Hydrogen fuel cells versus battery electric vehicles
Are battery electric vehicles just as compelling as hydrogen fuel cell vehicles?That's the argument that Gizmag makes for BW in the article, Is Hydrogen the Answer to Our Future Transport Needs?
A number of years ago, I thought I was going to become a disciple of the hydrogen economy, but the more I read about fuel cell cars, let alone the missing hydrogen highway, the more I felt that fuel cell vehicles were just a delay tactic to real fuel economy.
Thus, I embraced hybrid vehicles and the future of plug-in hybrid vehicles, which I have believed could make fuel cell vehicles, and the hydrogen highway, unnecessary. Lately, however, I am having second thoughts. (Finish: hydrogen versus electric)
Labels: fuel cells, Hybrid Vehicles, hydrogen highway, plug-in hybrid vehicles
posted by Dahcredyns at
9:33 AM
15 Comments:
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Are battery electric vehicles just as compelling as hydrogen fuel cell vehicles?
That's the argument that Gizmag makes for BW in the article, Is Hydrogen the Answer to Our Future Transport Needs?
A number of years ago, I thought I was going to become a disciple of the hydrogen economy, but the more I read about fuel cell cars, let alone the missing hydrogen highway, the more I felt that fuel cell vehicles were just a delay tactic to real fuel economy.
Thus, I embraced hybrid vehicles and the future of plug-in hybrid vehicles, which I have believed could make fuel cell vehicles, and the hydrogen highway, unnecessary. Lately, however, I am having second thoughts.
For example, yesterday I started thinking about Vampire electronics - essentially just electronic device standby-drawn electricity - and how it is becoming obvious that U.S. electricity consumption is going to explode in the next few decades as the digital revolution picks up steam. Currently, vampire electronics account for a staggering 5 percent of US electricity consumption, but that number is going to jump to 20 percent in just a couple of years! At that rate, what will it be in 10 years? 2o years? And the actual electricity consumption of all those extra electronics isn't even being considered.
Is the grid prepared? Is the grid prepared for this and millions and millions of battery-powered vehicles? Where will the extra electricity come from?
I already experience blackouts living in California almost every summer, yet I'm supposed to believe that there is plenty of excess capacity for millions of plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles as long as they only charge at night? Please, when have we ever lived in such a perfect world? My electricity cannot even be guaranteed today!
Hydrogen haters
Many against the hydrogen economy believe oil companies will dominate this new energy paradigm, and big oil companies just can't be trusted. Fine, but will big electricity companies monopolizing all of America's energy be so much more altruistic than big oil companies? Wouldn't it be better for utilities and oil companies to compete against each other for hydrogen production?
More interesting, wouldn't hydrogen enable better energy distribution and diversification than either oil or conventional electricity? For example, alternative energy providers could use hydrogen to store excess renewable electricity. Home owners might add fuel cells to their house to work with solar roofs that would make solar power much more efficient and cost-effective.
Now, I'm not arguing that hydrogen is more important than electric vehicles. Hydrogen generated via renewable energy, such as solar power and wind power, could both be stored for extra electricity capacity to power electric cars and used for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. And, while electric vehicles make great sense for small, urban vehicles, it seems hydrogen fuel cell vehicles make better sense for larger vehicles. Nonetheless, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can use the same battery technology as electric vehicles.
Ultimately, I think the debate between battery-powered cars and hydrogen fuel cell powered cars is shortsighted and misguided. America needs both, and both technologies should be seen as complementary technologies, not competitive technologies. In fact a hydrogen fuel cell plug-in hybrid vehicle might just be the best vehicle for the future simply because it enables the most distributive energy grid imaginable.
I noticed how you seemed to think that power plants would monopolize on electricity, causing high prices, if electric cars were the dominating cars in the future, and there would be less competition between oil companies and power companies. I think that's inherently flawed as I think that the more options we have for energy carriers, the more competition we will have. Atm oil dominates the transportation energy needs, and since you can't convert electricity into oil, there really is no competition from power plants. Therefore we need electric cars and plug in hybrid electric vehicles to generate the needed competition for fuel sources. Oil can readily be converted into electricity either inside a engine generator in a hybrid og at a power plant. Therefore will oil allways be needed even if there was a majority of electric cars on the road. Hydrogen will be the same deal just more expensive since you need a complete new infrastructure for it, compared to the existing infrastructure for gasoline and electricity for PHEVs(Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) Also compare the price of platinum needed for fuel cells in hydrogen cars to the price of lithium in electric cars. And lastly I will remind you that the energy efficiency of electricity as an energy carrier if far greater than that of hydrogen.
