> The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.
Do you have actual knowledge of their motives? Or is this speculation, confidently stated as fact?
Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.
I work for an oil and gas company. It has been specifically stated by my company that they are seeking support for hydrogen as a fuel because it adds value to their gas reserves - natural gas is roughly 75% hydrogen on a molar basis.
The idea is to stimulate demand for "green-ish" hydrogen (that is by grid-connected electrolysis); once demand for the hydrogen is there, it can be supplied by blue hydrogen. The O&G companies aren't super keen on green hydrogen made by dedicated renewables off grid, and they LOVE the approach of "we'll start off with grey hydrogen then we'll move to blue and green in the future".
This is very specifically a strategy to increase the amount of natural gas that can move from resources to possible reserves to probable reserve to proven reserves. That's how you increase the value of your company, which is how you get a fat bonus as a CEO.
You don't get a fat bonus by telling the truth or being right.
Can you define your hydrogen colors for us? It sounds like you have something interesting to say, but I can’t parse what it is out of your company’s jargon.
There's also "white" which is naturally occurring pure hydrogen.
Mostly it's seen as being economically infeasible to extract, though there is one working well in the world, and some other potential sources that may be feasible to extract discovered recently.
But the big problem with hydrogen is that right now, the majority of the supply is grey/brown/black, which all emit CO2 to produce. Green is far more expensive, and the carbon capture needed for blue is also expensive and the methods of storage are dodgy.
The thing about green hydrogen is that it's more efficient to transmit and store electricity than convert it to hydrogen and distribute and store that, so it's basically just a worse way of utilizing green energy sources. The only reason hydrogen is at all economical is that grey/brown/black are cheap, and it's hard to see any path for green or blue to become competitive (and truly zero emissions for blue).
It's possible that we'll find reserves of white hydrogen and efficient ways to extract it, but that's purely speculative right now, while building renewable energy sources, electric distribution, and batteries can be done right now.
10% of power is lost to distribution anyway. Batteries can also lose 10%.
The issue with hydrogen isn't producing it, it's that it's an absolute nightmare to transport and store. Hydrogen can soak into metals, causing them to become brittle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement and it leaks if there's absolutely any chance of it possibly leaking (thanks to the small molecules, and its tendancy to cause everything it touches to go brittle), and can cause a very big bang if it does leak.
It might work well for planes (where power to weight is at an absolute premium) but for cars and buses the weight of a bigger but tamer battery just makes more sense. It's absolutely a good rocket fuel.
The issue isn't that it can't be green. The issue is that it's rocket fuel - high performance but dangerous and high maintenance. Putting rocket fuel in a bus is just dumb.
But then you have even more losses when you convert the hydrogen back to energy.
The formula is that 55kW of electricity used to generate hydrogen from water and then converted back to electricity in a gas turbine or fuel cell results in 15kW of energy.
That's a lot more than 20%.
Compare that to just storing the 55kW in batteries and using them to spin an electric engine. "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.
> "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.
Or when batteries are really expensive and global production and/or geopolitics prevents a global power grid.
Both were the case 15 years ago (and geopolitics still prevents a global power grid today, but metal production has increased and is now sufficient).
Hydrogen wasn't entirely stupid back then; even though PV was more expensive than today, the trends were already clear.
Now? I think hydrogen is suboptimal for most users. But I wouldn't bet against the idea of someone, somewhere, likely in the arctic or antarctic circles, deciding that they really do need multiple months of energy storage, and for those specific weird edge cases I think it's at least possible they might decide a cryogenic liquid hydrogen tank the size of the space shuttle external tank, refuelled every summer by a comically large PV array that works 24 hours in some days, is less silly than 3 gigawatt-hours of batteries.
That's calculated in the total losses. You either need to compress it or freeze it. Usually for vehicles it's compressed, for long term storage or transfer it could be either.
Frequently the green energy used to split water is "surplus" energy. For example the bulk of offshore wind energy happens between 10pm and 2am when energy demand is at its lowest. That energy goes to waste if not stored in hydrogen. Hence, efficiency is irrelevant.
Sure, but as long as we are burning natural gas, hydrogen is a bonus. Either use it or let it be wasted.
Using it to power public transportation is a great idea, if only we can get some better hydrogen fueling infrastructure. It should have a fair shake against electrics as electric vehicle power generation is using a lot of natural gas stations to charge up those cars !
Red hydrogen: produce hydrogen from a thermochemical reaction between water, iodine, and sulfur at a high temperature, around 900°C, using the thermal energy from a nuclear reactor.
"Blue hydrogen" is commonly used for hydrogen produced from natural gas. If it is produced by steam reforming (most common), then the associated CO2 emissions are worse than if you just burn the natural gas directly.
"Green hydrogen" is usually hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis, using electricity from non-CO2 source, e.g. wind or electricity.
Right, if you "oops" don't have working capture because it's never been practical you're making "Blue" hydrogen in which your customers can tell everybody they're environmentally friendly but due to a technical hitch you are emitting lots of CO2. Maybe you can agree a token $1B fine, of course offset against the taxes you were already going to pay, and everybody carries on as before. Hooray for your profitable corporation and oops, too bad for the stupid humans who live on the gradually less inhabitable planet you're destroying.
This would only be really dumb if the corporation was owned by humans. Huh.
Green hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from a renevable source. (Imagine solar panels which are directly connected to an electrolysis plant.)
“Green-ish” hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from the grid. (And thus as green as your grid is.)
> natural gas is roughly 75% hydrogen on a molar basis
I thought it was methane. Wouldn't that be 80% hydrogen on a molar basis? (Or... 67%, if we're counting moles of molecular hydrogen?) Is the discrepancy coming from impurities, or different types of fuel, or what?
Natural gas is a mixture of methane and heavier hydrocarbons, the composition varies by region, depending largely on how the LPGs (propane and butane) are used. Ethane usually ends up in natural gas, unless there is a petrochemical complex nearby.
So, 80% is a theoretical maximum, which is never achieved in practice. 75% hydrogen looks pretty right.
I'm still curious about the measurement "on a molar basis". If you have 20 moles of methane, and you process that to separate out the carbon, you'll end up with 20 moles of some form of carbon and 40 moles of hydrogen gas, right?
I think that "on a molar basis" is there to clarify that it's counting by number of atoms rather than grams. On a gram-for-gram basis, methane is ~75% carbon.
"Molar" refers to a number of elementary entities, which could be atoms or molecules or w/e. So yes, if you are counting moles of H2 gas, but not if you are counting atoms...
But hydrogen gas is the only thing you can get from that reaction. There is a theoretical construct of monatomic hydrogen, also a gas, but you're guaranteed to get molecular hydrogen instead. And there will only be 40 moles of it. There isn't a way for you to end up with 80 moles of hydrogen product.
I'm the original commenter, and quite simply you're right and I slipped up. It's not really using the terminology correctly for me to say "natural gas is ~75% hydrogen on a molar basis".
Whenever talking about hydrogen's physical properties etc on a molar basis, we'd be talking about H2. So if you had a mole of methane (CH4) we'd say you could make two moles of hydrogen (H2) out of it.
My point was really just that the gas companies' reserves of natural gas mean that they'll do anything to try to stimulate demand for blue/grey hydrogen, because their reserves of natural gas are reserves of hydrogen.
Let's go back to your opening comment which was something like "I thought methane was 80% hydrogen on a molar basis". Methane does not contain H2 molecules, it contains 4 atoms of hydrogen. Plus one atom of carbon, which would indeed make it 80% hydrogen on a molar basis.
If that does not convince you: note also that atomic carbon is also a very unstable, and will auto polymerize into one of its allotropes (eg. C60 - buckyballs). And yet we count carbon by the atom.
The current US administrations moves against renewables should make you realize how powerful the oil gas lobby is. They got some pushback from local politicians so were slowed down but the way they started they were looking to end all wind and solar for a false promise of nuclear tomorrow.
The last decades' worth of German administrations (and EU countries in general) removed nuclear on the promise of a cheap grid made from green hydrogen and renewables. What they delivered was a EU grid dependent on imported natural gas and a record high ~€400 billions energy subsidies.
It is hard to see whose promise of a bright future seems most realistic.
Sweden was also on the same german track, shutdown some of the nuclear fleet, but is now going back and forth on the issue. They are also investing in new natural gas fueled thermal plants, with similar "future" plans of using green hydrogen.
The national debate in Sweden is also similar. The right is arguing that the future is nuclear, and the left is arguing that green hydrogen is the future and natural gas is the stepping stone to get there. It is a miniature copy of the general energy discussion in EU.
except that there are more than two possibilities, but the debate is reduced to artificial Left and Right -- a miniature copy of the American political duopoly
That is correct, and I would add that the debate is also addressing the wrong questions. We should ask what role government should have in providing reliable and steady energy grid, what the values such grid provide to society, and how the costs should be distributed between market forces and taxes.
It is the failure to define what people actually want from the grid that results in people creating a religion behind power production, believing in a promise of a future that we have never seen.
Germany is not unique either. Both France and Belgium are struggling with their inventory of nuclear power plants: many are operating near or past their designed lifespans, so maintenance is getting more expensive but they can't be decommissioned because there are no replacement plants (and due to electric transportation, demand is only going up). Germany definitely made the wrong choice, but at least they were aware enough to make an explicit choice. Other European countries have basically been burying their head in the sand on the same issue.
As of today, France is looking to start construction on six new plants but that still means the plants likely won't be in operation until 2040. And Belgium hasn't even started the planning phase. That's 15 more years of operating nuclear power plants designed in the mid 1900s.
Powerful is correct. It's strange to me the number of people on this site who think we should just throw away trillions of dollars. We should use natural gas to make renewable dirt cheap, just that would offset any externalities you can make up.
We are already on the path to have the grid converted to majority green energy over the next decade. Solar is by far the largest of New deployments and growing annually.
Grid batteries are just starting to scale up.
These are cheaper than any other option by far, with the shortest payback period.
That could have been an argument for a suspicious individual but China has showed otherwise. China came late to the green transition and now they are ahead of anybody else. And they are big and not relatively rich.
You're being downvoted because you're wrong, but sadly about 20-30% of the population shares your views and this needs to be addressed.
The people telling you that green energy "can't happen" are precisely the same group of people that will lose the capital they've invested in non-green energy technologies.
That's it. That's the reason you believe this.
You've been told over and over, by very loud and very well funded people to not even bother trying to replace legacy non-renewable energy sources with renewable energy sources. One hundred percent of the funding for this messaging comes from non-renewable energy companies, their shareholders, employees, and others with vested interests.
None of these people have your personal interests at heart.
Interest such as "having a livable planet" or having... you know... energy that won't run out in like a hundred years because... drumroll... they're literally advocating for energy sources that are NOT renewable. Finite. Expiring. Running dry.
"Oil baron with crushing loan repayments says the remaining drops of crude must be pumped out, no other option for the world. News at 11."
Hydrogen is also a byproduct of some source of energy, it doesn’t just materialize.
The difference is batteries are vastly more efficient at storage and doing useful work with that stored energy. There’s use cases where that’s fine like rocketry, but efficiency or energy density is usually a dealbreaker.
