Toyota rep: If you buy the Mirai, you pay for the hydrogen yourself

You don't have to repost Panasonic lab developments, usb. What about 47% efficient solar panels coming by 2017? That makes overly complicated and costly hydrogen not all that attractive for the average homeowner, which might be on the market in another 5 years. With the hydrogen promises that have been made for nearly 5 decades, I'm not so gullible as to believe any timelines associated with its advocates.

As for hydrogen being generated from natural gas, so can electricity. The oil industry (they are notorious drillers, and I'm sure many of them already have fracking experience) would love to see hydrogen be the de facto replacement for oil because they would ultimately be the purveyors of its distribution, lone lab experiments aside. It's ironic that you're concerned about lying. You repeatedly give the hydrogen peddlers a pass on repeated occasions.

And what you always seem to love to ignore is what can theoretically be done with hydrogen doesn't make it practical, feasible, or economic. It's almost always at some date in the future.

 

Which just BS like GM's excuses with GM. ICE fleet cars see a lot of use, but they get sent to auction if the dealer felt they couldn't sell it on their lot, not crushed.

I do understand that. The BMW, Mercedes, and even the Avalon are likely faster than the Mirai. I am saying that a FCEV needs to be at least equal or better in aspects beyond clean tailpipe emissions in order to attract people away from any ICE. Tesla has already shown that a BEV can do this.

The Prius comes close, and the next generation one will be closer, but that doesn't really matter because they'll go farther per filled fuel tank. In order for hydrogen FCEVs to have a shot at succeeding, they have to be more efficient than an ICE because the hydrogen costs more, and they can only carry about 5 gasoline gallons worth at a time.

Best case at this time is that the fuel cost per mile for a hydrogen FCEV will be equal to that of a comparable ICE car. The reality is that it is going to cost more per mile. Toyota is going to be handing out 3 year/$15k fuel cards with the Mirai. The typical lease will be 3yr/36k miles. Toyota is budgeting for the possibility that the hydrogen could be almost $30/kg.

Hydrogen production for FCEVs can be tied to the natural gas industry, which does have companies also in the oil industry. The majority of hydrogen will come from natural gas simply because of cost. Renewables and other sources cost more. Just like methanol can be fermented from cellulose, but it is just cheaper to synthesize it from natural gas. Thought that could change. Simpler, cheaper way to make liquid methanol fuel using CO2 and sunlight

Are you being dense on purpose? They use the grid, which is one of the cleanest in California.

 

The Miria is far from slow, I drove one last weekend. It drives just as fast as any normal ICE car, but silently.

Hydrogen is already more efficient they any ICE. An ICE only uses 30% of the energy from gas, where as Hydrogen uses 60% of the energy. Hydrogen is more efficient.

Toyota is providing $15,000 fuel card, which when calculated out over three years is about 90,000 miles of driving. Toyota will more than likely be ahead, as not many people are going to drive 90,000 miles in 3 years.

 

Electricity is generated from natural gas also. With Obama's plan to reduce coal by 22%, natural gas usage to generate electricity would increase.

So what? It'll enable us to eliminate oil imports while reduce carbon emission.

That would put a kg of H2 at $11. Good to know the roll out period price of hydrogen. It'll definitely come down when they are ready for the mass-market.

Here is my point. If all the renewable electricity purchasers claim they use renewable, the remainder (majority) of the grid users are left with non-renewable (coal, gas, nuclear, oil, etc).

 

It's slow in that a V6 Camry has a faster 0 to 60 time for far lower price. For the price FCEVs will need to offer more than a fuel cell if they hope to have an impact.

No agruement there, but when the public says it wants efficient cars, they mean low cost to operate. The price difference between hydrogen and gasoline means that the FCEV soen't look as good. Factor in hybrids and the balance sheet gets worse.

And how do you figure hydrogen is $11/kg? It is a reasonable figure at this time, but why budget for something nearly triple the amount? Why the car's range and availability of stations means very few will be doing 30k miles a year. Fewer still when lease terms are considered. Is it being overly cautious, poorly thought out marketing, or something else?

At $11/kg the Mirai will cost 16.4 cents a mile to run. The average price for regular in California is at $3.65/gal. The ES 300h will cost 9.1 cents, and the 4 cylinder Camry will be 13 cents.

Or nuclear. Or renewables with storage.

The so what is that the hydrogen lobby puts out videos about hydrogen being abundant, and we could make it from cow poop, cheaply from water, or other means when making hydrogen that way will cost more, or simply isn't possibly commercially in the present. At the same time they call plugins dirty, because of dated data on the national average grid mix. If FCEVs can benefit from future developments for clean fuel now, so can plug ins.

