Will Electric Vehicles Be Viable? When?

[strad]

Don't remember the exact number but there are only a few hydrogen filling stations in California and none or next to none east of California.

[Just_a_fan]

You wouldn't drive west coast to east coast using hydrogen unless you were pulling a very big trailer tank with you...

[djos]

If it was all about efficiency we wouldn't be driving fossil fuel vehicles anymore. An internal combustion engine isn't that efficient either. If you look from an implementation point of view it is all about cost! In that respect a private owned car has a completely different cost model than a commercial used car or truck. In the last case things as payload or availability can be more important. If a truck and personnel al are waiting during charging they aren't making any money. Also the (local) infrastructure for truck companies isn't there to charge a great amount of vehicles.
By the way in a few years time H2 cars will have the same purchase price as BEV, it will have to drop further to equal out fuel prices.

But before you talk about cost you need to go back to the origin of the problem and that is pollution reduction. A battery electric vehicle has a far larger production footprint than a fuel cell vehicle. So if you take as starting condition that the electricity for both is used renewable, than the hydrogen car emits far less CO2 than a BEV. Contrary you would need more sustainable energy. Just a few weeks ago news was released that in new experiments elektrolysis is performed with an 98% efficiency, which is 20% better than current technology. It would take a decade to fully implement it but the future is promising.

I am not against BEV (and especcialy if we make some more renewable energy) both BEV and FCEV will be far better than fossil fuels. I do want to point out that it is very easy to rule out a technology (FCEV) purely based on efficiency, it is far more complex.

Sure, but what would you rather pay to "fill your car", less than $15 US Dollars or ~$85 USD for the same ~500km range?

The inefficiency of hydrogen belts you right in the hip pocket making it the clear loser for me - I'd rather keep driving my fossil fuel-powered car if an electric vehicle is going to cost more than my current car!

Btw, I highly recommend folk what this video from "Real Engineering", it's a great look at the pros and cons of BEV vs HEV and the ecosystem that powers them.

[Brake Horse Power]

Like I said Djos, it really depends on the use case and for private use the BEV seams to be cheaper. For commercial use there are additional factors which! might! Go for another choice. So I fully agree BEV makes sense now for private use

[djos]

Like I said Djos, it really depends on the use case and for private use the BEV seams to be cheaper. For commercial use there are additional factors which! might! Go for another choice. So I fully agree BEV makes sense now for private use

HEV's might make sense for long-haul trucking and Freight trains, but not much else I think.

[Big Tea]

Like I said Djos, it really depends on the use case and for private use the BEV seams to be cheaper. For commercial use there are additional factors which! might! Go for another choice. So I fully agree BEV makes sense now for private use

HEV's might make sense for long-haul trucking and Freight trains, but not much else I think.

Something the size of a large truck or train could also (one day maybe) have the option of covering some of that surface with solar cells so tipping the balance even further to battery

[djos]

The solar Cell’s would have to be at least double the current efficiencies To make that worth while.

[Brake Horse Power]

By the way in a few years time H2 cars will have the same purchase price as BEV, it will have to drop further to equal out fuel prices.

No. You wont' be able to buy a H2 car in the next years for around 20k €.
https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/ ... price-5318

So if you take as starting condition that the electricity for both is used renewable, than the hydrogen car emits far less CO2 than a BEV.

This is already debatable if you only look at the energy that goes into production (depends on the car type and size of battery package), and completely wrong if you look at the whole lifespan of the car. Please stop spreading misinformation.

Compare apples to apples please, you also won't be able to buy a BEV with 400km of range for €20k. Those will be around 35-40 which a FCEV will also cost in a few years.

About the pollution here is a comparison made by Volkswagen which was mentioned earlier in this thread. Please don't pay attention to the use phase of the BEV, it is based on mix energy grid. I rather compare with Renewable, if you take that in account there is only a small amount of CO2 during the use phase. Now the battery is a big part of CO2 pollution, they are improving here but on the other hand this Golf only has a 35kWh battery pack. So they were around 300kg CO2 per kWh batterypack production.