Vastly more efficient at storing electricity. Vastly more expensive to construct, using rare materials. Have a Vastly shorter lifespan than a hydrogen tank and much lower energy density. Everything is a compromise
Many batteries actually last significantly longer than common hydrogen storage tanks, hydrogen embrittlement is a major issue. Type III and IV tanks have a life cycle of 10 years. https://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Storage-LCA.html
Hydrogen has also terrible volumetric energy density. It’s also really heavy until you scale to huge tanks.
Hydrogen's volumetric energy density is about as good as lithium-ion. The cost of replacing a hydrogen tank vs a lithium battery is absolutely massive. You also aren't considering the energy density lost in cold weather for batteries.
Almost the same in the short term requires you to liquify hydrogen and then use it immediately. Because the energy density rapidly goes to zero for any application with a moderately sized tank. On top of which you need a cryogenic tank, costing you even more volume.
Liquifying hydrogen also costs you another ~10-13 kWh /kg where Hydrogen only contains 33kWh if you want heat, but more like 10-15kWh/kg if you want to do useful work. So you’re roughly paying double the energy for the same amount of energy stored.
How expensive, big, and heavy would a hydrogen tank (farm) be if it had to supply a whole winter for, say, 1million people.
I ask because one of the bigger transition issues I see in Europe is load shifting from summer surplus to winter deficits, specifically for heating.
Why would you want to store enough energy to supply for a whole winter? Wind energy delivers most power during the winter and even solar contributes a bit. The actual amounts to store would be a fraction of that. Of course, that might be the one single good use of hydrogen as a means of storage, but way less storage is needed than most would think.
What the hell are you talking about, a. batteries weren't mentioned and b. hydrogen is on the periodic table and exists as an element, and can actually be found in its pure form.
Pure hydrogen is not found in meaningful quantities on earth.
There’s a huge demand for hydrogen in industry and it’s almost exclusively met with steam methane reforming there’s some methane pyrolysis and a little green hydrogen but not much. If people could just drill for it, they would happier do so as being so light it’s easy to separate out from other gasses.
> Pure hydrogen is not found in meaningful quantities on earth.
This is not necessarily true. A recent discovery in France could contain as much as 250 million metric tons of hydrogen (but that's a generous upper bound).
Given how hard and how long the fossil fuel industry has been fighting tooth and nail to suppress science, kill public and private projects, and fund bogus studies, all to avoid ever losing even a fraction of their ironclad control of the energy market, I think it's fair to deny them the benefit of the doubt at this point.
If they're saying or doing something that would stand in the way of or compete with the existing rise of renewable energy, even without any specific evidence, I believe it is fully justified to say they are doing it for selfish reasons that will harm literally every other human being on the planet.
It’s why we don’t have rail in the US like you see in Europe. At one point in time we had a ton of rail and streetcar networks but these groups destroyed it all because it was a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.
Pretty much all of them. At least in the west, less sure about the east.
France had 70000km of rail around ww1, now it has about 30000. The main (though not only) casualty was the rural narrow gauge lines ("local interest network") which got obliterated by car and low productivity (about 20000km progressively closed from about 1930 to 1960, a handful survive as tourist attractions).
One can extract hydrogen from fossil fuels. So if a hydrogen break through is coming, they already have a cheap source for the material.
Not really green though...
I remember natural gas vehicles (busses and cars, like the honda civic). You could actually fill up at home if you had natural gas, but the electricity just to compress the natural gas for the car cost as much or more than the compressed fuel in the car.
For hydrogen, it is even harder. take a look at cars running compressed hydrogen. I remember $17 for the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. I think it is even more expensive now.
Easier to burn CH4 than use energy to split out the H2, then compres it, then store it.
Dollar costs of physical things (pre tax) quite accurately measure how much effort it takes to produce/acquire that thing.
Hydrogen being more expensive than X quite stronly suggests that it is much more effort to get than X.
All well and good until you have producers burning (or otherwise using) the cheap, taxed fuel to produce the expensive, subsidized one while creating more net pollution in the process. It's hard to get this stuff right at the best of times.
"trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources" sounds very close to what op claims. For them, the goal is to get aboard, not to get to a destination.
Are you sure the hydrogen storage is still active? That page does say "This project has been operating autonomously since 2009" but the projects page on the same site lists the hydrogen village as lasting from 2008-2010 https://frontierpowersystems.ca/projects/. Frontier Power Systems is also a "wind-diesel" provider - so they certainly aren't separated from oil companies (though this doesn't automatically mean their intentions aren't genuinely to reduce fossil fuel usage as GP was saying, they even seem to be doing battery storage systems now).
Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.
Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.
It’s a rather old project (2009), so many articles covering it are defunct. Found some of the info:
“The purpose of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Wind-Hydrogen Village is to use excess wind energy along with hydrogen technologies to offer sustainable energy. Excess electricity produced by wind turbines on the island is being used to power a 300kW uni-polar electrolyzer.
A uni-polar electrolyzer uses alkaline liquids, rather than solid polymer, as its electrolyte. The electrolyzer can produce about 6kg of hydrogen per hour. The hydrogen is then stored as compressed gas in storage tanks that have a total capacity of about 500kg. The hydrogen is then used in the bi-fuel hydrogen/diesel genset to power the village when there is no wind.”
Not just to delay, but they're hope is that they'll be able to control it when it happens. Oil companies move fluids, using pipes and tankers. Hydrogen is a fluid. They want to keep doing what they've been doing. Electricity doesn't fit into their M.O.
Oil pipelines, no. Gas pipelines, yes. The effort to requalify existing gas pipelines for hydrogen use is well underway in Europe. There might be a need to run at lower pressure, depending on the type of steel, but leaks are not an issue.
Hydrogen embrittlement is a massive issue, I’d be interested to hear how this can be engineered around. My understanding is it requires more exotic materials than those used in any existing NG or oil pipelines. Everything I’ve seen claiming it’s viable to use existing infrastructure seems reasonable at first glance, but invariably contains a massive hand-wave or 2.
I think the obfuscation is that they are generally talking about stuffing small quantities of hydrogen into natural gas pipelines. Similar to alcohol in gasoline.
The existing infrastructure was originally built for town gas which is ~50% hydrogen, and run successfully for many decades as such. So this is mainly about checking out the more recently designed parts. My understanding is embrittlement is mainly a problem for storage tanks, which need to use high strength materials due to the enormous pressure -and ironically those materials are more susceptable.
Existing infrastructure is designed for & can be used for hydrocarbons with varying levels of hydrogen in their molecular structure; I don't believe there's an issue there. Most of the H2 in town gas is in the form of hydrocarbons, which are less reactive than pure H2, even if there's a relatively high percentage of H2 in the mix (as the H2 is strongly bound to the carbon). Embrittlement is definitely an issue for more than just storage tanks.
Leaks are an issue… hydrogen is a smaller molecule and leaks from natural gas pipes and there’s a lot of gas infrastructure in the ground in some countries e.g. in UK most houses have a connection
The only sense in which "electricity" could be said to be fluid is in its definition. There's no such physical quantity, it's just a vague term for a variety of phenomena.
It flows, you use fluid equations to describe it's state. I will grant that it flows in a different medium than molecular fluids. but that does not prevent it from being a fluid.
As for what is flowing, my understanding is that it is electrons in an em field. which if you think about it is almost the same thing that is flowing in a molecular fluid, only that has drag a bunch of protons around at the same time limiting performance.
The fluid analogy is ok for introducing the concept of electricity but it has some significant limitations, so one should grow out of it fairly quickly if you want a deeper understanding of the subject.
There's no "green revolution". Just different compromises and tradeoffs, and practical considerations for roll-out times (including for solar, wind, and batteries - no free lunch.
It seems to me like green fundamentalist see nothing but enemies and subterfuge everywhere. Hydrogen, biofuel, nuclear, switching from oil to natural gas where possible, the list goes on.
I don't have enough of an opinion to comment on anyone of them individually, but I notice a really striking pattern where every time the idea of alternative energy sources are brought up that are not wind or solar, whoever brings it up is accused of sabotaging the energy transition in some way or another.
I mean, read the current top sibling comment to yours. Someone who worked at an oil & gas company confirmed that this was their strategy.
Now, I don't think these people are sitting in their carved-out mountain lair, scheming to destroy the world; I'm sure they don't see themselves as villains. But they are making deliberate decisions to protect their business models and bottom line by adopting -- and, importantly, lobbying for -- technology that is polluting and emits greenhouse gases.
Sure are lots of HN software developers that confidently know everything about everything in this thread.
I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.
That's the problem. I often tell engineering interns that school gives them just enough information to be dangerous. This is doubly true for software developers.
this is the best answer and it's not the only way they do it, they've become extremely sophisticated saboteurs of anything energy related through pure marketing alone
Just not true. Lots of oil companies have a vested interest in renewables now. A lot of the infrastructure for offshore oil is being redeployed for offshore wind.
There's no "green revolution" coming, just the powers that be taxing us, normal citizens, to the hell and the back if we'd still want to hang on to our gasoline-powered cars, which taxing policies will for sure bring about the revolution of people choosing to not travel anymore, because too expensive. That's the revolution that they're now putting in place.
Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the techies in here) helping bring forward guys like Musk, they did that by purchasing and aggressively marketing for his vehicles, they've actually empowered him and brought him into his actual position of power.
" Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution"
well NO, contrary to popular belief. there is no such things because
1. Oil is scarce resource that not every country have
2. since not every country has, they must import it with expensive trade deficit meaning that Oil alternative or replacement is very much needed
since country like china,south korea and japan that has massive economy dependant on oil for their survival, hydrogen tech would come out of necessity but they are not because its not feasible
I think a lot of people miss the fact that China did not get to electric out of the blue it invested heavily in all these techs Hydrogen, Nuclear, Wind, Solar and batteries the cheapest and easiest to scale turned out to be Solar, Wind and then batteries.
Even today China is still building more hydrogen and nuclear plants than most of the world combined but those technologies have not scaled or gotten cheaper at the same rate as solar, wind and batteries so are not growing where as solar and wind are. China is close to reaching the point where it could start replacing its coal electricity with solar, wind and battery as it is cheaper.
Most of China’s solar and wind capacity is in its empty west where its people aren’t. They have a bit of transmission, but clearly there is a limit. Western cities like Lanzhou have really cleaned up though as a result. They are limited in how many people can live near renewable sources by water availability.
> if hydrogen is feasible in mass scale, trust me someone in Asia would already make it
That is a ridiculous proposition. Electric vehicles themselves were being pushed hard around the world before China saw the way the wind was blowing and overtook it.
"That is a ridiculous proposition. Electric vehicles themselves were being pushed hard around the world before China"
I never said they are first, I said they lead at the EV industry and usage, the amount of resource and how people use EV is gargantuan even compared to the west
Bet in the past tense? It seems they are moving further away from that position. There are also some domestic market issues for Toyota - Japan having the lowest voltage mains electricity in the world for example.
AC Transit (eg: East San Francisco Bay) performed a detailed 2 year study (July 2020 - June 2022) comparing newer Hydrogen Fuel Cell & Battery -powered buses to existing Diesel, Fuel Cell, & Hybrid -powered buses, 5 of each type. The key results are the Hydrogen Fuel Cells have significantly more expensive infrastructure, fuel, and maintenance costs than Battery. However, both technologies are still less reliable than Diesel.
