Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai
Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
I think we should make a show about our various theories about a big bang. I propose we call it The Big Bang Theory.
I’ll see myself out.
That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
That’d be my big concern; where tf would you re-fuel it?
There one single hydrogen fuel station in each of the two major cities near me.
Huh, I found one in my state that can fuel 10 cars per day at $10/kg, which gives a driving range equivalent to 2.2 gallons of gasoline.
Yeah, I wouldn’t take a free car. I would have to be paid. Beta testing is a job.
I disagree, EV are the exact opposite. Electricity was EVERYWHERE even before the EV were a thing.
A regular plug can charge an electric car and for few thousands $ you can install an 11 or 22kW charger.
Hydrogen on the other hand is extremely hard to store and transport. Unlike electricity the hydrogen production is very limited right now and full of unknown.
Most Hydrogen fuel is still made from natural gas. It’s greenwashing.
However, I haven’t ever liked the argument that “most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels” that’s looking too short term.
There’s loads of studies surrounding that. It isn’t expected to change. This because they’re planning to create hydrogen from gas in such amounts that it’ll not cause too much of a change in the percentage of green hydrogen (which is currently as good as non existant).
Hydrogen is also expensive, so it’s pretty difficult to get a factory (e.g. steel factory) to switch to hydrogen.
Currently literally 99% of the world supply of hydrogen is fossil fuels. Yes, in the “future centuries” sense of the long term things might be different, but in the “we need to stop climate change in the next decade or so” sense it’s a non-starter. If you banned companies from making hydrogen from fossil fuels, the world simply wouldn’t have enough hydrogen.
It’s basically not possible to make electrolysis more efficient; the energy requirements are simple physics. The only way that technology can make green hydrogen cheaper is to reduce the capital cost of building an electrolysis plant, and to make enough surplus electricity that the cost to ring it comes down. Although as the latter also makes recharging a BEV cheaper too, that doesn’t necessarily get hydrogen anywhere closer to being competitive.
My thought is we could feed electrolysis with nuclear, solar, or tidal generation plants to create hydrogen. That doesn’t mean it would be cheap, but maybe it could get us to the quick refill infrastructure we have with gasoline currently that we’re having trouble mirroring with BEVs for long trips.
I haven’t run the math … so if you have or you know a source that has and this is beyond uneconomically feasible (like it would cost $$$$$ for a single “tank of gas hydrogen”), fair enough.
For comparison, grey hydrogen currently costs around $2 per kg, and green hydrogen costs around $12 per kg. Filling a Toyota Mirai tank with green hydrogen would cost you about $70. That’s production at today’s electricity prices. The cost to fully charge a Tesla is about $15, same rates.
So for green hydrogen to beat grey hydrogen on the open market, costs need to drop by a factor of 6. And because it can only do this if electricity prices drop off a cliff, it’d be doing this in an environment where you can fully charge a luxury BEV for $3…
Hydrogen is also not the only game in town in terms of competitors with BEV. For those niches where fully battery-operated vehicles aren’t practical, there are also biofuels, which are (from a climate change point of view) greener than green hydrogen anyway (although they have their own controversies).
I don’t think battery tech needs to improve, it will, but I don’t think it needs too.
Prices are going to drop. Will be interesting to see what happens is BYD sets up in Mexico. But lithium for high end cars and sodium for cheap cars I think is enough to push the revolution.
I’ve written about my delima with buying a BEV (beyond the price) a bit already … here’s a link to that social.packetloss.gg/comment/1334210
Basically, I do think either the battery technology or the charging infrastructure themselves need a fair bit of improvement before we’ll see the average person adopting them enthusiastically.
No, electric vehicle sales aren’t dropping. Here’s what’s really going on::Tesla has been slashing prices. Ford just cut the price of its Mustang Mach-E, too, plus it cut back production of its electric pickup. And General Motors is thinking about bringing back plug-in hybrids, arguably a step back from EVs.
As time goes on there will be more chargers and less petrol stations.
What I’m saying is if the price keeps coming down battery tech is good enough today.
Like hypothetically if electric cars were half the price of normal cars and there was 10x as many charging stations you wouldn’t need better battery technology.
But battery tech will get better and cheaper and there will be more charging stations. I get their are issues now.
We really need a more nuanced discussion around EV’s.
I see a lot of “gas bad ev good”. While gas IS bad, really bad, we also need to allow into the discussion all the ways ev’s are also bad, not just range, but environmentally.
Hydrogen is really interesting to me
It’s also faster to fill the tank
That’s not true. A hydrogen gas station needs to be under a high pressure to be able to fill up just one car. That pressure is gone after 4 or 5 cars. After which it’ll take 45 minutes to build up pressure again.
You’re spreading doubt about EVs while promoting hydrogen while ignoring the known drawbacks of hydrogen.
Simply stated, per mile or km driven it’s significantly cheaper to “fill up” an EV vs hydrogen. That’s due inefficiencies around hydrogen.
That’s not true. A hydrogen gas station needs to be under a high pressure to be able to fill up just one car.
Ever heard of pumps? You do realize pump can build up pressure from lower pressure container? Even if the time needed to fill the tank is the same as EV you’d still get higher mileage per joule of energy simply by not having 700kg battery onboard.
That pressure is gone after 4 or 5 cars. After which it’ll take 45 minutes to build up pressure again.
Not sure where you got these numbers from but pretty much none of them make sense. I’d love to see some sources on that.
Simply stated, per mile or km driven it’s significantly cheaper to “fill up” an EV vs hydrogen. That’s due inefficiencies around hydrogen.
