This is the sunk costs fallacy and cognitive dissonance at work in the Japanese industrial base-government grand corporate vision obsessed with creating an unnecessary, parallel utility infrastructure that's lossier because of more steps than EVs. The world is already at 30% renewable electricity production and increasing rapidly. That trend should continue rather than build something that is redundant and lacks undeniable advantages over EVs. (Most of Japan doesn't really need FF-like range.)
Would you agree that for quite a few countries/regions in the world, there's a large seasonal fluctuation in renewable electricity generation which cannot easily be met with seasonally fluctuating demand?
As countries/regions try to get to 100 % renewable electricity they'll likely have to massively over build, leaving them with huge seasonal surpluses.
If so, then wouldn't the conclusion be that there needs to be seasonal storage of energy to _some_ degree at least?
If so, then do you think such seasonal storage can be achieved with batteries?
I doubt that. I'd rather envision hydrogen as seasonal storage from fluctuating renewable generation.
When/if the hydrogen is available, uses will likely follow.
According to this presentation, by 2030, Toyota expects to sell 100,000 FCV mostly trucks. At the same time, Toyota expects to sell 1.7 million units out of 3.5 million overall will be provided by BEV Factory.
The load-bearing word in the headline is "solid-state" -- hydrogen and existing EV chemistries are both relatively established tech-wise, whereas iirc the solid-state battery tech was only just announced earlier this year?
(afaict non-solid-state EVs by toyota are also in the six-figures of volume?)
I don't know how different things are in Japan, but here in the US I would have to drive thousands of miles to find a hydrogen station. I can charge an EV in my garage. Or at the supercharger station at my local target.
Is hydrogen catching on in other parts of the world? It seems DOA here.
Not really, gasifying the coal means you capture all the products, so the carbon is captured by default instead of released into the atmosphere which is what would happen if it were burned in a coal power station instead.
The ideal would be to actually make green Hydrogen, but frankly until the grid is 100% electric anyway it doesn't actually matter what we make with the green energy as long as we build it.
The carbon won’t be captured as in buried, it’ll be burned for energy of some form and the CO2 released into the atmosphere. And at the same time, it will keep the mines open and busy pulling new carbon up out of the ground, when otherwise the economics would probably dictate reducing overall production. Meanwhile a battery electric vehicle can charge from zero-CO2 power without wasting a ton of it on electrolysis (which isn’t available at scale yet anyway.)
They're also jumpstarting a nationwide charging network via the infrastructure plan.
But that's in the future, I mean today. I can't buy a hydrogen vehicle if I wanted to. I can't fill it up if I wanted to, not even at the dozen Toyota dealerships around me.
In Australia you'd need to live within 100 miles of the only station:
Victoria's first hydrogen refuelling station is now operational. A commercial-grade facility, Toyota’s Hydrogen Centre is located in Altona in Melbourne’s West.
to use the Toyota Mirai with it's 300 mile range.
Realistically you'd be wating to live within 10 miles .. and hope that other stations open in the near future.
This really is something for whole country adoption such as Japan is attempting.
It's probably same here in Europe. My local Lexus lists the hydrogen version,which is nice and all that but where the hell would I suppose to get hydrogen for it?..
To whom? And who is going to build out the refuel infrastructure? Its an idiotic business plan and is doomed to fail. I really wouldn't want to own one, and neither do you.
People keep saying that, but don't actually understand what's happening.
Tesla build charging station. They use the existing electricity network that is already in place. That is 100-1000x cheaper then bootstrapping a hydrogen charging network.
A single Hydrogen fuel station for 1 car is gone cost more then a whole supercharging station. Its incredibly safety critical. And that doesn't even account for the much, much higher maintenance cost. And then you have to actually have infrastructure to supply the hydrogen. And once you do all of that, you have not even solved the carbon problem either.
No company, not Toyota will do that. Toyota has no interest in doing that.
Sold Energy Systems have been shipping batteries for good while now. But mainly to niche applications.
Mercedes has a bus with sold state batteries if I remember correctly. But it needs to be heated up to a high operating temperature so it’s not suitable for cars.
There are a bunch of markets where the taxis run on CNG, with their own dedicated refill infrastructure. I guess hydrogen could make sense in replacing those? Taxis run long hours and any charging downtime means lost revenue.