The maintenance costs are only marginally higher per the report at $1.33 FCEB vs $1.15 BEB , $2.37 for Hybrids and $1.28 for Diesel (with additional public health costs for respiratory illnesses), the sample size(5x5) is too small to draw any meaningful conclusion on infrastructure costs or even reliability given the limited experience in operating anything not diesel.
Economics of hydrogen in CA are also complicated given our on-off approach to hydrogen infrastructure[2] for both personal and commercial vehicles but there is some progress on commercial side at least last year [1].
Hydrogen is not everyone but there are use cases for it.
The uptime (i.e. the refueling time) is an key factor [4]. Battery operated vehicles need a lot of downtime for charging thus you will need more vehicles for the same coverage. Fast charging can help but impacts battery life and thus TCO.
All green public transit are expensive. It is not a easy choice for administrators, should they improve coverage/ service frequency etc for their residents who need transit the the most or better air quality and less noise pollution for all of them.
Remember Fuel Cells are far cleaner for the air much more than BEV also, because it needs oxygen from the air FCs purify the air to do so. Kind of like having a big vacuum on the road in addition to not emitting direct pollutants[3]
[3] Ignoring tire dust, it is problem for all vehicles of course, that is independent of propulsion systems
[4] Even for personal vehicles it can be a decision factor when considering going green, as an owner of a Mirai with no easy access to EV charging stations I have benefited from being to refuel like a gar car.
If I'm reading that right the Battery Electric busses had the lowest maintenance costs? The need to charge is a potential issue, but at the same time busses do lots of low speed stop and go where battery systems are most efficient. As long as the bus has enough capacity for an entire day and can be recharged overnight it seems like an ideal solution, minus of course the up-front cost of the bus. Lower fuel costs, no noxious pollutants, less noise, lower maintenance, there is a lot to love.
An other option BEV busses give is hybrid trolleys, that way once a popular line gets fixed you can add overhead lines to it and later upgrade it to tram more easily.
It also means charge is a matter of having overhead lines which can be added as hoc (as overhead docking stations) to end-of-line stops, letting the bus juice up for some time before it runs the route back.
It is likely that new models had higher costs, including maintainers becoming familiar. Long-term, electric is unquestionably cheaper to fuel and maintain, assuming they are built to the same standards and scale as outgoing diesel models
I wonder about the added wear on roads that comes with so much added weight. That is the kind of cost that is easy to put in someone else's bucket until it impacts everyone. One of the roads near here was closed for a while putting a large amount of truck traffic on another road. It is impressive how quickly ruts have formed in a relatively short period of time from what I assume is a combination of increased traffic and the increased weight.
A typical diesel or natural gas city bus has a curb weight between 20,000 and 33,000 lbs[1]. An electric bus I found lists a curb weight of 28,000 lbs[2]. It doesn't seem like extra road wear is going to be a major issue.
Lowest short term maintenence cost. Until the battery is destroyed in a couple of years.
Charging a fleet of 100 buses overnight looks like a huge infrastructure issue to me. 100 charging ports, huge grid connection, substation etc. That is if the local grid even has capacity. Anyone who has tried to open a factory will know that is not always the case.
EV batteries have been performing much better than dying after just 700 cycles. Also, power is generally cheapest overnight when there is excess grid capacity. People with variable electricity pricing and battery banks make money by charging overnight and releasing power to the grid during peak hours. Commercial vehicles typically get more like 6,000 cycles out of a battery pack.
I think the case for using hydrogen today is pretty weak, but a lot of the details for why it's a bad choice are (as you say) exacerbated by the one-off deploys of the technology. If you were testing gas busses and needed to truck gasoline in just for your busses you would expect the numbers to get worse too.
My view is that if you want a clean alternative today you'd go with electric and also the tech seems worth continuing to develop for other applications. I also think that public transit doesn't seem like it plays to the strengths (such as they are) of hydrogen.
I get the impression they've had similar results in London. They've had ~20 hydrogen busses for a while but apparently are expensive like £500k per bus plus you need to find hydrogen.
On the other hand battery seems to be cracking along: "over 1,600 zero-emission buses currently in service, and TfL aims to have a fully zero-emission bus fleet by 2030, accelerating plans with increased government funding."
Only two years? They operated hydrogen buses from 2006 to 2010 and then got some more in 2011 and 2019. There are budget line items for new buses in 2023 and 2024 that I assume got bought
I'm not going to dispute your numbers with diesel versus EV reliability, but I have to think the simplicity of an EV drivetrain will win that battle in the next version or two.
The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.
idk these sound like very specific problems they had. The chargers had an availability of only 23% because of a recurring issue with the power modules failing. In a later volume they also again attribute a lot of unavailability to the same chargers:
> The BEB fleet operated at 66% availability with more than half of the total days related to retrofit of the charger cabling and programming by the OEM.
I guess you could say this is due to immature technology but honestly I don't see 75% of HPC chargers being offline for maintenance at any given time. This is probably just bad luck with a vendor.
If you look at the road calls the BEB is by far the most reliable one, causing one road call out of 45. It was also the cheapest per mile by a long stretch.
It’s hard to imagine it not. And also kudos and crazy respect for all the thousands of engineers that poured their work into making combustion engines as efficient and reliable as they are. A true marvel of humanity, and something to be respected even as we leave it behind.
Relative to EVs it’s not. But relative to ICE engines from 50 years ago it’s great. EVs are obviously going to take over ICE, my only point is that we shouldn’t discount all the work and ingenuity that went into ICE engines simply because a disruptive technology came about.
Based on personal experience my guess is that the unreliability would be in the battery not the drive train.
Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.
Batteries aren't unrepairable; you wouldn't open one up in the middle of the road to try fix it but at the bus depot with enough volume of battery electric vehicles, they'll have reason to hire repair technicians that can refurbish and repair batteries.
Obviously anything has a bunch of single points of failure, or catastrophic means of failure, but a battery isn't like "one engine". It's basically hundreds of little power modules wired in parallel, so an individual battery cell loss shouldn't bring down the whole pack.
So a battery pack should actually be heavily redundant ... assuming the pack has enough modules for a loss of vehicle to get to some charging station.
Limerick City in Ireland has electric double decker buses. They are dead quiet and it's a total treat to be a pedestrian without the buses passing by and blowing my ears off.
Back in 2003, President George W. Bush announced the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. At the time, people criticized the effort as an attempt by the oil industry to shift attention away from electric cars. The oil industry knew that hydrogen power wasn't going to be viable anytime soon, while electric cars were already a direct threat to their profits, so they pushed the US government towards hydrogen power.
Not to disparage the talented scientists and engineers working on hydrogen power, but now that 20 years have passed I believe it was designed to fail.
What about electric cars wasn't "viable" in 2003? That was the year Toyota released their all electric RAV4 in California...
Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.
Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!
I was alive in 2003. There were no mass market electrics on the road. The RAV4 nickel-metal hydride plug-in hybrid from 97-03 sold a grand total of 1400 units. Nickel MH batteries were notorious for losing range quickly, having a memory if recharged frequently from only partial discharge, losing 20-50% of their charge per month on self-discharge alone, having far less energy density than lithium, only lasting for 500-1000 cycles etc. Electric vehicles only became viable with the advent of cheap lithium ion batteries due to mass market laptop and cell phone production of said batteries in the late-00s.
They succeeded where others failed because they are fun to drive.
There were no fun EVs prior to the Roadster. And the Roadster was a small production precursor to Model S, which transitioned from boutique-ish to mass production, and which led to the Model 3, and then the Model Y, the number one selling car in the world.
Until the past five years or so almost every other EV was still an oddball whose design language seemed aimed at screaming "EV" over anything else. Look at the i3 or the Nissan Leaf. Until Cybertruck all Teslas retained a fairly conventional appearance.
No they succeeded because of carbon credits. To this day, 42% of Tesla's revenue is just carbon credits.
That means that everyone who is buying a gas guzzler is helping fund Tesla. Tesla was one of the first to have an EV-only lineup which means they could sell 100% of their carbon credits. Every company that wants to sell a gas guzzler has to pay Tesla for carbon credits in order to do so
The roadster was a conversion of a Lotus Elise, they were still trying to figure out powertrain and battery back then. Still, reusing an existing chassis was a good strategy till they had more experience.
Tesla succeeded because it focused on the luxury market first by building the Roadster (and then later the model S). It succeeded because they showed that electric cars can be cool and not associated with lame-looking and performing Priuses and Leafs. It succeeded because people bought billions of laptops and cell phones powered by lithium ion batteries, which finally produced the economies of scale and had the right properties that made electric vehicles viable in the first place. Subsidies came later, and Tesla would have done fine without subsidies. Its the trad automakers that are attempting electrics that need the subsidies.
It succeeded because it was the only company to only sell EVs. That means everyone who wants to buy a gas guzzler is funding Tesla. In the past decade, over 40% of all of Tesla's revenue is carbon credits
> The RAV4 nickel-metal hydride plug-in hybrid from 97-03 sold a grand total of 1400 units.
FYI, it wasn't a hybrid.
And your statement is a bit misleading. 1400 sales sounds pathetic, until you realize that means they completely sold out. 1400 was all they ever made.
It was a plug-in hybrid. Which is why they later consulted with Tesla on an all-electric RAV4 in 2010.
1400 sales over 6 years is worse than pathetic. They didn't run out of materials to produce them. Good lord, this is Toyota we're talking about, they've manufactured hundreds of millions of vehicles. It was an utter flop.
They only made less than 400 available for purchase by the general public, which all sold out, and there was a waiting list for more.
You keep criticizing the sales, yet it was the supply that was the limiting factor. You can't sell more than you make, so of course tiny production runs are going to be "worse than pathetic" for sales!
Almost like they didn't really want it to succeed...
Nevertheless, Toyota sold less than 1400 of the plug-in hybrid RAV4s (they were NOT all-electric) over 6 years, so they ceased the model's run.
It still holds that NiMH batteries were not practical for EVs. They had terrible range, memory problems and needed replacement after just 2 years. Anyone who used a cell phone or laptop from the 90s or early 00s understands this: batteries didn't last, that's why they were often engineered so that you could replace the batteries easily. Compared to today's electronics like iPhones and Macbooks that have internal lithium ion batteries embedded on device. This is because they work for years and years and lose very little maximum charge over that tme.
It was a car engineered to satisfy California's short lived requirement for auto manufacturers to make a zero emissions vehicle, hence the availability. Despite that, drivers loved it, and didn't want to give them back when GM cancelled the program (after lobbying the law repealed).
The car was engineered with 90s battery tech so it was plagued with problems that anyone who used such batteries in the 90s know existed: high self-discharge, memory effect, low energy density, voltage depression over time, and limited cycle life. These cars wouldn't last 2 years without needing their batteries replaced. That's why they never sold more than 600 of them.
"Memory effect" in the 1990s is an old wives' tale. It's a real condition discovered in the 1980s on satellite platforms with computer-controlled charging, but was identified and fixed quickly.
It never existed in consumer applications of NiCd batteries, especially as late as 1996.
It was not an old wives tail. I worked in wireless retail 23 years ago and saw these problems first hand. NiMH phone batteries from that era would scarcely last two years. Of course, it mattered less then because the tech was improving so rapidly that most people wanted a new phone every 2 years anyways. NiMH was an improvement over NiCd, but it still had memory problems nonetheless in its first few generations (modern NiMH batteries are better at this).