That depends on how much is forced to be renewable.

The statistic I brought up wasn't the number of people claiming to be using renewable energy. It was the number of plugin owners that have also installed PV at their homes. They very well could be claiming the use of renewable for their car and home, but, hey, they've actually increased to amount of it on the grid.

I brought it up not to comment of the clean energy use of plugins, but to counter that a shift to plugin cars is just shifting power from oil companies to electric companies, like FCEVs would be shifting it to natural gas and hydrogen companies. Because the people can choose to make their electric at home. If it was cheap and easy to fill high pressure gas tanks at home, there wouldn't have been issues with CNG cars and home filling, and CNG uses tank pressures well below half of what hydrogen does. Hydrogen tanks can even get higher in pressure, or FCEVs may simply fill with another fuel.

 

CA Renewable Hydrogen Rule: Forcing The Carbon Numbers To Work

 

from that link

well there goes that whole argument about "renewable" and "clean" hydrogen I guess.

 

What's stopping the oil industry (or even coal industry) from selling you electricity generated from oil/natural gas? It is the same scenario as hydrogen as both energy carriers could be produced from pretty much fuel sources.

As an owner of a plugin car with 7.8 kW home PV solar system on my roof top, I don't have to defend plugins or PV systems.

I am seeing overwhelming negative posts about FCV and hydrogen that I have to jump in to post to "balance" the views. Don't mistaken my posts and assume me as a hydrogen fanboy.

I think comparing cost at this point is not useful as hydrogen infrastructure is at infancy. The grid and PV panels have many many years ahead start. I focus on long-term.

Despite that, at any point in time, renewable hydrogen makes up at least 1/3. It seems like a valid scaling/roll out plan.

What's the plan for renewable electricity by 2021?

 

In California, retail utility electricity is already reportedly more than 26% renewable (required by law to be at least 25% by end of 2016) and will be required to be 33% by 2020 and 50% by 2030.

I don't have the latest absolute numbers, but a 2011 circa CARB planning document estimated that by 2015 the California grid would have about doubled its renewable energy generation from 2009 (from about 27,000 GWh per year to about 54,000 GWh). But, as I said, this isn't reflected in the fueleconomy.gov calculations yet.

That percentage does not include large hydro which is 5-15% of CA grid electricity depending upon snow pack water availability. It also does not include rooftop customer solar, or nuclear.

 

I think you need to look out to 2021 plan, recently revised by CARB for renewable hydrogen. If I read the plan correctly revised last month that is 86 stations with at least 33% renewable hydrogen. There is the claim that 46% of stations will be renewable, but many of these can only fuel 100 vehicles a week, so we need to wait to see if fills actually are higher than 33%. If a station does not receive California funding, which appears to average around $2M for building and $300,000 for operating for a station that can refill 100 cars a day, their is no renewable requirement. I think we can assume no one will pass up that much cash and 1/3 or more will be renewable.

Perhaps California will pay to install hydrogen in parts of Nevada so that California fuel cell owners can make it to the next state, where they frequently travel on gasoline.

For electricity
Gov. Brown's renewable energy plan could boost solar, wind industries - LA Times

Note plug-ins currently use a higher percentage of renewable electricity than the California grid today. Still we can low ball the plug-ins to 33% when running in California in 2020, and each year after the percent will likely rise.

California has gone through the roughly 70,000 phev stickers, but have authorized another 15,000. I would expect at least 85,000 phevs by the end of 2017. Long range bevs are fairly low, limited to teslas in the ball park of 20,000 in California, 48,000 in the US. That would put 200+ mile bev + phev sold in California is to date around 100,000. CARB latest report has less than 34,000 fcv in california in 2021.

IMHO selling plug-ins in the other 49 states is a positive, that fcv do not look to be able to do in any quantities in the next 6 years.

 

$11 per Kg @ 300 miles per 5 Kg = $55 for a 300-mile fill-up
That's expensive ($11/gal equiv), but it is reflecting extra costs/presumably start-up phase cost is higher

But per DOE the H2 cost is closer to let's say $4 per Kg that's more like $20 per fill-up more Prius-like.
Round figures H2 itself is $1.50/gal with $2.50/gal being Compression etc.
So should be about $4/gal and 5 gallons gets you 300-miles
1kg=1 gal (approx.)

I assume DoE talking lined-out lower price when things get rolling, not demo phase. And CA may be trying to run before they walk as far as dictating 30% renewable H2. If that is easy, fine but if it blows the economics let's show it.