The single biggest reason is that it locks you in, and unless it becomes a standard it's basically useless since people would probably need to go to a dealer to get a battery swap. For the average driver of a BEV, they are rarely going to need a fast charger anyway since just charging at home overnight is good enough for 95% of driving.
That's less of a problem for fleet operators, they could actually have a bunch of batteries at their business sites spread all over a city so a battery swap is never too far away. Fleet vehicles also do more km in a day than the average private vehicle as well, so they WOULD need to use fast chargers a lot more often.
The economics of battery swaps are actually very good. But it’s a situation where a large amount of people would need to agree on a standard. Those sorts of cross industry agreements seem in short supply these days. Reminds me of getting every company to agree for standards in the semi industry.
Those taxis usually run CNG because their country/region has access to lots of CNG (eg Phuket Thailand). I wonder if that means they have access to lots of hydrogen as well, if not, they won’t go for it.
BTW I was in a CNG taxi that had to refuel before (transferring between resort areas in Phuket), the wait was long and refueling was slow, probably because they had lots of CNG vehicles and not a lot of fueling infrastructure, and the pressure was slow for some reason. Definitely a supercharger session would have been faster.
What a dumb thing to say. 'Solid-state' doesn't matter. Its just a dumb marking thing that somehow got into popular popsci press. There is not one type of battery that is solid state. The important part, lithium metal anode is not yet in any cars. And the other types are not that practical for most cars.
Hydorgen GLOBAL production is literally about 1 weeks of Tesla.
If you put Hydrogen and EV on a graph, you can literally not even see the Hydrogen cars. And they also don't have high growth.
Hydrogen cars not a niche, they are a niche of a niche of a niche. They only happen because companies and governments are willing to lose lots of money on them. Mostly because of some decades old 'government strategies' that don't adjust to changing technology.
Hydrogen fueled vehicles may not be viable right now.
But there's one thing that makes me believe they will be in the future. Long-haul trucking with BEV seems rather unlikely to me and the one renewables powered alternative that looks scalable (across different aspects) to me is FCEV trucks fueled with H2 or methanol or some other hydrogen carrier.
(Amogy as a company develops such tech).
As soon as there's sufficient gas stations where trucks can refill H2/Methanol/.. hydrogen powered FCEV cars may stop appearing like a non-solution.
I think for all countries that have large seasonal fluctuations in wind/PV electricity generation, hydrogen will play an important role in both seasonal storage of domestic electricity generation as well as for importing energy (in the form of ammonia) from other regions. So the energy backbones of these countries will not solely rely upon the electric grid but also on a H2 distribution system. As soon as this is available, all sorts of uses of H2 will become viable.
Electric trucks are very efficient and cheaper to operate. They can do a majority of all trucking routes just fine. Companies will primary invest in those routes for electrification. More CO2 reduction. Very long-haul style operations will stay on gas for much longer. Electric truck operation will also be much cheaper then hydrogen operation.
The country most invested in Hydrogen is Japan, and in Japan, electric trucks are clearly superior.
In Europe, a large potential market for Hydrogen trucks, the way the regulations are in terms of rest, that covers electric trucks weaknesses.
Another issue with your theory is that the truck stop that trucks would use are not really the same in form and function as what normal traveling people use for the most part.
They will not be in locations where its viable for lots of commuters to go to. Specially because all short-hall distribution will clearly go electric, not hydrogen.
And its yet to be shown that anybody is actually willing to make the massive investments in hydrogen trucking station, and that there will be hydrogen distribution available. Local generation is very unlikely for a truck stop.
So it sound cool in theory but in practice it just doesn't really line up. Hydrogen trucks maybe make sense in a few long-haul niche application.
And even if, we somehow had hydrogen fuel stations. In practice they are simply worse cars then electric cars. They are far, far more complex to build, and thus cost more to build. They have far far more failure points. For the majority of people who can charge at home, or at work, its just a far worse experience. For long distance travel, supercharging is already really good and its getting better rapidly. Most people make longer breaks then necessary for charging already.
The few people who claim they do like 10h without stopping are the extreme exception of the extreme exception.
> I think for all countries that have large seasonal fluctuations in wind/PV electricity generation, hydrogen will play an important role in both seasonal storage of domestic electricity generation as well as for importing energy (in the form of ammonia) from other regions.
