was only partially used because services that ran on both electrified and non-electrified tracks needed to be powered by diesel for the entire journey. This has got a lot better more recently as we now have hybrid trains that can run on electricity whenever there are overhead lines, and diesel where there aren't. There is talk of replacing diesel engines with batteries so that they can run on electric (and use regenerative braking) even where there are no overhead lines, charging the batteries from the overhead line when available. https://anonw.com/2023/06/27/what-will-be-the-range-of-a-hitachi-class-800-battery-train/ https://anonw.com/2023/06/27/what-will-be-the-range-of-a-hit... There are usually multiple diesel generators on each train, so it's likely that the batteries will only replace some of them - there would still be some diesel power available for emergencies.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Heavy trucks is probably where green hydrogen makes sense unless you want 10 ton behemoths destroying roads annually (considering impact of construction costs etc.)

bodyfour 3y ago
and/or add overhead power delivery to major motorways, allowing trucks to have (relatively) small batteries for the non-motorway parts of their journeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Those can already run on batteries. Australia has some electrified road trains that are 165 tonnes, way more than is allowed on roads in most countries. Brutally simple solution with batteries that can be swapped in a few minutes. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/18/australian-miner-to-trial-worlds-first-electric-triple-road-train-with-swappable-battery/ https://thedriven.io/2023/04/18/australian-miner-to-trial-wo... Hydrogen is likely never going to be very popular for road transport. It's way more costly than battery electric to operate and most transport companies deeply care about their margins. Besides that, the infrastructure simply isn't there for hydrogen (never mind green hydrogen). And the battery equivalents are already being used on roads right now in pretty much any weight class. High speed megawatt chargers are already being developed. And with swapping batteries the whole argument against having to wait goes away.
- _hypx 3y ago
  Economics of road trains plus battery swapping will be disastrous. You will need many times more batteries than even other large BEV trucking ideas. In reality, it's pretty much a guarantee that hydrogen displaces batteries for most cases, and likely all of heavy transport. The mistake critics are making is assuming that this must be expensive. But just like other types of renewable energy, this is actually heading towards nearly zero.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    The road trains I mentioned are diesel truck conversions. It's that simple. Get rid of the original drive train, put an electrical drive train in. Shove in some battery where the fuel used to go. Actually works. On a 165 tonne road trains. Not a hypothetical but in commercial operation right now defying your notions of what is and isn't feasible. Imagine what a truck that is designed from the ground up to do that could do. Probably would do quite a bit better. Paying 2-3x for hydrogen and depending on infrastructure that simply does not exist yet doesn't even sound like the beginnings of a plan. It doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. It's a pipe dream financed by companies reluctant to get out of the diesel truck business. By the time energy really gets that cheap, battery electric trucks will have been dominating the roads for decades and there won't be any point in replacing them with less efficient hydrogen trucks. There isn't one now. There won't be one a few decades from now.
    - _hypx 3y ago
      A hydrogen truck is basically the same idea just economically sane and doesn’t have a huge weight penalty. You’re mostly repeating BEV propaganda and it is mostly just close-mindedness. The point is that hydrogen trucks are actually economically viable in this setting. Not to mention that BEVs are a >100 year old technology, and the idea that something that old can maintain a permanent cost advantage over all possible alternatives is a completely delusional idea. This even ignores the fact that fuel cells are electrochemical systems and don’t have any fundamental disadvantages compared to li-ion batteries. FCEVs are literally just a cheaper type of EV.
  - 3y ago
occz 3y ago
Alternatively, we could build more rail and move the shipping done by heavy trucks to trains. Even in their very reduced current form, and with heavy trucks getting their infrastructure for free, trains are still more economical than heavy trucks, so if we remove those factors then trains become the obvious choice.
_aavaa_ 3y ago
I highly doubt that. The end-to-end efficiency, energy density, safety, difficulty in transit and storage, and cost will make it a very dubious choice for anything but the niche of niche cases. I'm pretty convinced that anything that can't realistically be electrified is likely going to end up being biodiesel.

rob74 3y ago

Agree about trucks and airplanes, but electrifying rail is nothing new, and indeed 2644 out of 4109 km (64%) of railways in Norway are already electrified.

cjrp 3y ago
I wonder what % of train "movements" are electrified; length of electrified rail is one thing, but I suspect the majority of that remaining 36% of non-electrified rail actually account for a small percentage of movements.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Hard to say. It has been known for years that for very busy rail lines electric is cheaper than diesel, and the American main lines are more than busy enough to cross the threshold. However the long tail of not busy enough rail combined with the logistics of getting diesel to those less busy rail when they are used mean overall diesel is cheaper. (though I suspect the rails are not running honest numbers here, but that is a different debate).
  - crote 3y ago
    The most ironic part is that the vast majority of diesel trains are already diesel-electric and could trivially make use of overhead wires. But instead the rail companies have actually been tearing down existing electrification. There were 3100 miles of electrified rails in the 1930s, but now it is down to a tiny fraction of that.
- rjmunro 3y ago
  Yes and no. I know nothing about Norway's rail system, but it was the case in the UK that a lot of electrified rail was only partially used because services that ran on both electrified and non-electrified tracks needed to be powered by diesel for the entire journey. This has got a lot better more recently as we now have hybrid trains that can run on electricity whenever there are overhead lines, and diesel where there aren't. There is talk of replacing diesel engines with batteries so that they can run on electric (and use regenerative braking) even where there are no overhead lines, charging the batteries from the overhead line when available. https://anonw.com/2023/06/27/what-will-be-the-range-of-a-hitachi-class-800-battery-train/ https://anonw.com/2023/06/27/what-will-be-the-range-of-a-hit... There are usually multiple diesel generators on each train, so it's likely that the batteries will only replace some of them - there would still be some diesel power available for emergencies.