Quote from Hyundai FCV head of research

this is going to make some priuschatters very unhappy.

 

Because it's stupid, wide-eyed fiction.

 

"store"..."control supply and demand"...is the key. I don't care what flavor you like or prefer to improve or replace the "current" system, if government/business can not store, control and make the same or better money replacing it...it ain't gonna happen.

 

Yup. The value of that key is often overlooked.

Grid-tied renewable electricity are not stored, or control it's supply and demand. It is the fossil fuel (natural gas, coal) in the grid that is doing that work. Sure, you can store it with big battery packs but that doesn't make economic sense, which makes hydrogen and fuel cell value look very attractive.

 

Another quote from the article, “Developing a bespoke car offers clear advantages. For instance, the larger the radiators on a fuel cell car the better, and you can see on the Mirai that they have developed a cooling solution that helps with that scenario.” Is this actually about cooling, or did he mean air intakes.

If batteries don't make economical sense, then how will hydrogen and fuel cells make it? The methanol fuel cell lap top project basically died because batteries got cheap.

I understand future advances might make hydrogen and fuel cells worthwhile at the grid level, but battery research hasn't stopped.

 

How do we go about making all the H2 we need? Head of FCV isn't too loquacious. Anybody can BS about generalities.

 

I wasn't talking about economy. That's still up in the air but fuel cell has the advantage in scaling.

I was pointing out not to compare apples to oranges, when comparing electricity and hydrogen.

Google Hypersolar.

Also this: Panasonic's dream: The future home is where the hydrogen power generator is- Nikkei Asian Review

 

I'm still hoping we'll figure out how to make liquid fuels in a renewable manner. For example, algae-produced diesel instead of refining it from crude oil. It fits with our current infrastructure, and it's hard to compete with a 5-gallon gas can when trying to store energy for things such as a snow thrower. I don't see a hydrogen snow thrower in my future, and I don't want an electric or battery powered one because electricity becomes very unreliable during a blizzard.

 

But you used 'economic' for why batteries don't make sense.
I am for researching fuel cells because they might work out for grid power storage, but to work out they have to be competitively priced against batteries or renewable fuels for CCGT plants.

We can make fuels renewably; it is more an issue of doing so without losing money. Audi has a pilot plant that converts water, CO2, and electricity into methane, and another that goes a step further to produce a synthetic crude that can be refined into diesel for less than getting it out of petroleum. The methane can also be converted to methanol. These all can be powered by excess renewable electric, just as is proposed for hydrogen.

The diesel just gets put into the supply line with the petroleum. I don't know if the current infrastructure can handle a large percentage of methanol. It can't with ethanol. We need flex fuel methanol cars first, though.

There is renewable gasoline, but it currently involves growing microbes to make it. So it doesn't fit into making fuel from excess renewable electric paradigm.

 

911. Its not the price of batteries that stopped the demand of fuel cell batteries for laptops, it it was their improved energy density kwh/liter. If you need a laptop with long battery life you get a lithium polymer. Nickel metal hydride were too big and bulky. There is still that need for travel laptops, but you can't take your methanol on a plane post 911/shoe bomber liquid restrictions.

I expect drones (where kwh/kg is important metric) to provide a market for fuel cells as they expand and people want longer flight time. We may get back to lap tops later on if drones make the tech cheaper, and provide fuel in easy purchase if we can't take it on planes.

Fork lifts are today's killer app for fuel cells. Cars with refueling needed, and cheap oil, seem to be farther from fuel cell viability today then in 2009 when the clarity came out. Here cost is a major problem, that is not easily overcome. People are not going to be willing to pay a lot more for the inconvenience of hydrogen, versus phev.

 

ooops not necessarily so ... you don't have to spend 6 figures to yield a paltry few kW's .... you can now spend just 4 figures and get twice the power. and this solution doesn't have to burn coal or natural gas to store electricity;







hypersolar is a fantasy maybe fictional proposition. Storing grid power is now an affordable reality. Fuel cells for buildings are the product of hideous oversized monsterous scale. The power wall is many times smaller and capable of storing more per volume of square foot. It's a shame that the CO2 creating / coal/natural gas to hydrogen fiction has to continually have to be re-addressed for the dishonesty that it is. But who knows ... maybe some day the FC experiment will be on par with the power wall.
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