I think seasonal storage makes little sense economically. If your hydrogen production relies on intermittent power availability its going to have really bad uptime and is gone be really bad economically.
At the same time batteries are getting better and more economical at storage. With different battery tech for 4h, 8-12h and 2-3d storage.
Importing energy threw high voltage DC lines makes more sense then transporting hydrogen derivatives. Its far cheaper unless you are going across an ocean.
I absolutely do not believe in the vision that hydrogen (derivatives) will be like oil where a few regions have a shit-ton of production and then we ship it all over the world.
Most nations have enough energy option to figure out their own grid and balance out with their immediate neighbour.
> Electric trucks are very efficient and cheaper to operate. They can do a majority of all trucking routes just fine.
Agree.
Yet, currently of the daily 800,000 trucks (> 7.5 t) which are transporting goods in Germany, less than 500 are BEVs (including hybrids). BEV trucks cost ~ 3x as much as an ordinary diesel truck.
So right now, they're basically irrelevant.
> In Europe, a large potential market for Hydrogen trucks, the way the regulations are in terms of rest, that covers electric trucks weaknesses.
Agree, mandatory resting time for the drivers automatically gives much time for charging. But not all stops are hours long.
According to my source, there's currently not one mega charger in Germany that allows trucks to charge enough during a 45 min break, so that they can actually drive on.
According to the same source, several companies that tried to build a charging infrastructure with such mega chargers were turned down by the power utilities because the distribution network apparently isn't capable of handling that much load. Upgrading the grid accordingly is said to take 5-10 years.
I think countries with relatively high BEV share of passenger vehicle fleet will already face a decent challenge with getting the grid to charge these cars. Charging hundreds of thousands of semis will be an even greater challenge.
This is where fuels like H2/methanol/ammonia will have their place I think, as refuelling with these scales much easier than recharging BEVs.
> Another issue with your theory is that the truck stop that trucks would use are not really the same in form and function as what normal traveling people use for the most part.
Many truck stops along highways offer both, areas for trucks as well as cars. I see no reason, why they wouldn't be combined in many cases.
> And its yet to be shown that anybody is actually willing to make the massive investments in hydrogen trucking station, and that there will be hydrogen distribution available. Local generation is very unlikely for a truck stop.
Local generation doesn't exist right now. But as renewable share of electricity grows larger and as more and more old power plants (coal/gas) go offline, they offer perfect sites to (relatively) locally produce hydrogen from excess renewable electricity.
> And even if, we somehow had hydrogen fuel stations. In practice they are simply worse cars then electric cars. They are far, far more complex to build, and thus cost more to build. They have far far more failure points. For the majority of people who can charge at home, or at work, its just a far worse experience. For long distance travel, supercharging is already really good and its getting better rapidly. Most people make longer breaks then necessary for charging already.
Again, I (partially) agree. Yes, hydrogen/derivatives add complexity compared to a BEV.
Supercharging works, yes. But the question is, whether it will be practical to scale it to a vehicle fleet with a majority of BEV. I doubt it.
> I think seasonal storage makes little sense economically. If your hydrogen production relies on intermittent power availability its going to have really bad uptime and is gone be really bad economically.
Well, if there's sustained renewable electricty generation surpluses over say a week then that is already a magnitude that cannot be met with pumped hydro or batteries (EV/home).
Take an average grid throughput of 70 GW in Germany. Over 7 days that's 11,760 GWh. Now let's say due to renewables generating massively, you have a surplus of just 20 %. That's 2,352 GWh. You'd need ~ 30...
38 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 87.7 ms ] threadAs countries/regions try to get to 100 % renewable electricity they'll likely have to massively over build, leaving them with huge seasonal surpluses.
If so, then wouldn't the conclusion be that there needs to be seasonal storage of energy to _some_ degree at least?
If so, then do you think such seasonal storage can be achieved with batteries?
I doubt that. I'd rather envision hydrogen as seasonal storage from fluctuating renewable generation.
When/if the hydrogen is available, uses will likely follow.
According to this presentation, by 2030, Toyota expects to sell 100,000 FCV mostly trucks. At the same time, Toyota expects to sell 1.7 million units out of 3.5 million overall will be provided by BEV Factory.
(afaict non-solid-state EVs by toyota are also in the six-figures of volume?)
Is hydrogen catching on in other parts of the world? It seems DOA here.
