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The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
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nctnico:

--- Quote from: ogden on February 19, 2020, 05:15:21 am ---Yes, sure. Then there is depreciation and service cost. My point was that hydrogen generation & fuel cell is way more inefficient than battery charge/discharge, that's it. @nctnico proudly tried to convince that what I say is lame, it was debunked long ago, yet as we see he struggle to debunk it even using cherrypicking of data.

--- End quote ---
Well, like so many you are not looking at the big picture cost-wise; unfortunately that is where the EV dream falls apart. The prices I listed are the reality for the people not being able to charge from their own socket. And in the end nobody cares about efficiency. It is all about costs.
Look at this map of hydrogen filling stations in the mid-west part of Europe:

The green ones are operational; the blue ones are under construction. It is a clear proof that quite a few people see no future for EVs and you shouldn't be surprised if one of the European car manufacturers is going to announce a hydrogen car this year.

I'll admit though that there is one thing I didn't think about before. There are still vast amounts of fossil fuels. Besides turning solar and wind into hydrogen the fossil fuels can also be converted into hydrogen. If the resulting CO2 is stored underground (I'm not a fan of such a solution to put it mildly) then this would allow to continue using fossil fuels as a fuel source instead of abandoning them. This also means hydrogen cars won't burden electricity generation like EVs do.
woodchips:
Just catching up with reading this thread. Seems to me that there are two, possibly more, groups of users arguing past each other.

There are three possibly uses for cars:
 - shopping trolley, 50 miles maximum
 - commute, there and back of 120 miles
 - serious travel, you are driving 100 to 400 miles to and from a meeting etc, possibly carrying a load up to 250kg

The shopping trolley is trivial. one motor, simple control, simple heating, no aircon (for 20 minutes or so open the windows), powered by end of life lithium or even lead acid batteries. Flat out at 70mph.

Commute is more complex, larger, able to sustain speed limit speeds, 70mph or so, decent heating, more power.

Long distance is the real problem, multiple charges needed in realistic times.

Seems silly to make the same car fit all three. Any EV is serious money, so will be a second, or third, car. Lets face it, people like me with £2k to spend on a 15 year old car are not going, ever, to buy an EV. And, I am probably 2/3 of the market in the poorer, ie outside London, parts of the country.

As I said earlier, retrofit all the perfectly usable 15 year old Fiestas, 2 people, Mondeos, 4 people, cars with a battery and motor, all the brakes etc can stay. An engine and transmission weigh about 400kg which gives a reasonable weight to use lead acid batteries, 170kJ/kg, not lithium. Lead acid have been recycled for decades, and the infrastructure exists. Lithium seems to be somewhat harder, it explodes to easily. None of these cars need to be able to spin the wheels.

Tesla has gone for the Aston Martin end of the market, fair enough, it just only comprises 0.001% of the market.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: woodchips on February 19, 2020, 10:17:09 am ---Long distance is the real problem, multiple charges needed in realistic times.

Seems silly to make the same car fit all three.

--- End quote ---
Well, if you are taxed for ownership and have limited parking space then it makes more sense to buy one car which fits all usage scenarios.
mikeselectricstuff:

--- Quote from: nctnico on February 19, 2020, 10:10:45 am ---
Look at this map of hydrogen filling stations in the mid-west part of Europe:

The green ones are operational; the blue ones are under construction. It is a clear proof that quite a few people see no future for EVs

--- End quote ---
Nonsense - just because people are exploring alternatives doesn't mean EVs have no future.
There doesn't have to be just one solution.
EVs are an excellent solution for a significant number of use cases. Maybe Hydrogen and/or other tech will offer benefits for other cases.
 
Marco:

--- Quote from: ogden on February 18, 2020, 08:20:17 pm ---It was about charging @home, in US.

--- End quote ---

Unless we start using our natural gas distribution system for hydrogen that's not a fair comparison.

I suspect that with a large push for a hydrogen economy, high pressure electrolysis directly at the pumping stations will drag costs down. Distribution (likely with cryogenic liquefaction) adds a huge overhead to the basic production cost of hydrogen.
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