Zythryn said:
GRA, I don't believe anyone here has said hydrogen research should stop, or that it has no applications.
Most here, myself included, feel hydrogen for the light vehicle fleet is foolish.
Andy further stokes the fire by grouping others who don't agree with him and calling them the "give me battery or give me death" crew.
This is of course, silly. Any of us would like to see alternatives that work.
What many of us hate seeing is for the Fuel Cell industry guiding policy in CA and giving a disproportionate amount of funds to FCEVs.
This not only gives lousy return on investment, it slows the adoption of other alternatives.
Can you imagine how many CHAdeMO chargers 46 Million could buy?
You could develope a much better working quick charge network and distribute it throughout CA for that.
Instead we will see that money used to build 46 stations to support 2-3 thousand cars over the next three years.
If that isn't a boondoggle I don't know what is.
I don't see it as a boondoggle, , nor do I see it impeding the roll-out of CHAdeMO or CCS. I've seen no indication of any slowdown in government funding or research for QC infrastructure or battery research due to money being diverted to fuel cells and H2; they have both been funded - I don't post battery or related research government grant awards in this thread, but they continue in the tens or hundreds of millions every year, both state and federal.
If we've seen one thing so far with the rollout of pay at site QCs, it's that there doesn't appear to be a business case for them absent government subsidies, and I suspect the pay up front model that Tesla uses is not viable once you start talking about mass market-priced cars. Of course, CHAdeMO has been deployed incredibly badly, but I don't think that's the major problem preventing pay at site QC from being a viable business.
OTOH, as I've said many times we
know that the gas station 'pay at the pump' retail business model works, and (provided they can get the price of renewably-produced H2 down to compete with gas, which is the determining factor in the success of _all_ fossil fuel competitors absent serious prohibitions on fossil fuel use), H2 can piggyback onto that model with minimal problems. Everybody's situation is different, but whenever I see people extolling the advantages of home charging I think 'but the majority of the world's population is urban, and (as in my case) most of them don't own multiple cars that allow them to choose the car for the job, or live in a detached, single family home with a garage with convenient electric plugs that they own - when will affordable, universally usable BEVs be available, and how many years will it take to provide the necessary public infrastructure to support them'? Is there a profitable business model for it? And how much real estate will we continue to demand just to park/charge our cars?
Many here repeat claims that H2 is far too costly and will take far too long to build out the infrastructure. I pointed out upthread that we were able to go from 1 gas station in the U.S. to well over one hundred thousand in a couple of decades, and unlike the case then we needn't start from scratch - much of the retail fueling real estate already exists, is in the right places and, thanks to people in the U.S. reducing their per-capita VMT plus better overall fleet mileage for the past decade or so, there's been a lot of excess capacity at gas stations causing many to close. H2 additions/conversions to those stations will be fairly straightforward, as is being demonstrated in California now, including the initial H2 fueling station in my city.
People who talk about the lower efficiency of H2 versus just using electricity to charge batteries have a valid point (I've provided links on research to reduce or eliminate that efficiency difference, but it's impossible to know at this stage if that will ever be achieved), and I think most of us agree that if you only need a local commuter/errand runner car, batteries are better (with the proviso that you have somewhere to charge it). However, Andy and I believe that efficiency without capability is irrelevant, and for a civilization that considers that a car has the capabilities of an ICE, which can be used near universally, trying to convince them that a much more limited capability is acceptable is a far harder task than providing them with a vehicle with the same capabilities as an ICE that uses a different energy source.
Maybe battery proponents will be correct, and the true, affordable breakthrough battery really is just around the corner, this time. I certainly hope so, and prospects are better than they ever have been before. But having lived with the extravagant claims of AE proponents since the late '80s and seen them repeatedly fall short, well, I may be a native Californian but when it comes to such forecasts of impending performance/price breakthroughs I'm from Missouri - Show Me. That holds true for batteries, fuel cells, and any other tech flavor of the week/month/year. Until we reach the point where we can all agree that tech X means we just don't need ICEs anymore, I think it's simple prudence to keep as many irons in the fire as look like having a reasonable chance of success.
In any case, regardless of what opinions anyone here may hold as to whether it's a waste of money or prudent insurance, the experiment with H2 LDVs is going forward, in Japan, Germany, the U.K., California and along the northeast corridor. I look forward to seeing the results, whatever they may be.
In the meantime, I'll just provide this Thomas Edison quote from Feb 1883, showing that the more things change the more they stay the same:
"The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies. The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame thing. ... Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery it brings out his latent capacity for lying. ... Scientifically, storage is all right, but, commercially, as absolute a failure as one can imagine."
Not too many years after saying that, Edison was himself making premature claims of having 'solved' the storage battery problem for electric cars, with his initially failed and ultimately improved but no breakthrough Nickel-Iron battery. I'm sure I could dig up similar quotes from fuel cell proponents and opponents over the past forty years or so, but can't be bothered.
