Hydrogen and FCEVs discussion thread

[TomT]

+1!

Let me know when I can buy a home H2 fueling station for $1-2000 for my FCEV and install it in my garage. All you've linked to are PR bits of vaporware.

 

[abasile]

For H2 cars to become attractive as ICE replacements in California, there will need to be far more H2 stations than what we see on that map. Today and into the near future, the Tesla Model S is much more versatile for long distance driving. Try driving an H2 car to Grand Canyon National Park and refueling it there, as many Model S drivers have done. Who wants a "long distance" car that's stuck inside California? Even inside California, there's no near-term H2 coverage for Highway 395 along the east side of the state, a frequent destination for SoCal people, whereas Tesla Motors has plans for Superchargers in Bishop and Ridgecrest.

For most folks who want to cut their fossil fuel consumption while still having the ability to drive long distances and re-fuel within 5 minutes virtually anywhere, I think PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) offer a much better value proposition than H2. Another alternative is the "hybrid garage" for multi-car folks, i.e., owning both a BEV and a hybrid or pure ICE.

This isn't to say that H2 won't gain traction in the future. I'm happy to see California testing the waters by giving H2 a push, even as I wish that funds were being allocated to a well-planned DC fast charging network for BEVs. Overall, though, it's hard for me to see today's "innovators" going for H2 when BEVs are so much further along. I can't see anyone trading a Model S for an H2 car!

 

[TomT]

Which is what we have done...

Another alternative is the "hybrid garage" for multi-car folks, i.e., owning both a BEV and a hybrid or pure ICE.

 

[TonyWilliams]

What's rediculous is the $100M eVgo settlement which is only going to install 200 "Freedom Stations". These Freedom Stations only have a single CHAdeMO plug and a single 30A J1772 plug. What a boondoggle. These Freedom Stations should have been stubbed out for at least 2-3 QC stations...

They are ready for a second DC charger, and that will be the Frankenplug GM/German Auto Makers SAE CCS Combo1.

200 will be installed concurrent with CHAdeMO in four years.

 

[AndyH]

WWED (What Would Elon Do?) - Tesla delivered CARS before installing supercharge stations, right?

Easy to do when you can charge at home in any garage.

Yes, provided one has a garage (~60% of Americans - even the California variety - don't), or electricity in the garage. It's still not a slam-dunk in the USA, or even in California. Essentially what Hyundai's doing this year is delivering vehicles into areas AFTER the 5-minute recharge infrastructure is in the ground - and that's the starting condition before the push to expand the infrastructure begins. Yes, home recharging is useful for drivers, but it's only known to ~150,000 drivers in the world. The other >1 billion vehicles on the streets cannot refuel at home, and their owners don't even consider that to be important.

Let me know when I can buy a home H2 fueling station for $1-2000 for my FCEV and install it in my garage. All you've linked to are PR bits of vaporware.

I agree with you on price, but not on your assessment that it's "PR...vaporware". This thread already contains - and I've linked them multiple times - electrolyzers in use in the real world. Again - they're being used all over the world in labs generating gas for chromatography, they're used in both the US and all over Europe refueling H2 vehicles, they're used for stationary storage (like the CHP units I linked up thread that supplies electricity, hot water, and H2 fuel to Japanese homes. Similar units are in use in Germany as well). While I understand that some here don't like this project, repeating debunked beliefs is probably best left to forums at Fox News.

 

[abasile]

Easy to do when you can charge at home in any garage.

Yes, provided one has a garage (~60% of Americans - even the California variety - don't), or electricity in the garage.

I don't have a garage, but weather-rated EVSEs aren't hard to find. As a bonus, because my EVSE is outdoors, it's easy for me to share it in PlugShare, a very cheap way of helping to fill a gap in public charging infrastructure.

I do agree that H2 could work better than a BEV for some apartment and condo dwellers who aren't able to have a dedicated parking spot for charging at home or work. For many potential BEV owners, this could be solved relatively inexpensively by increasing the availability of workplace charging and curbside EVSEs coupled with EV-only parking spots. This is also the reason for recent California legislation to remove HOA roadblocks to condo owners who want to install their own EVSEs. Even then, I admit that having H2 as an option could be good for some environmentally-conscious urban dwellers.