Completely pointless comparison. You are comparing centuries of battery evolution to a technology that started being developed recently. Per whatever price is not comparable. If you want to go that direction, then bicycle is cheapest followed by a public transport and gasoline. This is not a question about price, this is question of finding a solution that’s scalable enough to replace gasoline, and batteries are not that. Lithium is rare enough, batteries weigh a ton and lose performance in the winter. They also take time to charge. Time which you can’t reduce without affecting battery life. Not to mention excess weight wearing down roads faster, wearing down tires. All that affects environment.
To make matters worse, Toyota has released its newest engine which can run on hydrogen, methane and gasoline. Making transition very easy. Sure hydrogen production is expensive at this point, but prices will drop once there’s competition and new greener ways are found to produce it. But change can start happening now. And by the way, am not talking about hydrogen EVs, but hydrogen ICEs.
We could use wind electricity, instead of stopping the windnturbines when the production gets so high that prices drop…
At some point hopefully we will realize
In the near term, it’s pretty clear that zero-emission, light-duty vehicles will need to rely on batteries. So why are Toyota and Honda (and Hyundai and others) still so bullish on hydrogen?
To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.
Why is this article so agressively angled?
While it’s clear the infrastructure isn’t there right now, isn’t hydrogen in the long term a clearly better alternative than ev’s? The biggest problem with EV’s being the battery, with all the horrible chemicals that go in to making them.
Shouldn’t hydrogen, in the long term, be the obviously greener alternative, or am I missing something?
In a conference that in attended, they talked about usbhavimg to look at energy sources like a flow of energy and not as limited sources.
Currently, wind turbines are imtemtionally stopped, when there is so much wind that the generated electricity becomes too cheap to sell!
Instead, you could run them and use the electricity to convert the energy into hydrogen. Yes some energy is lost but it would be lost anyway as wind
With wind, sun, wave energy, we can look at energy in different ways that we usually do with fuel and coal. It’s there and it just keeps coming.
Yes but the overhead we have is nothing compared to the energy needed to make everything hydrogen powered. we would need an absolute absurd amount of overhead to generate all the hydrogen from overhead alone.
It’s kind of dumb to intentionally waste 75-80% of the total electric energy initially generated to power hydrogen vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional overhead is a great idea, but it’s not a solution to hydrogen powered vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea
A factory which only runs some of the time will be really expensive. From what I’ve seen it’s way more cost effective to rely on batteries for surplus electricity.
Agreed, but 2 important things in my eyes.
1 - renewable surpluses. As wind and solar keep ramping , hydrogen is a fantastic way to store that energy. Sure, there are efficiency losses but it’s transportable, able to be stored long term, and able to be used from small scale to grid scale applications.
2 - total life cycle cost. There is an incredible amount of emissions embodied in evs. Haven’t seen a comprehensive analysis of a h2 vehicle but I would imagine a few hundred kilos of missing lithium is a good thing.
1 - renewable surpluses. As wind and solar keep ramping , hydrogen is a fantastic way to store that energy. Sure, there are efficiency losses but it’s transportable, able to be stored long term, and able to be used from small scale to grid scale applications
Grid storage is a genuine problem that needs solving, but there’s no particular reason to believe hydrogen is going to be the technology to fill that niche. There are much simpler and more efficient competitors, not least of which being pumped hydroelectricity, but also including exotic technologies like molten salt thermal plants or compressed air mineshafts. And batteries, for that matter; once portability stops being a concern, other battery chemistries start to be an option which don’t include lithium at all, like sodium-sulfur.
And even if hydrogen electrolysis does make sense as a grid storage medium, there’s no particular reason to think it’s a good idea to package up this hydrogen, transport it, and stick it in vehicles to convert into electricity through their own mini power plants. The alternative, where hydrogen is simply stored and converted back into grid electricity on site to meet demand leveling requirements seems far more likely.
You don’t burn hydrogen . But your point still stands.
In H2 car the H2 is just a really inefficient battery. Sure it can hold a lot, but it loses a lot. You lose it in energy conversions (to H2 and from H2) and you have to transport the stuff, and it leaks (smallest element) and it has to be cooled and compressed.
Battery tech is getting all the time, and really, you only need 300 mile range (many have that now) as humans have to stop for a rest/wee. With a charge network like or petrol network, you can charge then.
Edit: English
Hydrogen is good when it’s green hydrogen- made via electrolysis. Blue hydrogen is produced by gas companies, so it isn’t clean, unfortunately. There are some other snags, such as designing a really hard gas tank that cannot be punctured, and hydrogen storage is a bit challenging. It’s less dense than gasoline, particularly at normal temps. So it has to be cooled down, which takes additional power and delivery complications, and it’s still less dense even as a liquid, so you don’t get as far of a range vs gasoline or jet fuel.
Hydrogen storage as a battery medium for overproducing wind, solar, even solar towers might make sense. I, for one am excited about the idea of hydrogen blimps coming back for lifting heavy loads to remote places, which Canada is toying with right now.
Hydrogen might make sense for something like container ships, but short term, I think other efuels will be used for things like planes, buses, trucks, maybe cars. Stuff that is more inert or just less expensive to design across a supply chain. It also has potential offworld uses in the further future. It definitely has its uses, it just seems a bit difficult in personal vehicles.
Hydrogen cannot be greener than an EV, because it’s just an EV with more steps. It’s energy intensive to turn electricity + water to hydrogen, transport it, pump it, then convert it back to electricity.
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you’d have to break laws of physics.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you’d have to break laws of physics.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
Yes.
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
I didn’t. Those are very small. Compared to the losses of a HFCEV or even worse, a combustion hydrogen car.
There are laws of thermodynamics and there are laws of kinetics.
Fuels have much more power density than batteries. You can’t deliver power as fast with a battery compared to a fuel. It doesn’t matter if thermodynamically one is more efficient than the other. You would be crazy to suggest moving an airbus with a battery, that’s physically impossible even if thermodynamically is more efficient.
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