It could be mitigated by fully discharging a battery before recharging, and I'm certain that in applications such as satellites , they engineered the charging cycles to mitigate this. However, consumers powering phones and laptops can't be expected to maintain such discipline. Certainly people driving cars over variable distances can't be expected to uphold such requirements either, out of absolute necessity to travel a fixed distance between charges.
Lithium ion ultimately won because it solved these problems altogether. Modern NiMH has caught up a little bit, but Lithium has meanwhile improved as well.
You realize the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter is a hybrid EV right? Along with most trains and tanks and ships. But I'm not compensating for anything, so a small vehicle that gets me from A to B quickly, quietly, cheaply, safely, and has a 6ft long bed with fold down sides works great for me.
Those aren't really "sales" numbers (tbh I'm not even sure GM "sold" any car either given that it was able to destroy all of them).
GM only produced 660 units and 457 units. They never tried to actually mass produce the car and seeing how current electric vehicles are I really understand why; why cannibalize your higher margin ICE vehicles?
This is basically the same argument people make about a cure for cancer. Since there's a ton of money in treating cancer you can't develop a cure and kill your cash cow. It however, completely misses that somebody that isn't currently treating cancer can come in and develop a cure (i.e. Tesla) without tanking their treatment margins.
The parent commenter to you never claimed that electric cars were already viable or mass market, I would say the implication is that it was very obvious to the car industry at the time that EVs would be viable and even affordable extremely soon.
The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.
As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.
So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.
No, the auto industry had been envisioning a switch to hydrogen since the 60s, but particularly in the 90s, tons of concept cars were pitched by various automakers, including Toyota and Honda.
Battery technology still sucked in the early 00s and it wasn't obvious yet that lithium ion batteries would lead to the first truly viable mass market all-electric cars. Easy to say in hindsight, but there were still many possible futures and the path that had the most research behind it at that point was hydrogen.
This just doesn't make any level of sense. Automobile development cycles are relatively long. Don't forget that the Volt debuted at the 2007 North American International Auto Show.
I have a very hard time believing that in 2003 nobody inside the car industry was thinking that lithium ion-powered cars were a more viable solution than hydrogen.
It absolutely was. In the event that breakthroughs happened and it became viable faster than expected, the backup plan was to get the hydrogen from fossil fuels to make sure the industry would still get its cut.
Back when the Bush admin was hyping this stuff they managed to get the media to talk mostly about electrolysis of water using solar power. They would talk about how only water comes out the tailpipe, and the symmetry of being able to reuse water to make more fuel was extremely appealing to the credulous minds of the public.
Nothing has really changed either, 20 years later and laypeople still don't have better information about this technology...
Why do transit agencies keep falling for hydrogen busses? From the perspective of the US, it’s pretty simple:
1. Transit agencies have no way to reasonably validate what the future holds. From the standpoint of today, a hydrogen bus can be expected to replace a diesel bus 1 to 1, while battery electric is a 2 to 1 replacement. This might not be a huge issue except:
2. FTA regulations have strict requirements on how many spare busses may be kept at any time (defined by the ratio of peak vehicle usage vs the size of the overall fleet), doubling the size of the fleet blows this ratio out of the water.
3. It doesn’t matter what BYD offers or what’s possible in China, US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US. American manufacturers do have somewhat decent battery electric products, but they are clearly not at the leading edge. With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. To a large degree, gillig et al do get to decide what gets pushed into the market.
> With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market.
Do the conventional bus manufacturers in the US not make electric buses? All of the electric buses here are made by the transport authority’s traditional manufacturers.
US manufacturers absolutely make electric busses, but when you’re talking about global trends/capabilities in the market, you have to keep in mind that the core competency of most suppliers on the US market is still diesel drivetrains, their EV products are new/secondary.
They keep falling for it because fixed route busses are the one use case where hydrogen could theoretically make sense. The bus can fill up far faster than it could recharge an equivalent battery. The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel. And crucially, it can always fill up at the same place, which really ought to be the central depot where all the buses in that network return to.
But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t.
And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away.
If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.
> The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel.
This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.
I think the relevant numbers here (to evaluate the statement "The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel.") would be the total weight when empty vs when full.
The tank weighs at least 10x what the hydrogen weighs, so yes it’s relatively little per trip, but it does add up over the lifetime of the vehicle and I thought it was worth mentioning. Same goes for very high voltage in BEVs. There’s weight savings to be had by maximizing voltage which allows you to reduce the thickness of the wiring. But the savings are small compared to the weight of the battery.
Aren't buses with a fixed route also a great candidate for battery swap solutions? As all the buses are managed by the same company, I would be curious to know if there are any hidden issues with this approach: while an bus is riding with a battery, the replacement battery gets charged, and when necessary you just swap the battery.
Maybe. There are certainly companies doing this, such as SUN Mobility and BYD. But I think battery swapping will remain fairly niche, unless and until a few standardized battery shapes, sizes, and connectors emerge. Fixed route buses might be able to rely on custom solutions but that will of course increase the price and make it less tenable for the long-term.
Would it be so hard to manufacture your own hydrogen on-site with the $20k plug and play electrolysis setups they sell to labs and industries? You can just plug into a high wattage outlet and let it work when the grid is at low demands
You can't drill for oil & refine it at a bus depot but for the case of hydrogen maybe the assumption that fuel has to come from a supplier can be challenged
I don't see any benefits from economies of scale for electrolysis
Hydrogen would probably be delivered on a trailer and maybe hauled by an electric vehicle. Ultimately I think it makes more sense if hydrogen could be produced in a more distributed way.
Do you think it could be useful for farm or construction vehicles?
I blame the transit agency for those missteps though - it doesn't have to be like that.
Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/
Huh. I kind of thought that batteries had comprehensively won in this market, tbh.
I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.
Batteries have won this so hard (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") - because even when they hadn't won it, you just needed more busses.
Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.
The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets.
The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.
For the same reason the electric mail trucks are a good idea. You can probably expect UPS and FedEx to start replacing their fleets over time as the existing vehicles age out, now that all electric vans are starting to become available.
I'd say 95% of Amazon delivery vehicles I see in NYC are the electric type. Amazon are known to be really concerned with the bottom-line efficiency, so I suppose it must make clear economic sense.
(At least in King County Metro) the newer diesel-electric buses are series hybrids that use electric motors for traction, and diesel generators to power a small battery. So the low hanging fruit of electric traction was already “picked”. You can look up the bus model online - New Flyer XDE class
> But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus
Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases.
That said, current electric buses have sufficient range that this mostly isn't an issue. The unnervingly silent double-deckers I mention have a claimed range of 320km, which, at least here, is sufficient.
The big problem with Dublin's electric buses, ridiculously, was that the operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
This depends a lot on local climate and topography.
Seattle has kind of been a bust with them because the hills really reduce the amount of charge, and on top of that the existing bus depots are already full, so switching to electric only would mean having to find and locate space for more bus depots, which is quite difficult.
I wonder if trolley busses will make a great comeback now. Seems so obvious to just put the overhead lines near a few central bus hubs, so buses can recharge during the shift.
Hills should never reduce the range, because the energy lost during climbing up is recovered when going downhill.
This is one of the great advantages of electric vehicles with batteries, when properly designed.
Electric buses with batteries are even more suitable for cities with hills than for cities without hills, because they provide greater energy savings over buses with ICEs.
While I have never used buses with batteries, I have lived in cities with electric trolley buses. Even with the primitive technology of many decades ago, they were doing great in cities with hills, recovering most of the energy when going downhill, unlike the buses with ICEs, which had excessive fuel consumption because of the hills.
Regenerative breaking is not perfectly efficient, so you may loose a significant portion of the additional energy needed. Better EV systems are what, 70-80% efficient on the breaking efficiency?
Okay, but gasoline is far more energy dense than batteries and a gas tank is a whole lot cheaper than a battery pack, so vehicles can have a gas tank big enough that that doesn't cause range problems. I don't know about buses, but you can buy a pickup with a 48 gallon tank. Even after assuming only about 1/3 efficiency, that's still equivalent to some 500 KWhr, which is several times more than any consumer EV I'm aware of.
That's efficiency, not range. Suppose hilly terrain reduces range by a third for electric vehicles and half for diesel. The diesel bus just fills up twice as often. The electric bus needs a 50% bigger battery in order to finish the same route without stopping to charge, and then it becomes 70% because it has to lug the bigger battery up the hills.
You can just... do that, but that doesn't mean it's not a thing you have to do, and it's not free.
It is impossible for a hilly terrain to reduce the range by a third for well-designed electric buses.
The efficiency of regenerative braking increases with the power of the vehicle. The electric efficiency should be well over 90%, perhaps even 95%. The mechanical losses will lower the total efficiency to much smaller values, but even so, the total efficiency should be over 80%.
A bus with an ICE will consume 5 times more extra energy for climbing the hill and it will also consume energy while going downhill.
Values like a 50% greater battery are unrealistic, and a heavier battery adds much less to the consumption than by how much it is heavier, even when going up the hill (because most of the extra energy consumption is also recovered).
In a certain city, it may happen that the bus routes are so long that batteries are not competitive with ICEs, at least for now. However, the presence of hills in any city can only make electric buses more advantageous, not less advantageous, due to much greater cost savings for fuel and maintenance. Buses with ICEs that are operated on hilly routes also need extra maintenance, besides increased fuel costs. Well-designed electric buses do not care whether they are operated in conditions requiring higher torque.
Like I have said, I have lived in cities with hills and with electric trolley buses and there was no doubt that the trolley buses were superior to buses with ICEs exactly on the routes that were going up and down over hills.
> The efficiency of regenerative braking increases with the power of the vehicle. The electric efficiency should be well over 90%, perhaps even 95%. The mechanical losses will lower the total efficiency to much smaller values, but even so, the total efficiency should be over 80%.
It's not just about conversion efficiency. Moving a vehicle up a hill requires several times as much power as traveling on level terrain, which heats the battery. Reaching the top of the hill and starting regen when going back down again, also heats the battery. On normal terrain that isn't all hills there will be level sections in between that allow the battery to cool. If the terrain doesn't have that then the battery gets too hot and the vehicle will disable regenerative braking and use friction braking to allow the battery to cool off. The steeper the hills are, the more heat is generated per unit time.
Batteries also have charge curves. In the extreme case you start at a higher elevation, go down a hill and can't use regen at all because the battery is full and there is nowhere to put it, but then you have to spend energy later to get back to where you started. The same is true even if the battery isn't fully charged, because extreme charge levels require charging to be done gradually and the battery might not be able to take as much power right now as a heavy bus would generate descending a steep grade.
> A bus with an ICE will consume 5 times more extra energy for climbing the hill and it will also consume energy while going downhill.
Modern engines will cut fuel entirely when descending a grade.
> the presence of hills in any city can only make electric buses more advantageous, not less advantageous, due to much greater cost savings for fuel and maintenance.
That doesn't contradict the point that they'll need to have larger batteries to achieve the same range on hilly terrain.
Regenerative braking is nice but as sibling pointed out it doesn't nearly recapture everything. Another factor is that the additional load whether accelerating up a hill or braking down one puts more current through the system. In fact nearly every part of the drivetrain will experience accelerated wear under those conditions, mechanical or electrical. Cooling systems, too. Properly spec'd, it's of course very doable, but it's true hilly terrain is more difficult.