 

[GRA]

I have become so used to NOT going to a gas station that FCV feel like a step backward to me. It's been 3 months since I went to a gas station, just went this weekend to get some gasoline for a trip to the Sierra. Not expecting a hydrogen refueling station in Kennedy Meadows or Lone Pine any time soon so I don't think a FCV would be of much use to me.

Yes, for those who have PEVs now, not being able to recharge/refuel at home may be seen as a step backwards. PHFCEVs will solve that. For the other 99.4% of the driving public who don't have a PEV it will be a non-issue.

You also won't find a QC, not even a Supercharger, anywhere on the eastern slope of the Sierra south of Tahoe yet, 3.5 years after the first car equipped for QC was available, so no BEV is of any practical use to you for that trip either (although Tesla shows two SCs on 395, possibly in Inyokern and Bishop, by the end of this year, to allow people to get from SoCal to Mammoth). But a PHEV like the Volt would be excellent.

OTOH, I could at least get to Lee Vining non-stop from my place in the East Bay driving a FCEV, using either Hayward or San Ramon when they open. Probably couldn't get home yet, though. An H2 fueling station in Manteca or better yet Oakdale would allow me to make the round trip from there to Tuolumne Meadows, at least; if it's in Groveland I could probably do the roundtrip to Mammoth. Another in Lee Vining and one more in Lone Pine or Inyokern and the whole of 395 from Yosemite south would be covered (and north to Tahoe as long as you fuel up in Lee Vining), then you can start infilling with stations in Topaz Lake, Bridgeport, June Lake, Mammoth, Tom's Place, Bishop, Big Pine, Independence, Olancha, the same place gas stations are now. Bridgeport, Mammoth and Bishop (or Big Pine, depending on whether the earlier station was at Lone Pine or Inyokern) would be the first priorities of the second round.

 

[GRA]

WWED (What Would Elon Do?) - Tesla delivered CARS before installing supercharge stations, right?

Easy to do when you can charge at home in any garage.

Let me know when I can buy a home H2 fueling station for $1-2000 for my FCEV and install it in my garage. All you've linked to are PR bits of vaporware.

Too bad EVs have not had the same QC support.

So let's see, the most recent grant was $50M for 28 stations or about $1.8M / station.

How many QC stations would that build? It's been estimated that it costs Tesla about $200k per SuperCharger location (with 6 plugs). Cost would probably be similar for 6 Nissan CHAdeMO stations at a single location.

Could you imagine how much better the LEAF would sell if there was 28 well positioned charging hot spots with even just 3 CHAdeMO plugs per location in California instead of stations being scattered about haphazardly?

While I agree with you that installing QCs singly is a joke, the LEAF won't be a whole lot better if there are more QCs. It and all the other sub-100 mile BEVs are still too short-ranged to take full advantage of better QC deployment. To use Brad Berman's categories, an effective QC network lifts them from 'Just Local' (Smart/iMiEV) or 'Just Local Plus' (all other sub-100 mile BEVs) to at best 'Regional'. That's certainly a useful improvement, but not a whole lot better - they're still not cars to take on road trips (nor, IMO, is a Tesla, although it comes a lot closer). BEVs will need either shorter recharging times or ICE comparable range in all conditions before they will be good road trip cars - I consider Tesla S60s "Regional Plus' , S85s 'Road Trip Minus', to expand on Berman's categories.

 

[GRA]

For H2 cars to become attractive as ICE replacements in California, there will need to be far more H2 stations than what we see on that map. Today and into the near future, the Tesla Model S is much more versatile for long distance driving. Try driving an H2 car to Grand Canyon National Park and refueling it there, as many Model S drivers have done. Who wants a "long distance" car that's stuck inside California? Even inside California, there's no near-term H2 coverage for Highway 395 along the east side of the state, a frequent destination for SoCal people, whereas Tesla Motors has plans for Superchargers in Bishop and Ridgecrest.

