Ok, my next car will probably be a traditional combustion, simply because of cost, but this concept has me intrigued.
1 out of 1. What about thousands out of hundreds of thousands? Hydrogen technology is not new and it’s not unsafe. Just because you haven’t heard about it, doesn’t make it dangerous.
There's no infrastructure. Converting water to hydrogen takes copious amounts of fresh water, and more energy than simply charging batteries. It's a non-starter. But I admit I didn't watch the video.
The statement was made several times we can't make it on battery technology alone as the reason to need hydrogen fuel cells. But they never said why. I think the argument concerns range and charging times. But without massive infrastructure investment, it doesn't matter how fast you can fill hydrogen tanks. And it takes copious amounts of water and more energy than just charging batteries. They have the range covered with batteries, the charging times will come. But really, charging at home in a few hours is available now. I'll take that, today, over having to visit the gas station. The only exception is traveling out of town. Yes I watched the video.
10K square miles of desert covered in solar panels would be more than enough to meet current global energy demands. Distribution and storage are problems, however. One of the lessons that we should have learned from fossil fuels is to not be reliant upon a single source for our energy needs. I don't care what kind of battery technology we wind up using (I'm assuming that we'll eventually move beyond lithium-ion, just as we've moved beyond lead acid), it's going to take ripping up large sections of the planet (at least until Musk gets his asteroid mining operations going) to extract the necessary materials for the batteries. This ain't exactly ideal. Hydrogen storage tanks can be made out of recycled steel (obviously, these wouldn't be practical for vehicles, but just as we have large storage tanks for fossil fuels, we can do the same for hydrogen. We can (and should) also look at other methods of storing energy. Not just hydrogen and batteries, but pumping water to higher elevations so that it can then later run turbines as it is allowed to flow downhill. No matter what happens, so long as our society grows and expands, our need for energy is going to increase. Regardless of the source of that energy and how it's stored, there's going to be negative effects. Some of them we can predict, some of them we can't. The best way to ensure that we have as much time as possible to deal with those negative effects is to use as diverse methods of producing and storing energy as possible. In ~2005, Scientific American produced a single topic issue called something like "An End to Carbon." It had a pie-in-the-sky, money-no-object solution that would get us off of carbon in a relatively short period of time that had an unthinkable price tag of about $2 trillion. Energy would be generated via wind, water, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. The distribution network for the generated power was really interesting. In order to maximize efficiency, transmission lines would be buried superconducting wires, cooled by liquid hydrogen. One of the advantages to doing this is that folks who had natural gas appliances would only have to install simple conversion kits to run them off of hydrogen. (One could also refill their hydrogen-powered car at home.) I can't seem to find a copy of that particular issue online, but if you're interested in that kind of thinking, then these folks have a few ideas.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean there aren't cheaper better ways to achieve the same result, no matter how cool it seems. Solar roads are an example. More: Hydrogen has great scope to power many industrial applications. • But even producing it using renewable electricity is less efficient than using that electricity as a direct power source. • Hydrogen is best used to power hard-to-electrify sectors. This is because green hydrogen always comes with a significant energy loss. The efficiency of electrolyzers that convert water to hydrogen ranges from about 60-80%, meaning 20-40% of energy is lost in the process. Further conversion of hydrogen to other carriers (e.g. ammonia) results in further energy loss, and then it also needs to be transported. This means that 100 kWh of renewable energy usually produces somewhere between 60-80 kWh of hydrogen energy. Source
One of the most ridiculous ideas ever. It's insidious because it sounds like a good idea: you've got a lot of open space, why not turn it into a mass of solar panels? It's totally a bad idea. If you want a thorough engineering analysis, EEVBlog goes through the whole thing:
Well, technically hydrogen fuel cell cars are electric. But batteries are pretty good and getting better. And batteries don't have any infrastructure needs today for local travel. But airplanes! hey dirigibles!!! Burning hydrogen in anything seems wasteful. Either heat or mechanical loss of 50% (take your pick). Fuel cells are the answer for ships and airplanes.