The problem is that the hills in Seattle are quite large, so you are going up for a long period of time and possibly not able to regenerate before you run out of batteries.
The other problem is that because battery weight is so large, that in itself becomes a limiting factor for hilly operation where it is not really relevant for trolleybuses. And trolleybuses can feed current from uphill buses to downhill buses through the wires, but there's no such connection on battery buses.
> The problem is that the hills in Seattle are quite large, so you are going up for a long period of time and possibly not able to regenerate before you run out of batteries.
Is this deadpan sarcasm? Seattle isn't a mountain pass. The biggest hills are a couple hundred feet bottom to top. The "High Point" neighborhood, which is, uh, the highest point above sea level, is at 522 feet. Every other hill is smaller than that.
Total ascent time is measured in double-digit seconds, discounting lights/stop signs.
Not related to vehicle battery energy consumption, transit agencies have been reporting their BEBs struggling up hills due to drivetrain components not being good fits for their terrain. Surprising finding, with the OEM sending replacement parts as a result.
This is a weird multi-paragraph evangelical lecture seeing as any EV owner that’s driven in a hilly climate will tell you that this isn’t how things work.
Alternatively, you could add charging infrastructure in more places. Eg, partially have trolley-like lines on the route to "top up". This could make sense on dedicated buslanes, especially when multiple lines use that stretch (eg near central stop).
Many bus routes have a 5-10ish min break at some point (usually the main station) in the route. If you can utilize those ten minutes to do a top-up, you can go a lot further on the same sized battery.
No bus route should be more than 15 minutes between full and empty. That is you start at some station, go 15 minutes, then turn around and go back. There are many systems that attempt to do more, but there is no point: people have places to be: on the bus is not on that list. That 15 minutes means an average of 7 minutes, now they walk to some other express bus that gets them nonstop (at faster speeds) to someplace, but you still only get 15 minutes to get there before it isn't worth the bother, than 7 more minutes on some other bus. Add in 5 more minutes of walking time (and transfer time!) and we are at 45 minutes - this is unreasonably long for normal trips already, but it is the best you can do!.
In short there are plenty of places to switch buses if you need to.
There are two critical aspects to the bus routing problem. One is that no matter how well you design your system, there is always variance in the arrival times of a bus at any given stop. If you expect people to switch buses, then you need to account for this variance, and this means adding buffers. Nothing makes people stop using buses faster than missing your connection because your bus was late.
The other aspect is the what city topology you are dealing with. In square grid cities, you can probably put a tram on every road, and with one switch over, get to where ever you need to get to.
But many organically grown cities end up using the hub-and-spoke model, where there are main stations where many different buses meet. People switch over to the next connection (and you need a buffer here). Critically, you need all the buses to meet at roughly the same clock time, say every 30 min. Now, one thing you realize immediately is that not all routes are equal. One route might be only 25 min, Either you make it longer and waste fuel, and time for everyone sitting on the bus, or you wait an extra 5 min at the main station.
Bus scheduling is very difficult problem in real cities with weird topologies and real traffic issues. Buffers are a necessary part of any reasonable solution.
I'm coming from a different perspective: regardless of all else (all those issues you raised are very real), people need to get where they are going in a reasonable amount of time. Most bus service fails to account for that, but if you can't get people there in a reasonable amount of time there is no point in trying.
I agree that a system that does not deliver is going to fail. Transit systems can have improved scheduling in two ways:
(1) Better scheduling system. My opinion is that most real world systems are not too far away from the optimal trade-off curves. There is always room for improvements, or choosing better trade-offs, but it will rarely drastically improve things.
(2) More ridership: Most problems with speed just disappear if more people ride. For example, you do need a solid buffer when buses come every 30 min or more. But buses that come every 10 min or less, you can get rid of all buffer. A lot of scheduling problems are just not-enough-users problem.
No transit system has the money needed to provide great transit to their entire city even though if they did it would save all residents a large pile of money. They compromise on only the densist areas which are easy but mean that you can't get anywhere else reasonably. Of course some areas will always be easier than others to get to, but far too much of any city is not reasonably reachable without a car and that is a problem.
Am I misunderstanding you about the 15 minutes interval?
Every workday I take a one-seat King County Metro bus ride that lasts about 1 hr. The bus starts at a layover facility and ends at a different layover facility.
I don’t see how this 15 minute interval maps to my actual commute?
I don't think you're misunderstanding. I think the person you're responding to is misunderstanding that we were referring to trip end points (layover locations).
You put in a different depot for the 20 minute trip. With express buses the trip between the two depots may only be 5 minutes.
People through history have always considered about half an hour a reasonable daily commute. Doesn't matter if it is a hunter-gatherer going to their gathering grounds (if they follow herds they will move camp if the herd moves more than half an hour), or "modern man" going to the office, half an hour is what you get. Everything I said is based on making as many of those half hour trips possible as I can - but not all trips can be done that way and some locations will be left out.
You would then be subjecting people to indirect paths with multiple transfers. Instead of going from A to B you'd have to go from A to the first bus depot to the second bus depot to B, waiting for another bus at each transfer. If the trip was 30 minutes to begin with, now you've made it 45 (at best).
Have you though? You're at A, near but not at the first bus depot. If there is a bus that originates at the depot, stops at A and then takes you all the way to B, you get there in 30 minutes. If it only takes you half way to B, you have to go half way, wait there for another bus from a different depot, take it back to that depot and wait for a third bus from the depot to B.
Not only is that slower, having the first bus stop there and turn around instead of going all the way to B hasn't benefited anyone else either. The route from the first depot to the halfway point is still being covered by the same bus route. The interval is determined by how many buses cover that route and not just by its total length, and another bus that covers that section of the route might even go somewhere other than B after reaching the point you'd have had it turn around to go back, also giving a faster option than multiple transfers for people who want to go from A to C. When A, B and C are all high density areas, creating direct routes between them makes sense even if they're each more than 15 minutes apart.
Sorry, but, what the hell? This is Hacker News at its finest: completely talking out of its ass.
This isn’t how bus routes work, and this isn’t how people ride busses, on most if not all of the…many PT systems I’ve used in multiple states / countries.
There is a reason people complain about buses and prefer to drive in so many cases. Operators try to compromise on cheap and end up with service for those who after 5 DWIs can't get their friends to drive them anymore.
Forcing more people to change busses more often for their routes just to fit some 15 minute max route ideal is going to make more people hate the busses.
You're not necessarily making more destinations available. You're potentially just requiring more changes to go to the same destinations.
Imagine a metro area with somewhat grid-like streets (or at least common paths) that go on for an hour+ in each direction. People still generally cluster to 20-30min from the destinations they care to go to, so it doesn't break that standard. Breaking it up into four 15-minute stretches isn't making it better for anyone. All you're doing is forcing people to get off one bus at an edge and hop on another. Just run more busses on the full path so there's still ample service for the changes.
How does forcing the 15-minute max path make more destinations available?
It doesn't inherently make more lines. You might (you probably will) just have the same lines more broken up.
You could also just have more lines even if they're long. The length of the lines doesn't change the number of them. It's just a question of how many busses and drivers do you really have and what service interval are you trying to hit.
If you're arguing they should have like a 15 minute hub and spoke model, you might also be forcing some really inefficient routes and once again force people to change busses more when one bus route could have better served the community.
This is highly regional - any major city with a decent transit system will have excellent bus routes in dense areas. Also, “operators” usually means bus drivers, not transit agencies
Only dense areas. Some cities are ignoring dense areas that other cities have proven can support great service because they are not the densest there. People have places to be, and large parts of any city do not have reasonable transit options even though the density is there. Too often you are foced to take the long trip downtown and then back out even though your destination is just barely beyond walking distance.
> That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.
> That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change.
So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse.
There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.
It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up.
As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in.
It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.
> (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be")
In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen.
I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.
CNG buses were about a 10-year experiment in Toronto. There were a number of bus terminals where CNG vehicles were prohibited, either due to clearance or because of the associated explosion risk.
A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.
In Tompkins County we were early adopters of the electric bus, at least for the American market. We bought them from a startup which had trouble with the structural aspects and eventually they fell apart
Five months before the company filed for bankruptcy, Proterra's CEO was appointed to the President’s Export Council (PEC), "the principal national advisory committee on international trade."
Thanks for your insight. The amount of damage that Proterra did to the overall BEB adoption rates should not be underestimated. I work with many agencies and so many of them are running from BEBs toward FCEBs in large part because of their, or sister agency, experience with Proterra buses.
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This process happened in Madrid a few years ago. It's an incredible quality-of-life improvement for everyone in the city. Diesel buses were phased out a few years ago. The newer hybrid CNG buses are uncannily quiet, and some lines in the city core, where distances are smaller and speed is slower, are fully electric.
Yup, wasn’t being entirely serious. They’ve gotten progressively quieter over the last few decades; when I was a kid, they really did sound like they were within seconds of complete failure when going up a hill. The electric ones are a shock the first time you get on one, though - very futuristic.
Busses are not going to be quiet. Around here we have pretty cool "Van Hool ExquiCity" trolley busses and they can glide gracefully at slow speeds, but when they are hurtling down patched up streets they are not much quieter than the traditional busses.
Most city buses spend most of their time going fairly slowly. The electric buses are absolutely a lot quieter, at least around here. Crucially, also, they don’t vibrate; I’ve never been on a diesel bus where vibration from the engine wasn’t at least somewhat noticeable.
On the older busses in the city I live in, the level of vibrations actually make me sooo motion sick, I have gotten off the bus and immediately evacuated my insides.
Transit agencies don't have the technical expertise to distinguish truth from lies in cleantech marketing. They aren't the only ones, see the over-inflated valuations of both Nikola and Tesla as two (very different) stories of companies successfully lying to investors and the general public about the magical capabilities of their novel transportation platforms.
They kind of do, though. Most transit agencies hire consultants to plan out these transitions, and the consultants have expertise in the different technologies and can present the pros and cons. However, the decisions stemming from this information can often be dictated by the transit agency's governing board, which cares less about this fat report that they just paid for and cares more for the hydrogen interests whispering in their ears.
>Weight: a bus which can carry 20 persons and has a range of 2 km (1.2 mi) requires a flywheel weighing about 3 tons.
>The flywheel, which turns at 3000 revolutions per minute, requires special attachment and security—because the external speed of the disk is 900 km/h (560 mph).
>Driving a gyrobus has the added complexity that the flywheel acts as a gyroscope that will resist changes in orientation, for example when a bus tilts while making a turn, assuming that the flywheel has a horizontal rotation axis.
So you have a giant blender than can travel one mile in a straight line before needing to be recharged
I personally think Battery buses with SAE J3105 'docking' points at key stops (basically, the stops that are used to loiter to set timing, rather than leaving as soon as possible) is a better solution than the cost of stringing OHL through every major road in a city.
Reading about this and matching it up with what I see in some more recent electric truck and ferry charging videos I feel this is almost historic tech.
Answer to the question: political reasons and lobbying.
Hydrogen is produced by the big oil and gas companies. By pushing hydrogen vehicle instead of battery electric vehicles they stay in business.
They market hydrogen as a green alternative to oil, although most hydrogen is currently produced from fossil sources, and this won't change soon (next 10 years).