For most folks who want to cut their fossil fuel consumption while still having the ability to drive long distances and re-fuel within 5 minutes virtually anywhere, I think PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) offer a much better value proposition than H2. Another alternative is the "hybrid garage" for multi-car folks, i.e., owning both a BEV and a hybrid or pure ICE.

This isn't to say that H2 won't gain traction in the future. I'm happy to see California testing the waters by giving H2 a push, even as I wish that funds were being allocated to a well-planned DC fast charging network for BEVs. Overall, though, it's hard for me to see today's "innovators" going for H2 when BEVs are so much further along. I can't see anyone trading a Model S for an H2 car!

Agree with pretty much all of the above (see my 2 preceding posts). To expand on your question, who wants a long-distance car that's limited to routes within reach of an SC, unless you want to spend an inordinate amount of your time waiting for it to charge in RV parks and similar out of the way spots you'd never, ever spend time in if you weren't forced to? For those of us who think that way, we'll keep our ICEs or else go PHEVs for road trips for the moment, until the supporting infrastructure for BEVs and FCEVs meets our needs and prices come down to levels that the middle class can afford. I've been saying for a couple of years now that the Volt is a Tesla for the middle class, but available in 2011 instead of 2017 (if not later).

FCEVs are about at the stage where Tesla was just prior to the introduction of the Roadster, and about as expensive. BEVs have about a 5 year head start over FCEVs to achieve comparable-to-ICE performance and price, but at the moment FCEVs are improving faster, so we'll see which one wins or whether they both do. For my particular situation, which is a single car that can be used for all needs but with priority to road trips, and where home recharging isn't an option, the FCEV wins hands down at the moment over the best BEV, even though I can afford neither. But that will change.

 

[walterbays]

Yes, provided one has a garage (~60% of Americans - even the California variety - don't), or electricity in the garage.

Without home distributed hydrogen generation you're back to Bossel's 23% efficiency for FCEV's relying on public fueling infrastructure. http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=367225#p367225 Or at best 36% efficiency if all the recent improvements are commercially viable in the near term. Which compares poorly with a BEV's 69% efficiency. A publicly fueled FCEV will likely be much more expensive than a gasoline ICE, run on more expensive fuel, deliver comparable range, have extremely limited refueling locations within the metro area, and have virtually no refueling options for road trips. Not many people would choose that over a Prius.

A home fueled FCEV, if the solar hydrogen stations were inexpensively available, would be an intriguing alternative to a BEV or PHEV. Around town it could be as good as a BEV, and on road trips within range of the fueling infrastructure it could be nearly as good as a PHEV - certainly no worse than a BEV.

A filling station wouldn't want to have one of those small home solar hydrogen stations and have to put up an "Out of Fuel" sign after one or two cars filled up each day. They'd need deliveries with all the losses that entails, or they'd need to produce their hydrogen locally from natural gas (or gasoline?). Although it would be much more efficient to simply burn the natural gas directly in cars, that might just be the bridge necessary to transition to hydrogen. First, get cheap home solar hydrogen stations, and get enough cars on the road to support a public infrastructure. Next, get enough natural gas based hydrogen stations to make an FCEV feasible for apartment residents. Next, get many more FCEV's on the road. Finally, replace those natural gas hydrogen stations with something more renewable. E.g., maybe a shopping center's entire roof and parking lot could be covered with solar panels to power the center and produce enough hydrogen for a public fueling station, possibly supplemented as needed with occasional truck delivery and/or natural gas production.

 

[GRA]

For an exhaustively stated anti-fuel-cell analysis with respect to the California CEC awards for H2 fueling stations and particularly stations using SMR, re GHGs, energy and economics as posted in another topic by MNL member mbender, see

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/20/fuel-cell-vehicle-ghg-emissions/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[GRA]

From ABG:

"First hydrogen Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell CUVs arrive in California":

http://green.autoblog.com/2014/05/21/hyundai-tucson-fuel-cell-arrive-california/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Retail availability "within the next several weeks".

