Comment on Norway on track to be first to go all-electric
velxundussa@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoMy own prejudice against hydrogen is around manufacturing.
Most of the world current hydrogen made isn’t green at all, and the message is “we’ll figure it out once demand is up”
And the companies pushing the most for hydrogen are petrol companies.
I’m not a chemist, but it doesn’t seem to add up to me.
I say that as an EV owner living in Canada. I need to use a fast charge station about 4 times a year due to cold related battery issues, and all of those time are because of extended road trips.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s not impossible to produce hydrogen in an environmentally friendly way. We just need to further increase efficiency, and move the energy source to renewables and nuclear to power the electrolysis. The EV charging stations have the same issue, often being powered fossil fuel plants.
But it is impossible to manufacture EV batteries in an environmentally friendly way. We’re just expected to accept it.
Plus the performance of EV’s vs hydrogen always uses data gathered in ideal conditions, but hydrogen is leaps and bounds more efficient in extreme weather. We need to be highlighting that, as climate change begins to make extreme conditions the norm and ideal conditions disappear.
Noobnarski@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It is literally physically impossible to increase the efficiency of electricity-> hydrogen -> electricity above 30%, and that’s if everything is perfect.
EVs are above 70% efficient in the real world btw.
Hydrogen will be useful to decarbonise some parts of heavy industry where electricity cannot be directly used, but that’s about it.
There is a reason why fossil fuel industries are pushing hydrogen, because it means that the car makers can keep selling combustion cars until hydrogen is ready, which it never will be.
And even if hydrogen cars were somewhat ready in 10 years, EVs and the charging stations would also be much better than they are now.
And hydrogen has such a low density that a tanker truck could only carry hydrogen for around 100 car refills, compared to 600-900 that a normal tanker truck does. So every gas station would have to be connected to a hydrogen pipeline, which will realistically never happen.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Meaning ‘in ideal conditions.’ As climate collapse progresses, the areas of the planet experiencing ideal conditions will narrow further and further. I guess fuck everyone living in those parts of the planet, huh?
What you’re not grasping is how clean and abundant hydrogen is. Illustrated by your emphasis on transportation. In most scenarios, it won’t be traveling far at all, if it’s not farmed on site. No transportation needed. Pair its abundance with lack of harmful emissions, and it’s absolutely worth any loss inefficiency.
And those inefficiencies are already being addressed. We have a number of projects already producing working proof of concepts that are ready to be scaled up for further testing and refinement. Advancements aren’t assumed in hydrogen- they’re already happening.
What about battery advancements? I keep hearing that we just need a leap forward in battery tech, and everything will be great, but no one’s been able to actually produce this promised technological leap. Seeing a lot of the same promises and red flags that come out of the ‘fusion is almost here’ crowd.
Noobnarski@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No, the 70% for EVs is in real world conditions. The 30% for hydrogen is in ideal conditions, it’s usually around 10% in real life conditions right now.
And the efficiency of EVs doesn’t decrease that much at temperature increases or decreases, especially not down to the efficiency that hydrogen has right now.
This video is sadly only in German, but the guy who made it is a researcher for hydrogen and batteries (he knows what he is talking about), he explains it very well, why hydrogen will never work for cars: youtu.be/ZXC33UjdtBU?si=zHfORdzj0bfSesrS
Hydrogen might be clean if it is produced from renewable energies, but we don’t even have enough renewables to cover our current consumption, much less 3 times as much to cover everyone using hydrogen, and I don’t know what you mean by abundant, of course it is around everywhere bound in water, but we can’t use it before splitting it, which needs those insane amounts of energy.
There are also no projects that are able to go above those 30% because it’s just not possible, we can’t break the laws of physics.
We get new battery advancements every year, the current Trend is replacing everything with LiFePo4 batteries that are almost as good as LiNMnC batteries, because they need much less rare materials. Those batteries weren’t good enough a few years ago to be used in cars.
In the End electric cars are already good enough for almost all use cases and cost competitive, factoring in the running costs, while almost all car manufacturers have given up on hydrogen because they made losses even with their very expensive hydrogen cars.
I am seeing you being part of the “fusion is almost here” crowd, EVs don’t need to improve anymore to be competitive, but they most likely will, considering that the market for EVs is pretty big nowadays.
velxundussa@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
As far as I’m aware, the most impact around EV batteries is obtaining lithium and other componenets.
Components that can and are already being recycled from older EV batteries.
I’m curious to learn if there is other things I’m not aware of though!
I dont think making a parallel between ev charging and hydrogen manifacturing is valid though: my understanding is that electrolysis is an option, but that most of the current creation is a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement, like plastics (which explains why petrol campanies push it).
We can probably improve on electrolysis efficiency, but my hunch is that it simply won’t happen if petrol company can meet demand. Which I’m sure they will for just a bit cheaper than electrolysis costs to keep controlling the market.
If we can produce green electricity, as long as electrolysis efficiency is not as good as the average battery efficiency whatever efficiency of the hydrogen engine itself doesn’t matter: it’s still less efficient than a battery because of the extra manufacturing step. And then there’s transport and all on top of it.