An FCEV has a 1,5 kWh battery only, so the added production CO2 is rather small. Of course you need some catalyst for the fuel cell but not a great amount. Since the renewable energy required for production for H2 barely has a footprint even if you use great amounts it is still very small.

Source Vestas says something like 6grams per kWh for wind energy.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source ... Y3f51KR8PZ

So if a BEV uses 0,2kWh per km this is 1,2gram per km = 300.000gram over the lifetime (0,3 ton added to the production value of CO2).

Suppose a FCEV is 3 times less efficient it adds 0,9ton to the production value of CO2.

What would pledge very much in advantage of BEV cars would be if you recycle the batteries. Than the comparison again looks different but I don't have any figures of potential CO2 reduction for a recycled battery.

Of course eager to learn so if you have other figures and sources to your statements please share them.

[Brake Horse Power]

The solar Cell’s would have to be at least double the current efficiencies To make that worth while.

Agree on that. I did a quick math on what would happen if you place solar cells on the containers of a large container vessel. Different case but I thought I concluded maybe you can have 4 megawatt peak..which seams a lot but it requires a lot more to replace the 100MW internal combustion engine

[Big Tea]

The solar Cell’s would have to be at least double the current efficiencies To make that worth while.

Agree on that. I did a quick math on what would happen if you place solar cells on the containers of a large container vessel. Different case but I thought I concluded maybe you can have 4 megawatt peak..which seams a lot but it requires a lot more to replace the 100MW internal combustion engine

They would produce all the time there is light, not just when the vehicle is moving. If it just adds a few % it could be worth while (depending on cost) especially as they seem to be developing light weight full spectrum units.


pic here of a truck decked out, but it is an advert of course
https://flisom.com

[AJI]

The solar Cell’s would have to be at least double the current efficiencies To make that worth while.

Agree on that. I did a quick math on what would happen if you place solar cells on the containers of a large container vessel. Different case but I thought I concluded maybe you can have 4 megawatt peak..which seams a lot but it requires a lot more to replace the 100MW internal combustion engine

They would produce all the time there is light, not just when the vehicle is moving. If it just adds a few % it could be worth while (depending on cost) especially as they seem to be developing light weight full spectrum units.


pic here of a truck decked out, but it is an advert of course
https://flisom.com

My nephew has a solution. Sails, that are made from solar panels, plus wind turbines and exercise bikes for the occupants!

[strad]

They were on a test drive from southern California to Oregon and planned turn off I5 to go thru Vegas but they had to forget that because of the mileage between fuel up and limited access to fuel up stations.

[Brake Horse Power]

Don't remember the exact number but there are only a few hydrogen filling stations in California and none or next to none east of California.

https://cafcp.org/station map

[gandharva]

Compare apples to apples please, you also won't be able to buy a BEV with 400km of range for €20k. Those will be around 35-40 which a FCEV will also cost in a few years.

I will. VW already announced one for 2023 some time ago. At that time your FCEV will still cost around double the price at least, have much less system power, bad infrastructure, ~40% worse efficiency per car and more than twice as bad efficiency when you break it down to the consumption in kWh/100km related directly to the electricity network.

The consumption values make it clear that the strain on the power producer side for the FCEVs, including hydrogen production, at 56kWh to 67kWh per 100km (EPA driving cycle) is about 2.3 times as high as for the pure battery vehicles.

Page 26: https://www.vde.com/resource/blob/18752 ... e-data.pdf

[Brake Horse Power]

The VW ID 3 with 420 km range will sell for +-€40.000. I can't see how they will half that price in 3 years time? But you are perfectly right that for a lot of consumers BEV car will be the most sensible choice now.

Also I am not denying the efficiency is much lower of an FCEV so we also agree on that. I'm just saying efficiency is not the main driver for a lot of applications and commercial businesses to base a decision on. Also I can't really find in your link the information about the total CO2 emission, I think somewhere around page 36 this document actually says the footprint is smaller for FCEV and from a certain amount of cars it is also cheaper than BEV. It is on the page before.

Both can exist perfectly fine next to each other and we need both techniques anyways.