 

[abasile]

To expand on your question, who wants a long-distance car that's limited to routes within reach of an SC, unless you want to spend an inordinate amount of your time waiting for it to charge in RV parks and similar out of the way spots you'd never, ever spend time in if you weren't forced to?

This is a very valid point. As long as it's not too frequent, having some additional, en-route charging time isn't all that bad, particularly when one has the pleasure of driving a car as nice as the Tesla S and avoiding gas stations for daily driving. Using places like RV parks is better than not being able to make the trip at all, as would likely be the case with a hydrogen-fueled vehicle.

I do agree that the Tesla S will remain ill-suited to certain drives, such as the Alaska Highway, for years to come. While the functionality of the Tesla S is quite good for a vehicle that does not take gasoline or diesel, and is only getting better, it still has limits. Thankfully, as prices come down, there's a large addressable market for whom those limits aren't fatal.

 

[AndyH]

Yes, provided one has a garage (~60% of Americans - even the California variety - don't), or electricity in the garage.

Without home distributed hydrogen generation you're back to Bossel's 23% efficiency for FCEV's relying on public fueling infrastructure. <snip> Or at best 36% efficiency if all the recent improvements are commercially viable in the near term. Which compares poorly with a BEV's 69% efficiency. A publicly fueled FCEV will likely be much more expensive than a gasoline ICE, run on more expensive fuel, deliver comparable range, have extremely limited refueling locations within the metro area, and have virtually no refueling options for road trips. Not many people would choose that over a Prius.

A home fueled FCEV, if the solar hydrogen stations were inexpensively available, would be an intriguing alternative to a BEV or PHEV. Around town it could be as good as a BEV, and on road trips within range of the fueling infrastructure it could be nearly as good as a PHEV - certainly no worse than a BEV.

A filling station wouldn't want to have one of those small home solar hydrogen stations and have to put up an "Out of Fuel" sign after one or two cars filled up each day. They'd need deliveries with all the losses that entails, or they'd need to produce their hydrogen locally from natural gas (or gasoline?). Although it would be much more efficient to simply burn the natural gas directly in cars, that might just be the bridge necessary to transition to hydrogen. First, get cheap home solar hydrogen stations, and get enough cars on the road to support a public infrastructure. Next, get enough natural gas based hydrogen stations to make an FCEV feasible for apartment residents. Next, get many more FCEV's on the road. Finally, replace those natural gas hydrogen stations with something more renewable. E.g., maybe a shopping center's entire roof and parking lot could be covered with solar panels to power the center and produce enough hydrogen for a public fueling station, possibly supplemented as needed with occasional truck delivery and/or natural gas production.

We don't need to replace the natural gas H2 reformers - we just feed them biogas. Of course - expand PV and wind - but I suspect the next five years will be more eventful than some suspect.

When I put on my 'crystal ball hat', I don't expect the next 50 years to look like a linear extension of the past 50. The end of the fossil fuel age is a huge change and we're on the down-hill side of the bubble. I'm not a doomer and am not spending my time learning how to replace horse shoes but I do think that we will be forced to make our lives look different.

One of the situations I think is highly probable is a neighborhood/co-op type of refueling station. I don't see a DCFC or an H2 dispenser in every garage - I see a neighborhood scale PV/H2 storage/electric micro grid hub sort of situation. No, it won't happen this week or next. But whether we evolve into Reinventing Fire or TIR, we'll have micro-grids and real-time data visibility that will give us much more flexibility than our current 'gas station' model. It doesn't have to be in our garage (provided one has a garage) to be distributed.

Sorry - 2006 efficiency numbers and especially Bossel's piece are irrelevant in today's environment and will be less so in the near future. Today is a worst-case situation for electric vehicles - for these things to work we need to do much, much better than we are doing.

 

[WetEV]

- we just feed them biogas.

Not enough biogas. Best case is a dairy farm. Such a farm collects a lot of waste, far more than the average household, and can generate a lot of biogas. How much?