 

How much of the renewable electricity is being used for renewable hydrogen?

 

Probably not too much.....

I haven't seen numbers for that.

 

IIRC, even the electric used in making hydrogen from from land fill gas needs to be renewable. If the hydrogen plant or station doesn't include its own renewable electric generation, it needs to buy RECs.

 

Nothing but there exists no feasible or economical way for anyone to extract hydrogen, so the producers have the monopoly. This is not the case with electricity thanks to solar generation. You're holding onto the promises of a lab experiment here.

You're seeing overwhelming negativity because of H2's impracticality and the subsequent disgust at corrupt bureaucracies and manufacturers lined up at the trough to pick the public's pocket for same.

H2 R&D goes back nearly 5 decades.

 

From Total Electricity System Power

Coal 6%
NG 45%
Renewables 20% (+ large hydro 5%)
Unknown 14%

Note that per CPUC's own 33% RPS reports to the legislature, their expectation is that most of the growth in renewables will come from PV, contrary to some of the beliefs on this board. For example see page 6 in http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/8EB096A9-8000-4A1D-9623-DB3EB9F1BFB5/0/2015Q1RPSReport.pdf.

 

Thanks. I don't look up these renewable numbers very often.

A correction to my earlier assertion that California requires 25% renewable by 2015. The correct target required by the law is 25% by the end of 2016.

Renewables are being added rapidly to California's generation mix. Solar PV generation has jumped sharply during the last year with multiple large installations coming online.

The latest data available that I found is from the U.S. Energy Information Agency and it covers January 2015 through the end of May 2015. It shows 26.2% of California's net generation was renewable (not including large hydro) with solar PV alone making up 8.2%. During the same period in 2014, California's renewable share was 22.8% and solar PV alone was 4.5%.

The numbers in parenthesis below refer to tables in the May 2015 "monthly report" linked below.

California
70,352 mWh total (1.6.B)
18,437 mWh renewable (1.14.B)
5,780 mWh solar PV (1.20.B)

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/pdf/epm.pdf

 

Solar is gaining in double digits but it represents 0.5% of all electricity generated in Q1 2015. Natural gas is over 30% and increasing.

Clearly, coal and natural gas has the "monopoly" in the electricity. Kettle is calling the pot black.



California is mandating 1/3 renewable for both electricity and hydrogen. It is a good thing that both BEV and FCV will be running with zero tail-pipe emission.

Nope. The root cause of the negativity was tracked down to misunderstanding of how CARB incentive works. ZEV credits were originally given to hybrids. Toyota lead the pack with AT-PZEV Prius. Then, it was moved on to plugins. Now, ZEV credits are shared between plugins and FCVs. FCV is the new kid on the block with many advantages of gasoline and capable of fast refuel and scaling in EV range, therefore given more credits.

Hybrid incentives lasted 2-3 years but the plugin incentive has been going on for 5 years (and 5 more to go). The cost is an order of magnitude higher. The emission of these plugins was about the same as 50 MPG Prius so, the investment had very little return.

Incentives for hydrogen and FCV may be higher but the return (reduction in emission) is good. Mirai is cleaner than Volt even with California electricity.

 

There are two types of credits under CARB's ZEV program. The first is what AT-PZEV used to get, and what TZEV (plug in hybrids) get now. The second is the actual ZEV credits. The first can only satisfy part of what a manufacturer needs in terms of credits, and can not be traded. The second can be sold to other manufacturers for real money.

There is no investment on the state's part in regards to the ZEV program. It is a basic "make this much of X, or be fined Y" plan. The automakers aren't getting money from the state. Those that overproduce ZEV credits can make money selling to other companies.

Let's say a manufacturer needs to earn 100 ZEV credits.
A BEV earns 3, so they would have to sell 34 of them.
A long range BEV earns 4, that is 25 to be sold.
A FCEV earns 6 plus the 3 free ones for fast refueling. That is only 12 that has to be sold.

Perhaps a FCEV will have better emissions, but how does letting a car company sell less of them for their quota, and thus more of their ICE models reduce emissions overall. The company that has to sell 34 BEVs vs. 12 FCEVs is going to get more ICEs off the road. BEVs were also being mass produced when they started in this ZEV era; FCEVs aren't. Giving more ZEV credits is just awarding companies for doing the least in terms of putting clean cars on the road at this point. Why not give them base 4 credits like a long range BEV to at least retire more ICE cars?

 

Hydrogen gets the undue precedence, don'tcha' know?

And just no, USB, not going to be pulled in again. You are dishonestly referring to the grid as a whole when I clearly referenced feasible home energy production.