I think hydrogen cars will fail miserably in the end, and in 20 years most new cars will be PHEVs
I'm not advocating for fuel cell cars instead of EVs or PHEVs. Hydrogen can power both EVs and FCEVs. Hydrogen could also power plug-in hybrid vehicles.
You say that a whole new distribution system would be required for fuel cell vehicles. When a squirrel can knock out the energy grid in parts of America, do you really believe that the grid can handle 100s of millions of electric vehicles?
Today's electric grid is in terrible shape and it will require massive investment, even if we don't go to electric vehicles. I'm not just talking about trusting utilities, I'm talking about grid integrity.
Still, in terms of utility competition, I think California provides a pretty good example of the dangers of trusting electric utilities. Aside from the massive fraud and price collusion that residents of California have suffered, we also face blackouts every year - my neighbor was without power for more than a week last summer.
More important, your assumption that hydrogen requires a massive distribution system is flawed. The future of hydrogen will probably be solar-produced hydrogen and such a system provides for an incredibly distributed energy grid.
As solar power becomes more efficient, what do you with the excess energy? You can't really store yesterday's excess energy for big spikes in demand the following day. Hydrogen offers a solution for this problem, especially as solar power becomes more powerful. Under our current grid, the more powerful and efficient solar power becomes, the more energy is wasted because the grid simply cannot store extra production.
This fact is why Honda is developing solar powered home energy systems that utilize fuel cells and hydrogen. But Honda has never understood anything about the future of the car business and technology.
I'm not calling for hydrogen tomorrow. I'm claiming that America should try to stay at the forefront of this technology. Countries, such as Iceland, have fully committed to hydrogen. Countries, such as China, whom are having massive electricity shortages are heavily exploring hydrogen, as is India.
In America, however, we are spending billions on the corn-ethanol fraud in the hopes of achieving cellulosic ethanol, yet many scientist claim cost-effective cellulosic ethanol could still be decades away, and there are still huge questions about the efficiency of cellulosic feedstock.
Finally, automakers are already exploring substitutes for platinum for use in fuel cells. Talk to any of the engineers involved in fuel cells and they will tell you that the breakthroughs in the last couple of years have produced more results than the last couple of decades. The learning curve is finally increasing sharply.
We're just barely starting to grasp the physics and chemistries of both fuel cells and hydrogen and your easy dismissal defies the typical pattern of scientific history and progression.
The big revolutions in science have always been doomed to failure by the skeptics, yet continually, science has a strong history of proving skeptics wrong.
If the grid in america is as bad as you say (I'm Norwegian btw. Our grid is top notch), then you should focus on upgrading it, cause PHEVs will dominate in the future whether you like it or not. I'm not really that exited about pure EVs, and in that regard Hydrogen car may be able to compete decently. But for PHEVs it's a complete different story. Todays PHEVs is alot better than Hydrogen cars. And if more research is done into PHEVs the difference will only increase.
You claim that electric cars will hurt the integrity of the grid, I can agree somewhat to that. But in the case for PHEVs I don't believe that will happen since a PHEV can get energy from two sources and can even power your home using whatever fuel the car needs. And for plug-in cars in general they will generate demand for solar panels on the roof of their owners houses, which will help make the grid alot more stable.
Hydrogen cars will need alot of investments into distribution systems because hydrogen is a gas and needs to be transfered using pressurised tanks. This is a very complicated system and will be extremely costly compared to the existing system for liquid fuels. I think the price for hydrogen will be too high for it to ever catch on in the market. And it won't happen until oil runs out and ethanol/biodiesel becomes too expesive to make( due to scarce availability of food sources).
Hydrogen as an energy storage for future deficits in the grid may be the only viable solution using hydrogen in the short term. But even pumping water back up into hydroelectric plants is atm more efficient.
I'm not claiming that hydrogen as a fuel shouldn't be explored at all, I'm just saying that hydrogen shouldn't be explored at the cost of research in PHEVs. Cause that's exactly what has happened. But people are allready realizing just how bad hydrogen cars are compared to PHEVs. Oil companies have allways feared alternatives to their oil. Batteries have steadily improved over the last few years, and are now so good that they can compete with gasoline as cars main fuel source. Hydrogen won't be able to compete with this for at least 100 years imo.
In summering up, I think hydrogen should be explored as a storage system for energy. I just know it in my bones that it will never catch on in cars, at least not in the first 100 years. PHEVs will dominate just as gasoline cars have dominated the past 100 years. Hydrogen car research is just a means for oil companies to maintain status quo, since they make too much money from todays system.
I don't think you've considered the actual energy storage costs and inefficiencies of hydrogen generation. Also, the grid has plenty of overnight and excess daytime capacity to charge more than 100 million vehicles every day. You should do some fact-checking before you come to conclusions based on just hypothesis.