Given the gas production rate of the Penn State digester, a net daily biogas output of 40 cubic feet (1.2 m3) per cow, Pennsylvania diary farmers could produce 5 billion cubic feet (143 trillion m3) of biogas per year. That is enough "manure power" to provide about 20 percent of all energy used on Pennsylvania diary farms.

http://extension.psu.edu/natural-resources/energy/waste-to-energy/resources/biogas/projects/biogas-from-manure" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

20%. So where does the other 80% come from? And for those that don't live on dairy farms, where does the biogas come from?

[edit, quote source added]

 

[AndyH]

- we just feed them biogas.

Not enough biogas. Best case is a dairy farm. Such a farm collects a lot of waste, far more than the average household, and can generate a lot of biogas. How much?

You keep saying this Wet but it's still incorrect. Biogas CAN be generated from manure but methanogenic bacteria digest all (in concert with other bacteria) biomass. One of the currently-operating SoCal H2 stations reforms landfill biogas exclusively. That's today - right now.

We waste about 40% of the food we buy in the USA. If we pull that food waste out of the landfill stream and send it to sewage treatment plants, we get more gas generation because now we have sludge as well. If we put the two waste streams together, we get more gas - and we get fertilizer.

There's nothing unique about dairy cattle - all animal manure is a feedstock (including humanure). How many pig and chicken farms do we have in the US, Wet? How many sewage treatment plants? How many landfills?

Dairy farm is not the best case and it's not even the majority source of digestible biomass.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz3PYyrnp38[/youtube]

http://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/review12/mt007_baxterclemmons_2012_o.pdf

Several South Carolina manufacturers already use landfill gas energy for
heat/power; several already have elected to convert their MHE inventory to
fuel cells; marrying the two could significantly increase fuel cell MHE market
penetration goals in the private sector

Here's a look at biogas production as part of water treatment:
http://sjostad.ivl.se/download/18.488d9cec137bbdebf94800055137/1350483759340/LWR_EX_11_35.pdf
http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/bits...ns_in_the_microbial_world_2002.pdf?sequence=1

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UafRz3QeO8[/youtube]

Given the gas production rate of the Penn State digester, a net daily biogas output of 40 cubic feet (1.2 m3) per cow, Pennsylvania diary farmers could produce 5 billion cubic feet (143 trillion m3) of biogas per year. That is enough "manure power" to provide about 20 percent of all energy used on Pennsylvania diary farms.

20%. So where does the other 80% come from? And for those that don't live on dairy farms, where does the biogas come from?

Hmmm...maybe Midwest farmers are just better with manure than the ones in PA. Farmers are getting CHP benefits - warm barns, warm digesters, 100% of electricity, and surplus to sell.

http://www.mnproject.org/pdf/Haubyrptsummary.pdf

A 135-kilowatt engine-generator set is fueled with methane captured from the digester. The hot water to heat the digester is recovered from the engine-generator's cooling jacket. Barn floor space is also heated with the recovered heat. The digested effluent, odor reduced, flows to a lined storage pond where it is kept until it can be injected or broadcast spread on fields for crop production...Approximately 70,000 cubic feet/day of biogas is used by the engine-generator; the rest is currently flared.

Since the expansion of the milking herd size from 425 to about 750 cows in the summer of 2000, the digester has been producing enough electricity to provide all the electric needs on-farm, plus enough surplus electricity to power about 75 additional homes.

A stationary fuel cell would use the gas about twice as efficiently as the diesel generator and still provide hot water.

Germany towns are doing similar things - local heat and power generation with excess gas and electricity feeding their respective grids. Those Germans are much smarter than Americans, I guess...

http://hestiahomebiogas.com/ (Hestia's in the NW - maybe chat with their engineers?)
http://solarcities.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-build-solar-cities-hdpe-bio.html (Or maybe the PhD engineers here?)
https://www.facebook.com/thculhane/posts/10154111866030551 (Ditto.)
http://www.clarke-energy.com/gas-type/biogas/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.wastefullthoughts.com/2014/05/industry-indigestion/

I have a set of Hestia digester plans, but will more likely use a three-IBC tote digester developed by the Solar Cities crew. I guess since I would be an idiot to ignore all of you smart people, I should just invest in a CNG car - they burn biogas and are cleaner running that fossil gas.