The ideal would be to actually make green Hydrogen, but frankly until the grid is 100% electric anyway it doesn't actually matter what we make with the green energy as long as we build it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/13/why-ira-hydrogen-tax-credit-...
But that's in the future, I mean today. I can't buy a hydrogen vehicle if I wanted to. I can't fill it up if I wanted to, not even at the dozen Toyota dealerships around me.
Realistically you'd be wating to live within 10 miles .. and hope that other stations open in the near future.
This really is something for whole country adoption such as Japan is attempting.
https://www.toyota.com.au/electrified/hydrogen/stations
Hydrogen might be viable for trucks, ferries and ships with limited dedicated infrastructure. But it’s a lost cause for personal cars.
Tesla build charging station. They use the existing electricity network that is already in place. That is 100-1000x cheaper then bootstrapping a hydrogen charging network.
A single Hydrogen fuel station for 1 car is gone cost more then a whole supercharging station. Its incredibly safety critical. And that doesn't even account for the much, much higher maintenance cost. And then you have to actually have infrastructure to supply the hydrogen. And once you do all of that, you have not even solved the carbon problem either.
No company, not Toyota will do that. Toyota has no interest in doing that.
There is no "hydrogen plug" infrastructure, in any city. There are only proof of concept stations scattered around California. Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/...
https://www.newegg.com/p/0JB-00MZ-00007?item=9SIBRVSK1T1450
Mercedes has a bus with sold state batteries if I remember correctly. But it needs to be heated up to a high operating temperature so it’s not suitable for cars.
That's less of a problem for fleet operators, they could actually have a bunch of batteries at their business sites spread all over a city so a battery swap is never too far away. Fleet vehicles also do more km in a day than the average private vehicle as well, so they WOULD need to use fast chargers a lot more often.
See video here:
https://mastodon.green/@FabianLaasch/110083147601165341
Linked as well:
https://www.theautopian.com/china-is-already-doing-ev-batter...
BTW I was in a CNG taxi that had to refuel before (transferring between resort areas in Phuket), the wait was long and refueling was slow, probably because they had lots of CNG vehicles and not a lot of fueling infrastructure, and the pressure was slow for some reason. Definitely a supercharger session would have been faster.
Hydorgen GLOBAL production is literally about 1 weeks of Tesla.
If you put Hydrogen and EV on a graph, you can literally not even see the Hydrogen cars. And they also don't have high growth.
Hydrogen cars not a niche, they are a niche of a niche of a niche. They only happen because companies and governments are willing to lose lots of money on them. Mostly because of some decades old 'government strategies' that don't adjust to changing technology.
But there's one thing that makes me believe they will be in the future. Long-haul trucking with BEV seems rather unlikely to me and the one renewables powered alternative that looks scalable (across different aspects) to me is FCEV trucks fueled with H2 or methanol or some other hydrogen carrier.
(Amogy as a company develops such tech).
As soon as there's sufficient gas stations where trucks can refill H2/Methanol/.. hydrogen powered FCEV cars may stop appearing like a non-solution.
I think for all countries that have large seasonal fluctuations in wind/PV electricity generation, hydrogen will play an important role in both seasonal storage of domestic electricity generation as well as for importing energy (in the form of ammonia) from other regions. So the energy backbones of these countries will not solely rely upon the electric grid but also on a H2 distribution system. As soon as this is available, all sorts of uses of H2 will become viable.
Electric trucks are very efficient and cheaper to operate. They can do a majority of all trucking routes just fine. Companies will primary invest in those routes for electrification. More CO2 reduction. Very long-haul style operations will stay on gas for much longer. Electric truck operation will also be much cheaper then hydrogen operation.
The country most invested in Hydrogen is Japan, and in Japan, electric trucks are clearly superior.
In Europe, a large potential market for Hydrogen trucks, the way the regulations are in terms of rest, that covers electric trucks weaknesses.
Another issue with your theory is that the truck stop that trucks would use are not really the same in form and function as what normal traveling people use for the most part.
They will not be in locations where its viable for lots of commuters to go to. Specially because all short-hall distribution will clearly go electric, not hydrogen.
And its yet to be shown that anybody is actually willing to make the massive investments in hydrogen trucking station, and that there will be hydrogen distribution available. Local generation is very unlikely for a truck stop.