Actually, you can turn electricity into oil in a roundabout process. You have to electrolysize water for hydrogen and then autothermally reform it with coal or some kind of carbon source to synthesize methane and/or methylene. Then you can use Fisher-Tropsch processes or the Mobil Process to make liquid hydrocarbon products such as gasoline and diesel.
Several of y'all's facts are simply incorrect. You do not need platinum for fuel cells. Also, corn ethanol is not a fraud, but the oil-controlled media would like to tell you that it is. Hydrogen storage can easily be overcome by pumping it into existing natural gas, oil, and gasoline pipelines as it can easily be separated at the extraction point.
Hydrogen technology is expensive, hydrogen fuel would be SUPER expensive, it's also very dangerous and explodes easily, and it has invisible flame. In cold weather, hydrogen cars don't work.
Hydrogen profits only 30% of the energy provided, while an electric car profits around 80% of the same amount of electric energy.
Electric cars are the best, they charge in 5 minutes and give up to 500 km (300 miles) range.
Let's wait for ZENN and their EESTOR powered cars.
And let's make more solar panels to generate extra energy.
Lithium Battery technology has improved greatly and will keep improving rapidly I hope. So excess electricity could be stored in batteries as chemical energy instead of converting the electrical energy into Hydrogen, which involves more waste and is less efficient, I think. Cars could carry spare batteries then. What do you think?
It's possible.
I always involved in a conversation with the CEO of A123Systems about such a plan, and the kind of batteries to store electricity are technologically possible, but feasibility of such a system are pretty sketchy.
Also, if you had plug-in fuel cell hybrids, you wouldn't need much hydrogen.
There are lots of issues with the hydrogen highway, but I'm amazed at how aggressively Japanese automakers, especially Honda, continue to pursue this technology. Recently, Europe has also gotten much more aggressive.
I really believe that innovation will create cheap, efficient sources of hydrogen. That isn't a reason to limit EVs, just to keep pushing both. Ultimately, i believe they are complementary technologies.
A lot of smart comments... I don't think I am as smart as you guys, but I did have a couple of things I wanted to say.
I believe they are upgrading the power grid. Part of the ___ hundred billion dollar Obama stimulous package.
I hope electric/hybrid cars are here to stay. I am not sure the average person wants anything other than a gas powered car at this point, other than those who really care about the environment or those who have extra spending money.
The government and the car companies seem to think this is what people want though... so hopefully they are right. I mean there is an Cadillac Escalade hybrid after all... whats next?
I would be more than happy to see a large amount of hybrid cars on the road in the next 20 years.
As for hydrogen, I think its best we don't expect to see these cars on the road frequently for some time... but its exciting to see most car companies have plans with this:
http://www.hydrogencarinfo.com/hydrogencarplans.html
Most hydrogen vehicles will probably fuel cell hybrid vehicles and I hope they happen, but first the hydrogen nut has to be cracked. One way or another I believe that will happen. Or maybe we'll used methanol instead - methanol created by solar and wind power via methanologenesis.
hydrogen is really dangerous, and the electric grid could be adapted to handle millions of users with relative ease. I just finished reading the book Two Cents Per Mile by Nevres Cefo, and it has a very good technical analysis about electric cars vs hydrogen cars which clears up a lot of this discussion.
We'll end up producing most of the hydrogen for a hydrogen economy through electrolysis of water, so regardless of whether you want to have 100s of millions of battery cars connected to the grid, if you choose hydrogen you're just going to have the hydrogen retailers connected to the grid. In addition, they will actually draw more power from the grid anyway since hydrogen production and use is less efficient than battery charging and use. The grid will have to increase its output regardless. On an efficiency scale, the battery-electric wins hands down. http://www.physorg.com/news85074285.html shows a diagram that shows the end-use efficiencies of hydrogen and electric.
Hydrogen is just a form of energy storage, just like a battery. The power still needs to come from somewhere.
the idea that electric cars are going to take over the auto industry flies in the face of almost every bit of research that has been carried out.
minimally, we're talking two decades to achieve even 20 percent share of plug-in hybrids and EVs. even then there are still massive issues as to where the energy comes to produce the electricity.
if we're talking solar, we might be able to produce far more solar then we can use. rather than just dumping this waste energy, as is done today, more efficient systems might be created that store this energy as hydrogen.
it's not about comparing hydrogen to batteries. in the future, it'll be about systems and the sum will be greater than the parts.
it seems very unwise to me to assume that batteries are the answer without massive breakthroughs beyond lithium-ion, as numerous researchers have verified over and over.
automakers have some of the smartest engineers studying these issues, as they have been for decades, and to assume they don't have any clue what they are talking about - all over the world and working independent - seems a bit nonsensical.
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