Then there's this Midwest nut-job - says biogas could only replace 21% of this nation's gasoline use.
http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com.../renewablefuels/news&vendorReference=0702BAC3

"Taking all feedstocks into account, the U.S. can replace 51% of fossil transportation fuel through biogas, or 77 billion gasoline gallons equivalent," each year, Schuppenhauer said. Of that feedstock mix, 49.93% is energy crops, 30.29% is crop residues, 6.01% is manure and the rest, 13.76% is made up of landfills, organic MSW, and other sources.

You guys rock - thanks for saving me from all this foolishness. I'm going to head out right now and search for some 'pure' gasoline because 20% just isn't worth it. :roll:

 

[Stoaty]

Given the gas production rate of the Penn State digester, a net daily biogas output of 40 cubic feet (1.2 m3) per cow, Pennsylvania diary farmers could produce 5 billion cubic feet (143 trillion m3) of biogas per year. That is enough "manure power" to provide about 20 percent of all energy used on Pennsylvania diary farms.

20%. So where does the other 80% come from? And for those that don't live on dairy farms, where does the biogas come from?

Damn, Wet - you got me. I guess we could only make 20% of our hydrogen from biogas. Not even worth it, is it? :roll:

Note that the manure power didn't provide 20% of hydrogen needed, it provided 20% of the energy used on Pennsylvania dairy farms. If you aren't a dairy farmer, you are out of luck.

 

[AndyH]

Note that the manure power didn't provide 20% of hydrogen needed, it provided 20% of the energy used on Pennsylvania dairy farms. If you aren't a dairy farmer, you are out of luck.

We crossed in editing. Don't get too worked up about the dairy BS - PA dairy farmers apparently need help from the Midwest...or India...or China... Besides, you didn't get suckered in by the citeless quote, did you?

DTNProgressiveFarmer

Schuppenhauer said the U.S. can replace 21% of gasoline consumed with CNG from crop residues at a $2 per gasoline gallon equivalent each year.

Too bad fuel cells will never work - if we used this gas in a fuel cell instead of burning it we could double this percentage. Sigh - oh well.

 

[DaveEV]

While I agree with you that installing QCs singly is a joke, the LEAF won't be a whole lot better if there are more QCs. It and all the other sub-100 mile BEVs are still too short-ranged to take full advantage of better QC deployment. To use Brad Berman's categories, an effective QC network lifts them from 'Just Local' (Smart/iMiEV) or 'Just Local Plus' (all other sub-100 mile BEVs) to at best 'Regional'.

See, but < 100 mi EVs don't need to be long-range. Regional is fine - that's where the vast majority of miles are driven. Keep a PHEV for those long road trips.

That's certainly a useful improvement, but not a whole lot better - they're still not cars to take on road trips (nor, IMO, is a Tesla, although it comes a lot closer). BEVs will need either shorter recharging times or ICE comparable range in all conditions before they will be good road trip cars - I consider Tesla S60s "Regional Plus' , S85s 'Road Trip Minus', to expand on Berman's categories.

"Perfection is the enemy of good". I think that Tesla has already shown that their EVs made perfectly fine road-trip vehicles. Sure, you can't go just anywhere with decent recharge times yet, but others have shown that you can certainly take the lesser traveled route and still get your "road trip". If you are going to apply the same criteria here, H2 vehicles will never get there, either. Better stick with the same old ICE.

A home fueled FCEV, if the solar hydrogen stations were inexpensively available, would be an intriguing alternative to a BEV or PHEV. Around town it could be as good as a BEV, and on road trips within range of the fueling infrastructure it could be nearly as good as a PHEV - certainly no worse than a BEV.

How about a plug-in FCEV? That's one H2 vehicle I could get behind. Then you have the best of both worlds (EV when you want it, long-range when you need it and all with no tailpipe emissions). Problem, of course is cost of combining two very expensive powertrains, one of which would be rarely used.

