Outcast_Searcher wrote:There's no reason hydrogen couldn't be produced lots of places. You're right -- just electricity and water can do it. However, to do it at scale takes a lot of power and that isn't cheap. It comes back to economics. Until fuel cells are CHEAP, the incentive to create a widely available and convenient public hydrogen supply doesn't exist. Until that happens, fuel cells are a non-starter (outside parts of CA where govt. provides more incentives than elsewhere in the US) since without convenient hydrogen, no economic fill-ups, and game over.
Yeah, I hear you. I haven't looked in a while: it's still the case that fuel cells are the main expense in a hydrogen car? Of course thermodynamics means hydrogen may always be more expensive in certain sized vehicles because electricity to hydrogen to liquid hydrogen back to electricity is so awfully inefficient compared to just electricity to battery to electricity again. But as we have seen, battery sizes in larger vehicles like long-haul heavy trucking and agricultural equipment is probably prohibitive. That's why I said in an emergency, they might even go down the hydrogen BURNING route - not that it's better for energy efficiency, but maybe it's cheaper to burn hydrogen (and waste more hydrogen) than to try and be more efficient with it if the fuel cell is vastly too expensive? But 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. It's all more expensive than oil. For now.
One thing though -- if the electricity to crack the water to produce the hydrogen isn't green (solar, wind, etc), i.e. if it's done with natural gas, then that's not any better than charging BEV's with electricity produced from natural gas (or worse, coal).
Absolutely! Also, did you ever see the links to these studies?
NREL studies show we can convert about a third of our cars into EV's without requiring a single extra power plant if we turn all our baseload plants up to full and charge at night. This would mainly be light vehicles like family cars and light trucks. “For the United States as a whole, 84% of US cars, pickup trucks and SUVs could be supported by the existing infrastructure”
http://tinyurl.com/y6b6s7nx
This means that we can charge about a third of today's vehicles for "free" on today's electricity grid without building a single new power plant. Another study confirms that "the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States." Technology Review August 2013 http://tinyurl.com/y3qvtv5k
To me, as you say, this is all technically viable now. The remaining big item is for the tech. to get good enough to make things like fuel cells and BEV's truly as good or better than ICE's or HEV's in terms of economics. I think it's just a matter of time. There will be a transition period, even when the economics is clearly favoring green tech, since ICE's don't suddenly become worthless (despite bizarre Musk claims), though their resale value could diminish significantly.
Yeah, and who knows? Maybe we'll end up with some niche e-diesel aka "Blue Crude" trucking sectors while most light vehicles go electric. Some already think e-diesel could be economically viable.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/synthetic-diesel/
Of course, the doomers will object that since it's not all economic today, it "can't happen", it "won't work", etc. No one rational ever claimed a major transition like changing the bulk of the global vehicle fleet could happen over night. Huge physical and economic constraints must be dealt with to mostly transition such a huge fleet of vehicles.
But some things CAN and historically HAVE happened 'overnight.' Well, in a decade anyway. France went from 8% nuclear to 3/4 nuclear in a decade. They were burning OIL for electricity when the 70's oil crisis hit, and without large fossil fuel reserves went nuclear, big time. At one point they were building 15 reactors a year. (The other quarter of their grid is hydro.) I guess a nation just has to want it bad enough. Anyway, it's interesting to note that Dr James Hansen has calculated that the world needs to build 115 GW of reactors a year to clean up electricity by 2050 for a world of 10 billion people. On a reactors / GDP basis that is slower than the French build out rate. In other words, if we get the political will we know it is technically viable to clean up electricity fast enough because one nation has already done it.
But oil? A third of vehicles would charge on that grid, as per the studies above. That's a whole THIRD done and dusted!
So we 'just' have to replace 66% of our oil. If Big Oil decided to get into e-diesel, and this paper is correct, then e-diesel is competitive and the cost of building the new nuclear reactors for heavy vehicles is already included in the money we are already paying Big oil.
Clever city planning and public transit and New Urban programs could reduce the amount of transport energy we use per capita, but I'm not counting on it. If we got serious, I can see us easily building a standardised reactor fleet of 115 GW a year (which the French already beat) and the extra reactors required to charge all the cars and crack all the e-diesel we need to replace 66% of our oil. The total is probably between 150 GW and 160 GW a year. It seems doable.
But then, you never know. In 2016 the world voted for both Brexit and Trump.