I’ve been riding electric buses for almost 10 years, and no hybrid comes close to them. The experience as a passenger or as a citizen living next to a bus stop is far way superior: smooth, silent, non-smelly, no hot motor heating the back of the bus in summer… I hate riding any diesel bus after having got used to electric ones.
I've ridden both hybrid and electric buses and I prefer the latter, as those huge engines still produce a lot of vibration.
I drive a Toyota hybrid and while it's a step up from a purely combustion propelled car, I still have to do oil changes and its fumes still smell bad when it's running rich for whatever reason.
> The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
The problem is hybrid drivetrains are complex. You don't save anything on the complexity of a combustion engine and exhaust train (over 1000 individual parts that have to be machined at extremely low tolerances), but add a more complex transmission (it needs to be able to work with two distinct inputs) and an electric drivetrain on top of that.
It is worth it in terms of energy efficiency and acceleration stats since even a small electric motor can supply a lot of torque at low speeds until the high-horsepower combustion engine catches up (virtually all modern cars have a turbocharger that needs time to spin up), but it's technically challenging to actually build into a modern car design - unlike 90s cars with ample space available to stuff components in, in a modern car every cubic centimeter is accounted for due to crash resistance.
As a simple driver of cars, I've never understood why no one has mass produced an EV with a built-in generator. That would avoid the complexity of the hybrid drive train, allow easy plugin and short range electric-only travel, and could even be offered as an optional attachment. So what am I missing? Is the efficiency gained by the generator offset by losses through the EV system?
That is called a series hybrid and the reason they're not popular is that the power split device in common hybrids is simply better.
The power split device isn't an ordinary transmission, it's a set of planetary gears with a fixed gear ratio between three shafts. One goes to the wheels, the other two to the engine and the electric motor respectively. The ratio of the engine speed to the wheel speed is then set by the speed of the electric motor connected to the third shaft, which gives you a CVT with no belts, clutches, torque converters or even synchros.
The transmission is "more complicated" only in the sense that it contains electric motors. In every other respect it's simpler, more efficient and more reliable than an ordinary transmission. Meanwhile those electric motors mean you don't need a starter motor or an alternator because the engine can be started by the electric motor through the transmission and an electric motor is a generator when operated in reverse.
A series hybrid still requires you to have a gas engine with all that entails, but now the gas engine needs its own dedicated electric generator/motor and you can't deliver power from the gas engine directly to the wheels, so the traction motors have to be bigger in order to supply 100% of the torque used in acceleration instead of the gas engine and electric motors both contributing. That makes series hybrids heavier, slower and more expensive, so they're basically useless. Probably the main advantage would be that you could offer the generator as an option on what would otherwise be a full electric vehicle and then only people who need the extra range would pay for it.
Wouldn't an additional advantage of series hybrids be that the engine can be tuned to operate solely in it's most efficient RPM band, since it just charging the battery and doesn't need to deal with changing speeds? This can (according to some very cursory googling), result in efficiency gains of 20-30% relative to the least efficient RPMs. This should at least partially offset some of the size and weight considerations, since you don't need to size the engine for it's energy output in less efficient speeds. This seems like it would be most important in stop-and-go conditions where the engine is spending considerable time at less efficient speeds, such as in a bus.
The parallel hybrids can already do that because of the CVT.
In practice they also allow the engine to run at higher speeds under heavy acceleration because the peak efficiency RPM and the peak power RPM are different and the assumption is that if the driver is stomping on the accelerator they want to resolve the power/efficiency trade off in favor of power right now, which is another thing the series hybrids can't do.
This was the GM Volt, predecessor to the Bolt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt GM ceased production in 2019. The answer to your question can probably be found there, but IIRC [from GM's perspective] the consumer market preferred ICE + battery over electric + generator, especially after the all-electric options came to market and siphoned demand from the latter.
It just turns out not to be worth it. The generator is a lot of weight to add, and a whole bunch of new parts to maintain.
It's a lot easier to add enough batteries to match the range of an ICE car. Range anxiety is largely manufactured at this point. The cars know how far they can go and where the chargers are. A gasoline powered generator would be a huge extra cost with no real upside other than averting a non-problem.
Edison Motors is working on a system like this. They're looking to sell kits for retrofitting it onto pickup trucks, & a larger scale semi truck cab version for use with logging trucks. It looks great in their videos, although I'm not sure if they're selling to the public yet - probably a ways to go before it's really mass produced.
Most BYD PHEVs work like that - with the additional option of connecting the engine directly to the wheels via a clutch at highway speeds. I think Honda has a similar system.
You're talking about PHEVs, basically. Ramcharger is an example of one where the ICE engine only charges the battery; it's not connected to the drivetrain.
That undersells it. The data on hybrid drivetrains is pretty clear--it's definitely more reliable. Even mechanics will tell you that; certainly mine did, and he's not a masochist. Start+stop is hell on mechanical drivetrains. It's a no-brainer when purchasing a new car except that there's still a premium for hybrid, so the RoI might not be there given baseline reliability and depending on your preferences. Though the premium gap is closing, at least for non-plugin hybrids. Plugin hybrids are the new premium option in model lineups, so traditional hybrids are moving down market.
My plugin hybrid (I just bought it 2 weeks ago) is on track to save me $200/month over the others similar vehicle it replaced (minivan with the same engine, but 10 years difference in years, so lots of other differences).
At least for Toyota hybrids, the intuition is that the traditional ICE transmission system is replaced by what Toyota calls a "power split device" which continuously feeds and balances the electric and combustion power sources. This power split device uses a simpler gearing system (enabled by the high torque electric motors) and appears to be mechanically simpler and more reliable than traditional transmission systems (which probably wear out quicker than the engine in most ICEs).
This is not really true in the US, but maybe moreso in Europe, where engine displacement is penalized?
> that needs time to spin up
Porsche's latest 911 does something very cute here ("T-Hybrid"): they have a small electric motor in the turbo. They use the high-voltage hybrid battery to rapidly spin up the turbo on demand to significantly reduce turbo lag (one of the major drawbacks of a turbo engine). Then, at lower load, they can also regen the battery using the exhaust gases and that same motor.
The drivetrain was actually invented several decades before that. It wasn't until around 20 years ago that the batteries got to the point to make it practical to use.
They're also made by more than Toyota and Honda. The American automakers have been offering vehicles with a similar hybrid powertrain for around two decades and the German automakers for only a little less than that. But they're generally not a separate model like the Prius is, so the only exterior difference is a hybrid badge on what is otherwise visually identical to the non-hybrid car/truck of the same model.
> The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
I bought and drove a 2005 Prius for about 10 years. Loved it. But I would never buy another hybrid. My family now owns 3 EVs. Hybrids are better than pure ICE vehicles. But EVs are much much better than both of them. I could tell you about all the benefits of EVs, but until you own one, it may not sink in.
Hybrids are good for some people. Apartment dwellers without a place to charge an EV.
Hybrids are better for road trips in my experience. We have an EV and a hybrid, and nearly always choose the hybrid for road trips, because the EV needs to stop 2x as often, for 3-4x as long.
(At least in King County Metro) their newer diesel-electric buses are series hybrids that use electric motors for traction, and diesel generators to power a small battery. The drivetrain seems smart but maybe other agencies use it less? You can look up the bus model online - New Flyer XDE class
Here in SE Michigan, one local transit authority ditched its new hybrid busses and returned to diesel ~15 years ago - because the TCO for the hybrid busses was so much higher that fixing the hole in their budget proved impossible.
Sticker price on a hybrid bus was a few $100K higher than on a conventional, the actual mileage wasn't all that much better, and the maintenance was considerably more expensive. My source didn't mention reliability - but it's a big enough system that they'd track that as cost, too.
("ditching already paid for" - probably not the case. Vs. leasing, or selling the hybrids on, or something.)
That goes for anything hydrogen and wheels pretty much.
It's actually pretty simple to figure out. Making hydrogen takes energy. You lose some of the energy making the hydrogen. This is not a fixable problem. At least not unless you break the laws of thermodynamics.
When you have created hydrogen, you lose more energy compressing the energy. Then you have to transport it to wherever it's going to be pumped into the vehicle ... both of which take more energy. Then it goes into a fuel cell, which loses more energy. All these losses multiply. And if you know your maths, you know that multiplying numbers smaller than 1 means the result gets smaller and smaller. These losses are significant.
And we're comparing it with putting the energy into a battery directly. It has inherently better round trip energy. Even if hydrolyzers, and the infrastructure to store, compress, and transport hydrogen were free (which they are not), using hydrogen would still be more expensive than that. Because it wastes more of the energy that goes in. So, in addition to the energy losses, you also need to deal with infrastructure cost. On top of regular energy infrastructure.
Anyway, that's all theory. For practice, just look at market price of hydrogen. Most of that stuff is of the dirty grey hydrogen variety creating that wastes a lot of methane. So much, that it would be cleaner to just use the hydrogen in a combustion engine in the bus and you'd have less CO2 emissions. Expending more methane to make hydrogen to have less emissions makes no logical sense.
If you are using grey hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than methane. Nothing can change that. If you are using green hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than battery electric. Nothing can change that either. That's just physics and simple economics. Yes there are some innovations in this space happening that reduce the gap a little. But it's never going to be enough.
Right now it's not even close. Unless somebody is subsidizing the hydrogen fuel, you'd be paying way more per mile than with diesel. And not just a little bit. And a common reason to switch from diesel to BEV is that it actually costs way less per mile than diesel. So, instead of saving money, you are spending more money.
Subsidies are hiding the true cost of hydrogen. That's the only reason there are some vehicles on the road. As soon as the subsidies dry up, hydrogen transport use cases evaporate. There are of course plenty of other use cases where hydrogen is needed that make much more economical sense. Using scarce and expensive hydrogen for transport is a poor use of resources. The utopian world where we have vast amounts of hydrogen surpluses does not exist.
The argument for hydrogen has to do with energy density. There are certain use cases where batteries are just too heavy, but hydrogen, with its higher energy density, is not. Maybe that will change in the future, but as it stands now, energy density is a significant barrier to adoption of battery/electric in certain areas. The cost of energy doesn't matter if it can't be used due to batteries being too heavy.
It's possible to imagine a future where both fuel sources have found their place, depending on context. Doesn't have to be an either/or.
The fallacy with that argument is that hydrogen's volumetric energy density is very low.
In liquid form, methane has about 2.7x more energy by volume than hydrogen. Diesel has 4.2x more energy. Keeping and transporting hydrogen in liquid form takes a lot of energy and requires constantly boiling it off to keep it liquid. In practice, most hydrogen is transported in compressed gas form (700 bars). In that form, you need about 11 hydrogen truckloads to a single diesel truckload.
So, it takes up a lot of space. This makes it very impractical for transport use cases. Unless you convert it to something that maybe contains hydrogen but also other atoms. Like carbon (carbohydrates) or nitrogen (e.g. ammonia). Converting it to those forms takes more energy. And those multiply. And doing the chemical conversion back to energy in a combustion engine has the same problem as all combustion engines: it loses most of the energy as heat. Fuel cells might improve on that; but they'd still be losing energy.
This is why battery electric trucks easily match the ranges of most hydrogen trucks on the road. There are currently no production hydrogen trucks or buses that offer a longer range than their battery-electric equivalents. You'd need significantly larger tanks and adding the same volume in battery would match the range easily. Even with current production batteries (160-200 wh/kg), which are about a third of the energy density of already announced new state of the art batteries (500wh/kg). Batteries are on a path of steady volumetric an mass density improvements. Hydrogen will never get better than it already is.