So it sound cool in theory but in practice it just doesn't really line up. Hydrogen trucks maybe make sense in a few long-haul niche application.
And even if, we somehow had hydrogen fuel stations. In practice they are simply worse cars then electric cars. They are far, far more complex to build, and thus cost more to build. They have far far more failure points. For the majority of people who can charge at home, or at work, its just a far worse experience. For long distance travel, supercharging is already really good and its getting better rapidly. Most people make longer breaks then necessary for charging already.
The few people who claim they do like 10h without stopping are the extreme exception of the extreme exception.
> I think for all countries that have large seasonal fluctuations in wind/PV electricity generation, hydrogen will play an important role in both seasonal storage of domestic electricity generation as well as for importing energy (in the form of ammonia) from other regions.
I think seasonal storage makes little sense economically. If your hydrogen production relies on intermittent power availability its going to have really bad uptime and is gone be really bad economically.
At the same time batteries are getting better and more economical at storage. With different battery tech for 4h, 8-12h and 2-3d storage.
Importing energy threw high voltage DC lines makes more sense then transporting hydrogen derivatives. Its far cheaper unless you are going across an ocean.
I absolutely do not believe in the vision that hydrogen (derivatives) will be like oil where a few regions have a shit-ton of production and then we ship it all over the world.
Most nations have enough energy option to figure out their own grid and balance out with their immediate neighbour.
Agree.
Yet, currently of the daily 800,000 trucks (> 7.5 t) which are transporting goods in Germany, less than 500 are BEVs (including hybrids). BEV trucks cost ~ 3x as much as an ordinary diesel truck.
So right now, they're basically irrelevant.
> In Europe, a large potential market for Hydrogen trucks, the way the regulations are in terms of rest, that covers electric trucks weaknesses.
Agree, mandatory resting time for the drivers automatically gives much time for charging. But not all stops are hours long. According to my source, there's currently not one mega charger in Germany that allows trucks to charge enough during a 45 min break, so that they can actually drive on.
According to the same source, several companies that tried to build a charging infrastructure with such mega chargers were turned down by the power utilities because the distribution network apparently isn't capable of handling that much load. Upgrading the grid accordingly is said to take 5-10 years.
I think countries with relatively high BEV share of passenger vehicle fleet will already face a decent challenge with getting the grid to charge these cars. Charging hundreds of thousands of semis will be an even greater challenge.
This is where fuels like H2/methanol/ammonia will have their place I think, as refuelling with these scales much easier than recharging BEVs.
> Another issue with your theory is that the truck stop that trucks would use are not really the same in form and function as what normal traveling people use for the most part.
Many truck stops along highways offer both, areas for trucks as well as cars. I see no reason, why they wouldn't be combined in many cases.
A hydrogen refuelling station for trucks that just opened can also be used by cars: https://www.now-gmbh.de/en/news/pressreleases/opening-of-a-h...
> And its yet to be shown that anybody is actually willing to make the massive investments in hydrogen trucking station, and that there will be hydrogen distribution available. Local generation is very unlikely for a truck stop.
Local generation doesn't exist right now. But as renewable share of electricity grows larger and as more and more old power plants (coal/gas) go offline, they offer perfect sites to (relatively) locally produce hydrogen from excess renewable electricity.
> And even if, we somehow had hydrogen fuel stations. In practice they are simply worse cars then electric cars. They are far, far more complex to build, and thus cost more to build. They have far far more failure points. For the majority of people who can charge at home, or at work, its just a far worse experience. For long distance travel, supercharging is already really good and its getting better rapidly. Most people make longer breaks then necessary for charging already.
Again, I (partially) agree. Yes, hydrogen/derivatives add complexity compared to a BEV. Supercharging works, yes. But the question is, whether it will be practical to scale it to a vehicle fleet with a majority of BEV. I doubt it.
> I think seasonal storage makes little sense economically. If your hydrogen production relies on intermittent power availability its going to have really bad uptime and is gone be really bad economically.
Well, if there's sustained renewable electricty generation surpluses over say a week then that is already a magnitude that cannot be met with pumped hydro or batteries (EV/home). Take an average grid throughput of 70 GW in Germany. Over 7 days that's 11,760 GWh. Now let's say due to renewables generating massively, you have a surplus of just 20 %. That's 2,352 GWh. You'd need ~ 30...