I mean yeah, but on the other hand with hydrogen you have much more control over when and where you use the electricity. You can transport it by pipes or by trucks/ships without overwhelming the electric grid.
Okay, but if they don’t have the electricity for EVs they definitely don’t have enough electricity to waste 2/3 of it turning it into hydrogen and back.
NoRodent@lemmy.world 10 months ago
zurohki@aussie.zone 10 months ago
You can do off-peak charging with EVs too, that’s not a magical hydrogen thing. My hot water system is on its own circuit which can be turned off by the power company whenever they need to cut demand, providers have been doing that sort of thing for decades.
nexusband@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You can’t store the power in EVs for weeks and weeks and also you can’t move it around on a whim, without loosing that stored energy.
zurohki@aussie.zone 10 months ago
What? Of course you can store power for weeks. It doesn’t just dribble out onto the floor. Go away for a month and come home, your EV is still sitting there with the battery charge whatever you left it on.
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
So, let’s say I leave an EV at the airport, with 60% charge, battery in reasonable health, and return 2 months later and head home, having lost maybe 3%. You are telling me that’s…not doing exactly what you’re saying I can’t and didn’t just do?
You don’t also immediately lose all the stored energy either. In a (hypothetical, future tyme) properly kitted out scenario, I leave my EV plugged in at the airport and it’s battery contributes to local grid storage while I’m away. So the 60% I arrived with might drop down during high load, but since my utility company has a handy app I can schedule when I need to unplug and ask for the charge percentage to be topped up in time.
I might even not have to pay to park my car in that scenario, or potentially even earn credits back…
SeaJ@lemm.ee 10 months ago
That’s more an issue with hydrogen than it is with EVs. Hydrogen is very leaky.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
So providers just prevent people from using what is potentially their only transportation option as it suits the power company?
Hot water isn’t usually a survival need as long as you have liquid water available. Means of movement can be.
zurohki@aussie.zone 10 months ago
They don’t just… leave it off. They turn it off for like 15 minutes in the middle of an 8 hour charging session. Nobody notices or cares.
gmtom@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So providers just prevent people from using what is potentially their only transportation option as it suits the power company?
No? Thats effectively the same thing as a gas station closing. You can go elsewhere to charge it.
nexusband@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The electricity for Hydrogen isn’t bound to any place. If they put up 10 offshore wind turbines exclusively for Hydrogen, that hydrogen can be shipped around the country as needed and wanted. That’s not possible with Grid power and especially not when they have different systems in place.
zurohki@aussie.zone 10 months ago
Transporting energy isn’t possible with grid power? Really? That’s what grids are for.
Yes, they have the issue of separate incompatible grids, but building complicated interconnects is still going to be easier than building and operating a hydrogen trucking industry.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
It’s actually a lot more work than “add more electricity”. It’s a load demand issue in areas, and if there’s a bunch of high load electric cars trying to charge that needs all the extra equipment and transformers and larger gauge wiring and stuff to go with it.
Like, look at your house. You may just have a 100 amp breaker box on it. Now you couldn’t handle a high-speed charger pulling 40 amps for your car, 30 for the hvac, 20 for lights/tv/computers etc, and then trying to get another 15 or so from and oven or vacuum cleaner. You’ll need a bigger amp breaker box, only you can’t just install that because the line running to your house also isn’t big enough, so you have to have the electric company come out and install a bigger line. But if too many houses in the area need all that, then the main run of lines and equipment going to that neighborhood will also have to be built up.
Toyota doesn’t like all electrics because they don’t want to add a $15,000 battery to a vehicle and make it weigh 1,000 pounds more for a vehicle that will no longer be in working condition 15 to 20 years later. They’ll fully change their tone once battery tech gets better than lithium based stuff made today. Until then hybrids are great. Cheaper lighter batteries with no range issues and easy to replace the batts when needed.
zurohki@aussie.zone 10 months ago
Like, look at your house. You may just have a 100 amp breaker box on it. Now you couldn’t handle a high-speed charger pulling 40 amps for your car, 30 for the hvac, 20 for lights/tv/computers etc, and then trying to get another 15 or so from and oven or vacuum cleaner. You’ll need a bigger amp breaker box
I’m not sure if you know this, but there are smart chargers that include a sensor to put on the feed going into your house. The charger can throttle up and down as you turn stuff on and off to keep the house’s total power draw under the limit, so you run all your stuff and the car just gets whatever’s left over. You can even have dozens of chargers in a parking garage and program the chargers to share a limited grid connection.
EVs aren’t a fixed load, you can ramp them up or down or shut them off as needed, so they’re pretty easy to accommodate.
AA5B@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is really not a blocker - you don’t need that high a charger, you don’t need to run it full time, nor are you running everything else full time.
People forget about time of use metering and that this is a gradual phase in over a decade or more. A little bit of certainty in expectations should make this much easier to plan for.
My charger has a configurable limit, and can be programmed to be active at specific times. I don’t have incentive to do that because I have flat rate metering and sufficient electrical service but I could configure it to be much more friendly to limited service.
nexusband@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Maybe easier, but not cheaper. Transporting hydrogen around is already being done as well - you don’t have to develop the wheel again.
Geobloke@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Over 75% of Japanese energy is imported under current circumstances and they have a reluctance to use geothermal for social and economic reasons. Wind is another good choice but they’re restricted in where they can deploy it by social and economic concerns
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 10 months ago
And this is the same country that wanted to mine cobalt off the nearby ocean floor a decade ago. What a strange world.