It's also why hydrogen planes are no longer being considered a viable plan by the likes of Airbus; most of the plane would have to be reserved for hydrogen containment.
For ships, using hydrogen as a fuel is not a serious option either. Simply too much volume. Transporting hydrogen by ship in liquid form loses 1-2% of the load per day to boil off. This is the only way to keep it liquid; boiling it off cools the liquid. The longer the journey, the more hydrogen is lost to unavoidable boil-off, making long-distance transport highly inefficient.
This is propaganda. I can find you a dozen websites and statements from University professors, why gas, electricity or hydrogen is doomed from the beginning. And I can find another dozen, why they are the future.
"stuck with 19 buses that they have to drive a long way to refuel at great overall expense, something I wrote about this week."
This seems like a problem that can be solved, but it is a hen and egg problem. Not enough refusing options, system less attractive. Electric cars had this too.
I wonder why city buses have this problem. I am not aware that city buses use regular gas station, I always assumed that they get refilled in their "home base". This would make the refueling infrastructure not very challenging.
This isn't comparable to the EV charging station problem, because at least there's already electricity everywhere and you don't need to convert to hydrogen on top of that.
> Metro gets about one or two buses every week or so, and that it typically takes around four months of testing before they are put into service. The lengthy testing process is necessary because the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, one of the funders of the Metro’s initiative, requires the agency to destroy one of its existing buses before putting a new one on the road
The mechanism through which fossil fuel interests work is "grey hydrogen" which is hydrogen produced through processing of fossil sources with no eye towards carbon capture. Grey hydrogen is as polluting as just burning the fossil feedstock but works with an established hydrogen infrastructure.
This lets the producers "green wash" their production pipeline by stating in a lies-through-omission manner that their hydrogen is "clean burning". See no carbon out of the tailpipe! It's clean! It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production. It's just moving the tailpipe somewhere else rather than eliminating it entirely.
There's also "blue" hydrogen that's manufactured with fossil fuels but claims/intends to capture the carbon produced in the process. It can still feed into a hydrogen infrastructure so fossil fuel companies love it due to the same greenwashing.
The only carbon neutral hydrogen is "green" hydrogen which uses a renewable source and electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen. But even that is wildly less efficient on net than just using renewables to charge battery EVs. Electrons are far easier to move long distances than hydrogen or hydrogen feedstocks (including water).
> It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production.
This is just anti-ev propaganda.
First, its kind of a chicken-egg situation:
'its not worth going green for the power grid, all the cars are still ICE' 'oh its not worth building EV cars, the power grid is dirty anyway'.
Second, there are lifecycle analyses that show that even if your powergrid is entirely fossil fuels, EVs are still a win. This is because powerplants are really efficient in ways that a car engine can't be because of scale/weight. iirc the only exception was if your power-grid was still like 50%+ coal?
Not only that, it's completely the opposite: One of the biggest impediments to adding more renewables to the grid is aligning generation with load. EVs are rolling energy storage devices. Put EV chargers in workplaces with a setting that says "just make sure the battery has at least 100 miles of charge by quitting time" and you get a full 300 mile charge from 100% renewable energy whenever it's available, still enough to come back tomorrow if it's cloudy today, and a discount for using the charger where that's what happens.
Then you not only charge the EVs from entirely renewable generation, most of them can curtail their load for about a week because typical EVs have around seven times the average commute in total range, and then when renewable generation is at 25% of normal, the capacity added to charge EVs can be directed to less flexible loads because the demand from EVs can be easily delayed for the right price.
Their existence is what makes a grid with a higher percentage of renewables even work.
It's not. I'm not in any was opposed to EVs. Assuming so is a bit ridiculous on your part.
There's a marketing push to cast EVs as green no matter the prevailing sources of utility power. EVs can be green (like hydrogen) if they're charged from renewables. They also get greener over time since they're as green as their charging source.
In the short term EVs are just moving their emissions from tail pipes to smoke stacks. Contrary to the marketing around them.
The UCS has been regularly publishing data on whether grid charged EVs or ICE had lower CO2 in the USA. Even their oldest data in 2012 shows a clear improvement, based on the assumption of grids not getting cleaner with non-hybrids being worse everywhere in the US, and hybrids only competitive with EVs in the worst grid areas:
Their updates obviously showed continual progress from there as the grid cleaned up, a process which continues, as does lower carbon footprint batteries (LFP is half the carbon of NCM) and higher efficiency EVs.
It would be interesting for them to revisit the old projections with the 12 years of newer grid data and calculate the real numbers and compare them with their conservative estimates.
I was under the impression that for typical energy mixes in developed nations EVs are strictly better than ICEs and that you have to exclusively charge them for burning lignite to be slightly worse. Only counting climate change impact of course. I think there is a lot of value in reducing local emissions in cities too.
I disagree it's a chicken-egg problem, nor is it not worth buying an EV (aka "going green").
You can charge an EV with electricity made from several different energy sources. You could even charge it with gas or diesel generator, if such a need would arise. You can't really fill an ICE car with home-brewed gas.
The real issue a) range and b) if your car use maps well to an EV's need to have it plugged in for several hours at a time.
... yep, you could, though I don't think a small farm would cover my yearly needs for gas.
A small roof can cover an EV.
Best thing here is electrons are very pure, no matter the source. Chemicals - not so much. Distilled alcohol still has a significant amount of water, and if you're trying to get biogas, that one needs to be desulfurized. It's just messy.
Almost every Shell station in San Francisco, remodeled and added hydrogen refueling stations about two or three years ago. Now they sit idle or turned off.
If green energy were a money making business, the oil companies would get into it tomorrow.
I recently visited Barcelona — it is a fantastic city. A perfect intersection of amazing food, friendly people, vibrant culture, great weather. Is life in Barcelona as good as it seems from the outside?
> Fuel cell buses do produce sufficient waste heat, but here’s the problem: it’s exceptionally expensive heat. Every degree of warmth comes from hydrogen — a fuel that’s costly to produce, store, and transport. Unlike diesel, heating with hydrogen’s waste heat is technically easy but economically painful.
Yeah, I just find the framing very weird. It's talked about as if it's somehow worse than diesel. But then isn't the issue that hydrogen fuel is less economical than diesel in general, regardless of whether the fuel is used for locomotion or for passenger heating? In the context of passenger heating specifically, waste heat is either free for both diesel and hydrogen, or equally non-free for both.
Also the article appears to be arguing for electric instead of hydrogen buses, but for some reason seems to try to frame "winter range" as being an issue for hydrogen buses specifically, and then says "electric buses face a different challenge" -- winter range.
I feel like there are two separate points that can be made:
- Hydrogen fuel is more costly than diesel or electric (not even sure how true this is, but it's what the article seems to indirectly imply).
- Hydrogen fuel doesn't have winter range issues the way electric buses do, but regardless electric is still better for other reasons.
Hydrogen fuel (gray) is often about $8-10/kg, which is about an 80% increase in costs per mile over diesel. Green hydrogen is like $14/kg.
Additionally, agencies are experiencing vapor losses of fuel, which results in an overall increase in fuel costs. These losses can occur in different circumstances, but often occur after fueling when the gaseous fuel left in the hose (that cannot be returned to the liquid tank) evaporates. One agency reported double the cost of fuel due to these losses.
Anyway, yeah I think the argument in the article was that this waste heat isn't "free" because you're paying such a premium for it via the fuel costs.
Yes it is. You've accounted the price of the heat in efficiency/fuel cost already, the heating is free, and not "exceptionally expensive heat".
I wish there were a common framework for this lose and hand-wavy accounting. For some people this is painfully wrong, while the rest are not even convincible about it.
Anyway winter or cold temperature is an advantage for hydrogen in hydrogen vs electric, precisely because heating is free. They get the reasoning wrong. I think "exceptionally expensive heat" is just made up to illustrate their point. Trash "article" either way.
Thanks, you beat me to it. While it is more expensive per watt, that's a sunk cost: you've already paid it when you were consuming the hydrogen to make the bus move.
I don't get why Americans are hating on hydrogen fuel cells so much, but in Korea, half of the eco-friendly bus market is basically on hydrogen (note: the gov uses all kinds of weird terms and stats, so I really can't nail down the actual number). There are lots of electric buses, but they're too heavy and not great for the tight corners and hills that are everywhere in Seoul. FCEVs are lighter and more powerful, so bus drivers seem to prefer them over BEVs. However, hydrogen buses are about twice as expensive as battery buses from China.
Somehow the technology "stack" seems to have way more sharp edges, from hydrogen diffusing out of the storage tanks up to inefficient generation. However I think a lot of those have been solved and cars are already in the 3rd generation.
IMHO hydrogen is the most foolproof way to store cheap solar energy.
A good professor convinced me hydrogen was a dead end some years ago.
But to be fair busses and trains and other public transit that does fixed routes every day is the perfect bench for any clean energy drive train that needs real world testing.
Also public money should never be overly shy of coordinating with companies who are trying to in good faith to solve our climate crisis.
Some discussion on this thread about hydrogen being a poison pill promoted by oil interests which I don’t really know about.
Electric bus programs have been broadly successful and no doubt have contributed in a real way to our understanding of that technology.
The electric airplane is another myth. There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon, that can provide a large enough power/weight to make them practical.
> There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon, that can provide a large enough power/weight to make them practical.
Small aircraft are already there. I'm looking into starting my pilots license this year, the local flight school recently acquired an Elektra Trainer [1], that apparently has 2.5 hours worth of flight time [2].
Big transoceanic widebodies obviously will be fossil fuel based for a long time to come, but I think a lot of the GA market and bush pilot/island hoppers can and will be done by electric planes sooner than later - alone because the noise and lead emissions are all but gone, and I think that in a few years, when experiences on failure modes are a bit richer, electric planes will also be cheaper to maintain - similar to cars, there are less parts involved in the first place that can break down.
It is, because it's easier to get started with certification and experience in ultralights than in full-size planes. It won't be long until we see bush capable Cessnas, I think.
They use electric seaplanes at Harbour Air for regional flights across the Georgia Strait between Vancouver, Seattle, and Victoria. Electric makes a lot of sense for short-range flights.
No, the eBeaver has never flown a commercial flight. Harbour Air is aiming for certification in 2026. Additionally, it only holds four passengers and is more a proof of concept than anything else. It is a cool effort but battery technology needs to come a long way first.
Firstly: I'm a fan of Harbour Air's work and their electrification. Have flown that airline.
Retrofitting electrical flight to a 1950s airframe will be, in the long run, not a great use of the technology.
Those planes were designed around having a single heavy powerplant up front driving the propeller, and fuel largely distributed along the center of gravity (in the wings) so as not to adversely alter flight characteristics over the trip. The electrified Beaver stores its batteries in the fuselage; of course there is no change in mass/CG over the flight with electric, but all that fuel tank space in the wings is going to waste. The fact that these are floatplanes make charging/battery replacement tasks at the dock challenging and restrict options.
A clean sheet design, with multiple distributed smaller motors and more options for battery placement, will be a significant improvement.
