Featured Review of hydrogen

It's a little like the Ethanol lobby...if you propose methanol in the USA you will get your teeth kicked in.
USA sees extreme importance to picking losers and winners for Gov't mandates and investment.
.

 

A valid criticism, but your first post just discounted the message because of the messenger.

Hydrogen has that fast fill advantage, but that comes at the cost of overall efficiency as a good portion of electricity is needed to make that happen. For some uses, that may be acceptable, but then we have other options for fuel.

So you were drawing a conclusion for wide use based on your personal experience.

Bob's post didn't discount hydrogen for energy storage.

There are flaws in using natural gas for this example. The seasonal cycle here is due to direct heating use, not electricity. Direct use of hydrogen for that would require a serious amount of pipeline and equipment replacement. Installing heat pumps, geothermal where possible, everywhere would likely be cheaper, and consume less GWh overall.

There is a seasonal cycle to electric use in the US, with peaks in the summer and winter. While solar energy will drop off in the fall and winter, that is when wind energy will pick up for most of the country.

Wind generation seasonal patterns vary across the United States - Today in Energy - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

The need for grid storage is more pressing on the daily level in the US than on the seasonal, and batteries are proven to be effective for that. And again, we aren't limited to hydrogen as a storage medium.

This isn't about picking winners, but propping up losers.

We need green hydrogen.
Fuel cells could be a better way of turning a fuel into electricity.

The two do not have to be combined together. It may even be better if they weren't in the beginning, as green hydrogen going to transport means fossil hydrogen still being used in its traditional roles. Then hydrogen plus fuel cell could be the best combo for a given application, but it doesn't look to be the case for hydrogen FCEVs.

Take the Mirai. The new one is an improvement, but still lacks a compelling reason to buy one over an ICE car. The only one is zero emissions while sticking to a refueling station model. A good reason for those that can't charge at home, but it also entails making compromises elsewhere of the car.

Space is one. Toyota went with a bigger chassis to improve cabin space, and the solution for getting a fifth seat is the same GM used in the gen2 Volt. Then the trunk is still smaller than a Corolla's; under 10 cubic feet, IIRC. A SUV would mitigate the space loss, but it is still going to be more than in an ICE or BEV. While the price of the car can come down with larger production, the performance or niceness of the Mirai isn't enough to justify the the higher price to potential buyers now. The price of hydrogen isn't going to beat gasoline. Green hydrogen could get cheaper, but much of the price is to cover the electricity to get it into the car's tank.

Then the fuel cell itself has questions on reliability. They degrade with use. Like plug in batteries, the amount varies, and it may not be an issue for the user. A 10% average power output loss was seen at 75k miles though. While that and other aspects can improve, the space issue won't without a break through in storage. Fuel cell plus another fuel probably has a better chance.

So there just isn't anything about the Mirai itself that gets people to buy it over another Toyota. The zero emissions are something, but the population says they care about fuel efficiency while buying some of the least efficient cars out there. Meanwhile, plug in car sales are increasing. Some with the loss of government incentives.

Do we continue propping up hydrogen car sales? VW and Diamler have determined they aren't worth it, and the German government has a hydrogen plan. They see commercial trucks using hydrogen as possible. Maybe that would be a better use of resources, or working on other carbon neutral fuels for engines and fuel cells.

 

No, I was projecting doing it the only logical way to do it.

 

Well, you should worry about it. Without seasonal storage solved, we can't keep the lights on, heat our houses, run our businesses, run our industries or fuel our vehicles, at least economically.

 

And how many cars would you fill up at work at one time?

 

One.

That's kind of the whole point of the concept.

You only use this hydrogen for road trips. The rest is done on plug-in energy when near home. On road trips, you store hydrogen all the time at the fueling location, and fill up in a few minutes when a car on a road trip happens by.

As I've said hundreds of times, pure hydrogen cars are just as dumb as pure battery cars. When in your home town running errands and going to work, you should be all plug-in.

To put it another way, I've had my Prime for around 1,400 days. Of those, I've been on road trips about 50 of them. I'm almost pure EV for 1,350 days (it would be 100% if I had 40 miles of range), and I've only used gas primarily for about 50 days. Same would go with a PHEV H2 car, and virtually all of those fill-ups would have been out in the sticks between major cities.

 

The SAE protocol was designed to fast fill multiple cars at rates seen by gas stations. Even if hydrogen is used just far long trips, the highway stations will still be busy.

 

Not any time soon - just like the Supercharger stations. In all those 50 days of traveling, passing by multiple supercharger stations, I saw a grand total of one Tesla charging.

In the long term, it's not hard to do the same thing - just expand storage as you expand production, and let the gas cool to the ambient temperature inside the steel tanks. They are stationary - they don't have to be light.

 

That simply isn't going to work for stations that will see hundreds to thousands of cars per day, and these would be big tanks even for stations that see a few cars a day. Then starting at ambient temperatures, the hydrogen could get hot enough to damage the tank during filling.

The selling point of hydrogen is filling up as fast as gasoline is possible. If people end up waiting to fill up, they'll reconsider a BEV for their next car.

 

Yeah, that'll go over well on airplanes.

The point you don't understand is that our energy systems (electricity, heat and transportation) are connected, and thus any solution to sustainability will necessarily involve all three.

Running airplanes on oil is unsustainable.
Nuclear fission is unsustainable.
Storing 1,000,000GWh of natural gas for heat is unsustainable.

The seasonal variations of wind and solar combined with hydro and biofuels requires more storage and batteries could ever provide and curtailment alone is not economical.

So solve ALL those issues. Do ALL the math. Good luck. Took me almost two years and thousands of simulations.

 

Curtailment is and is becoming even more economical. Storage needs will be much less as noted above and much of this will be covered with overproduction of renewables:

The result with regards to this study is clear: it makes even more sense to simply overbuild cheap wind and solar power plants than to try to fill in the gaps between supply and demand using fossil fuel power plants. Even leaving environmental matters out of it, it’s simply cheaper to overbuild low-cost solar and wind power plants.
​

The Best Electricity Plan: Overbuild Solar & Wind Power Plants

 

The tanks are not that big, and it doesn't really matter anyway because they are stationary. Ours was a small tube trailer (20 feet long and 6 tubes, IIRC). They make them 10 times that large and even ordinary gas stations have three gas tanks larger than those (my local Costco has 3 tanks each 2.5x bigger than a semi tank trailor).

This just isn't an issue.

 

That approach, called curtailment, is not economical used alone. It's part of the optimal solution, but not a huge part.

 

Except the part that it is a huge part.

 

Stations here bury their fuel tanks under the parking lot, even though they'll have to replace them every 5 or so years, because real estate is such a premium. Same in California and other areas with higher population densities.

 

My middle name is Hydrogen...worked with it my whole career

I spell it with a "J"

 

Not to mention hydrogen has a brutal temperature inflection point that causes the pump handle to freeze into the car if the action is too steady and temperatures aren’t heavily regulated.

good way to waste 15-20 minutes on a brutally warm Southern California day, god only knows what would happen in a midwestern winter