For an exhaustively stated anti-fuel-cell analysis with respect to the California CEC awards for H2 fueling stations and particularly staions using SMR, re GHGs, energy and economics as posted in another topic by MNL member mbender, see http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/20/fuel-cell-vehicle-ghg-emissions/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Oh snap.

Simply put, while the fact is incontrovertible that FirstElement Fuel Inc., stands to gain $27.6 million from public funds, under the most basic forensic examination the academic advice received by the CEC to support that outcome does not hold up.
Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/20/fuel-cell-vehicle-ghg-emissions/#7Utt7XuF1ceKrtPX.99" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Schuppenhauer said the U.S. can replace 21% of gasoline consumed with CNG from crop residues at a $2 per gasoline gallon equivalent each year.

Too bad fuel cells will never work - if we used this gas in a fuel cell instead of burning it we could double this percentage. Sigh - oh well.

Or we could simply feed that biogas into combined cycle generation plants and reduce the amount of coal we burn.

 

[AndyH]

While I agree with you that installing QCs singly is a joke, the LEAF won't be a whole lot better if there are more QCs. It and all the other sub-100 mile BEVs are still too short-ranged to take full advantage of better QC deployment. To use Brad Berman's categories, an effective QC network lifts them from 'Just Local' (Smart/iMiEV) or 'Just Local Plus' (all other sub-100 mile BEVs) to at best 'Regional'.

See, but < 100 mi EVs don't need to be long-range. Regional is fine - that's where the vast majority of miles are driven. Keep a PHEV for those long road trips.

PHEV? How do we get off fossil fuel in your plan?

That's certainly a useful improvement, but not a whole lot better - they're still not cars to take on road trips (nor, IMO, is a Tesla, although it comes a lot closer). BEVs will need either shorter recharging times or ICE comparable range in all conditions before they will be good road trip cars - I consider Tesla S60s "Regional Plus' , S85s 'Road Trip Minus', to expand on Berman's categories.

"Perfection is the enemy of good". I think that Tesla has already shown that their EVs made perfectly fine road-trip vehicles. Sure, you can't go just anywhere with decent recharge times yet, but others have shown that you can certainly take the lesser traveled route and still get your "road trip". If you are going to apply the same criteria here, H2 vehicles will never get there, either. Better stick with the same old ICE.

Sorry, no. Can you see the circular denial here? "Don't waste money on H2 refueling." "FCEV will never work because there's no infrastructure." It was pretty hard to fast-charge those Roadsters the first year or so if I recall the complaining...

A home fueled FCEV, if the solar hydrogen stations were inexpensively available, would be an intriguing alternative to a BEV or PHEV. Around town it could be as good as a BEV, and on road trips within range of the fueling infrastructure it could be nearly as good as a PHEV - certainly no worse than a BEV.

How about a plug-in FCEV? That's one H2 vehicle I could get behind. Then you have the best of both worlds (EV when you want it, long-range when you need it and all with no tailpipe emissions). Problem, of course is cost of combining two very expensive powertrains, one of which would be rarely used.

There is no 'combining' here, because both a FCEV/FCHV and a PHFCEV have both a fuel cell stack and a battery. A fuel cell vehicle IS an EV. The only thing needed to make a FCEV into a PHFCEV is to add a plug is a charger. It would be like owning a Volt...without a gasoline tank and ICE...and without 'mandatory engine run events to keep the fuel system clean and lubricated'...and without a muffler or catalytic converter. And more seats...

Schuppenhauer said the U.S. can replace 21% of gasoline consumed with CNG from crop residues at a $2 per gasoline gallon equivalent each year.

Too bad fuel cells will never work - if we used this gas in a fuel cell instead of burning it we could double this percentage. Sigh - oh well.

Or we could simply feed that biogas into combined cycle generation plants and reduce the amount of coal we burn.

The info was posted to show how much gas we produce since some seem to think it's about as useful as cow flatulence. The point that led to that is that was the erroneous belief that gas reformers would have to be taken out of service if one wanted to make H2 from non-fossil sources. We're already feeding biogas into ICE, turbines, and fuel cells today to feed the electric grid.