Reply to post: Re: Quick charging

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Quick charging

>You might be content to sit around twiddling your thumbs for an hour waiting for a "quick chrage"on occasion.

EU driver safety rules require 45 minutes unbroken rest time every 4h30 anyway, so this "on occasion" is already largely accounted for. This would require deployment of significant numbers of high voltage DC chargers but this is no different to the enormous amount of infrastructure required to safely transport and handle hazardous, high-pressure compressed hydrogen gas.

The real difference is in process efficiency. You can rule-of-thumb the generation of "green" hydrogen from electrolysis at something like 75% efficient, followed by 60% efficiency in the fuel cell. It's a double efficiency hit. Every unit of energy put into a battery gets you something like twice as much useful work as when put into a hydrogen fuel cell. We all know how sensitive transit is to raw energy costs. Nobody is going to accept a 2x multiplier on their operations.

So are batteries bigger? Yep. Are they heavier? Absolutely. Will they take 10-30 mins extra per day of charging time? No doubt. But they are massively cheaper to run and - bear with us here - are actually feasible. We do not produce anywhere near enough hydrogen gas (of whatever colour) to run something like the world's HGV fleets, and 95+% of what we do produce is a near-accidental byproduct of hydrocarbon processing. The economics only works today because "waste" hydrogen is so cheap. They completely break down for anything even remotely "green" or "blue", and neither of those products even really exist today or in the near future. They're a myth. When they do exist we'll probably need them for little things like smelting steel and shipping and aviation.

Practical, ubiquitous battery-EV HGVs are within touching distance. BYD, Freightliner, Volvo, Tesla and so on all produce or are about to produce 300-mile class vehicles, and much like cars 95% of journeys are for substantially less distance than that (~170mi per day in the US, for example). Range is a solveable problem. If it's not there for your use case yet it will be in five more years, probably before this Hydrogen FC factory is even running in serial production.

Go back in time five years and you'll find people making these exact argument about battery-EV cars. They'd never get enough range for normal people. What about long distance driving? Hydrogen just "makes sense". Those arguments turned out to be nonsense there and they will here.

The number of downvotes the OP accrued is absurd. Hydrogen has practically no place in road freight, not unless someone comes up with a smart way to produce 10,000x more of it than we do today with half as many efficiency losses, and gets there (with all the requisite infrastructure) faster than batteries. Or a pantograph network.

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