Edit: although maybe there's a good idea: catapult or winch launch for electric aircraft would massively reduce the power and energy storage requirements to be carried onboard.
Being constrained to a ship makes things harder though. If it was simply very long (runway length), I reckon an abort would be fine. There are probably a lot of different ways to do it.
But yeah, much harder than a regular runway. Probably not economical.
Considering how thick fast charging cables for cars are, I don't think it will fly, literally. We could make the cables thinner with high enough voltage I guess. But then we would actually need two wires with proper separation, because unlike with trains, you obviously can't use the ground for the return path. Loose high voltage wires may be a safety problem too.
By comparison glider launch wires are quite thin and light.
They're great for trainers. Short hops with immediate control, low maintenance and operating cost, and you can save the magneto/ignition/etc workload for a different lesson series.
So, make electric airplanes the initial license, reduce the amount of hours to get it, and have an entire course on monomotors before pilots can deal with combustion airplanes.
Exactly. Flying the airplane is the first 90% of flying, managing the engine is the other 90%. So it helps to set one aside while you work on the other.
I feel there is an unaddressed market for a hybrid gas/electric or diesel/electric powerplant.
Size the battery for takeoff/climbing/go-around/diversion use-cases. Size the fossil-fuel engine for cruising power, which should improve efficiency. During takeoff and climbing power, the two motors work together. During cruise and descent, the electric motor regenerates the battery. I imagine that for general aviation, you would maintain one propshaft and not even bother with a clutch pack, since the gas engine is needed in all phases of flight, and freewheeling an electric motor is simple. Perhaps have the fossil-fuel engine keyed to the shaft with a shearing pin, so that if the engine seizes, the electric motor still turns the prop.
This has the advantage that you now have two independent motors, which could eventually help with ETOPS rating, but would initially improve safety/reliability for general aviation.
Yes, you are still fossil-fuel dependent, but you burn much less of it, first by offsetting some takeoff energy to the electrical grid, and secondly by reducing reserve power in the fossil fuel engine to improve efficiency.
Really? The Beta Alia CX300 just completed a coast to coast journey (Vermont - Santa Monica). Range of about 338 miles using 200kwh of completely unremarkable ~150wh/kg batteries. With 500wh/kg batteries being announced from multiple manufacturers now, that range should improve pretty quickly.
> There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon,
If hydrogen busses really were going to have a lower operational cost per mile in 2050, then some company would be offering to lease busses for $X per mile to transit operators, fuel included, for a 25 year lease. They'd make a loss initially, but big profits later.
That approach turns this technology maturation and cost risk into a market, and those with most expertise can then put their own money on the line to help everyone make the right decision.
There's also a sort-of-middle-ground here. There are trolleybusses which also have batteries, and can operate as regular busses where no overhead power is available. Basically you get continuous charge on parts of the route, while also being able to operate in other areas. Granted, this works for cities which already have trolleybus infrastructure in place.
With modern battery electric busses there is usually no need to charge while driving. Drivers need breaks, fast charging during the break time is enough. Fast charging infrastructure is much simpler to install and cheaper than overhead wires.
Battery is silly for buses, IMO. Invest in streetcars (electrified fixed-route buses) and be done with it. Streetcar lines represent continued investment, and are therefore more attractive to developers, unlike bus routes that can be changed on a whim. And they've been around for longer. Cut the red tape on building them and on zoning if you want to see serious results.
Tram lines really only make sense for very high capacity routes; even in cities with huge tram and underground networks, there’s still place for buses.
I addressed that. High price is an artificial problem caused primarily by red tape, from tariffs to environmental studies to rolling over to NIMBYs over neverending hearings. We had electric streetcars in small towns in the early 1900s in the US. Small towns in other countries have them today.
Buses suck. People don't like riding them as much as trains and streetcars. Bus lines do not attract the same kind of investment that streetcars can. Attracting denser development along routes improves ridership AND tax base, which helps balance out the cost.
I think we will massively regret BEV as the solution to ICE vehicles. They don't handle temperature extremes well and I believe people are overly optimistic about recycling them.
IMO it's totally fine for buses to keep using ICE for many years to come. There are orders of magnitude fewer buses than cars, they are already pretty fuel efficient, and everything that makes public transport more expensive is very bad in my opinion.
If we had zero cars in a city, but 10k diesel buses, the city would still be better than if it had 100k cars and 500 electric buses. I'm making up these numbers, of course.
Point being: sure, electrify everything eventually, but let technology improve and let prices go down to the point that it makea sense for public transport.
Right now, an extra diesel bus would do more good than replacing a diesel bus with an electric one in many cities.
Seattle's streetcars have been changed on a whim, check out the Broadway extension. Just because they've laid tracks doesn't mean nimbys can't prevent them from running.
How much power does it take to charge a bus in a reasonable amount of time?
I heard 100kw. If I have 100 buses charging overnight at 100kw I guess I need 10Mw grid connection? Is that an easy thing to get to a city bus depot in the US. In the UK I believe that would require moving to a location with a HV line and building a sub-station.
If you charge the buses over night, then you don't need 100 kW. I think the battery sizes are something like 100-300 kWh. So with 9 hours of charging, you need only perhaps 30 kW at the most.
Anecdotally, the town I live in invested in probably around 100 buses. They did build a new depot with charging stations.
Batteries are coming down in price, so if getting a good grid connection is a problem, you can put in a buffering battery.
The comfort of the BEV buses is much better than the old diesel buses, by the way, and they are much less noisy in the city.
Ok so you still need 3MW or with a buffering battery as big as your fleet you could spend half the day charging the batteries. So you still need what, 1.5MW? Or is it half that. It is still a grid connection that is larger than you could easily find in an old inner city bus depot, I would have thought?
No, that is not right. The correct answer is "it depends", but let's run some indicative numbers on data for Boston:
On average and excluding the minority of routes with dedicated lanes (which may be best run on diesel), the Boston metro buses are in use for 6.6 hours per day, covering on average 53 miles.
A full size electric bus uses electricity at a rate of approx 2 kWhr/mile.
So, on average the bus would have around 17 hours to charge up with 106 kWhrs of juice, and this averages out to about 6.2 kW. On average.
However, the smart thing to do would be to charge the buses when the power costs the least, say between 10 pm and 8 am, so you'd need ~10 kW/bus, maybe ~1MW for the 100 bus fleet. Not difficult.
Dunno about US but globally this is really a "it depends" answer. In developed countries, there are plenty of former factories and power plants with strong HV power line connections. Long term, with the electrification of everything, locations in close location to HV lines become prime estate.
There's also biofuels. In Norway until recently the biofuel mixing requiremnts were doing as much to avoid CO2 in passenger cars as EVs, though EVs grew so they're about twice as effective now. Still a powerful complementary strategy.
If the goal is anything-but-diesel-or-gasoline/petrol, the use of propane (a fossil fuel that is a byproduct of oil and gas refining) is a well-understood, well-implemented practice. I am not advocating for propane as a primary solution, but rather as part of the journey towards truly clean vehicle emissions and the ramp-down of heavily polluting fossil fuel refining. Propane and the equipment to operate engines with it are available today, and we have the knowledge going back over a century to implement it successfully.
BTW, I wish I could find the article from the 1970s discussing how Ford Motor Company engineers had converted a brand-new 1960s Lincoln to propane and ran it with 100% synthetic motor oil, never changing the oil or filter. After 500,000 miles of daily use, they stripped the engine down to its parts and found it to be shiny and not exhibiting the expected amount of wear seen in usual engines of those years with much lower mileage. I'd have to pour through old magazines for that story, but life gets in the way, so let's treat my recollection as apocryphal.
There isn't any point to propane now. Electric busses got good enough to do the job. Propane reduces pollution, but the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. Buying propane means buying electric in decade or two.
A local airport shuttle service converted some of their vans to propane. They told me the benefit is that they go about 3-4x longer between oil changes. (I suspect they aren't brave enough to go 500,000 miles.)
LPG had its chance here in Australia in the 2000's, but it didn't work out [1]. Subsidised conversions were offered back then, which many people took up on their 80's+90's model cars, but it probably led to the early demise of many of those cars. By the late 2000's there were factory cars selling with LPG "gas" systems, but they weren't as good as the petrol variants [2]. By 2011 you could get "liquid injection" models, which were as good [3]. But like the first article states, people with "large" cars were shifting to SUV's and dual cabs by that stage, and a lot of them were 4cyl petrol/petrol-turbo/hybrid/turbo-diesel, so their fuel efficiency was comparatively decent.
Also in 2011, the government introduced fuel-tax on to LPG, which it had been exempt/discounted on previously. So the price went up, and all of a sudden it wasn't as economical. So that put it in to a death-spiral, especially when many servo's started getting rid of it due to low demand. Now people with LPG cars have "range anxiety" [4]. Where I live (Perth, Western Australia), you are basically stuck in the metro area if you are LPG only. It also means there's a ton of ~2008-2012 LPG Falcons for sale second-hand at good price, but no one wants to buy them.
Out of curiosity, I just went and looked up some data for where I live - the Perth metro (source [5]);
Like all ICE engines, it still emits NOx pollution that cities want to get rid of.
It is even less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells. It combines energy-inefficiency of ICE with the energy-inefficiency of hydrogen generation and distribution.
Hydrogen is a worse fuel than gasoline, so these engines are more complex and deliver less power.
Such engines in busses would be more expensive to run, more expensive to maintain, and still have tail-pipe emissions.
I can't agree with the underlying idea of this article at all.
1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale
2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen?
3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all
4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however
5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy.
I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own.
I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.
1) Hydrogen combustion engines exist, but are extremely inefficent. For this reason all Hydrogen buses currently in use use fuel cells, which are expensive and complicated. That you were unaware of this makes me doubt the rest of your commentary.
2) There is a huge existing logistics network which conveys diesel to all corners of the world. The same, in a sense for electricity. For Hydrogen this doesn't exist.
5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.
In Europe at least, battery powered trains and commercial vehicles have been in use for decades simply because they were the best solution for certain use cases, before anyone thought about the climate or subsidies related to it. Hydrogen only came along once subsidies did.
In every single case I am aware in my country Hydrogen vehicles were only purchased because politicians insisted that Hydrogen MUST be used, and these projects have pretty much all been disastrous.
Recent in my city a number of diesel trains were replaced with battery and hydrogen. The Hydrogen trains lasted two weeks before they gave up and went back to Diesel. The battery ones are running perfectly.
> 5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.
Thank you, a template ad hominem. I'll cut that out and put it in my scrap book
Ah yes, his opinion on a completely unrelated highly partisan thing being wrong in hindsight implies his opinion about the company he is the very chairman of isn't trustworthy.
Maybe you should be the last person we all learn basic logic from :-)
> hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric
Fuel cells are presumably more expensive than battery packs. The former are barely produced, while the latter are made in gigafactories. You can't just fill up the gas tank with hydrogen, it will leak out and/or cause a violent reaction with oxygen.
> somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot
You can't just store hydrogen in a tank and call it a day. Again, it leaks through everything and is rather reactive. Maybe it could be stored on site, but even then it'll still need to get there.
> it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle
Not intrinsically. Buses could be built with swappable battery packs.
> allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
How many solar panels and how much water you need to power those 100 buses you mention? Hydrolysis isn't very efficient.
> hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy
In theory, maybe. In practice, it is difficult to store at scale.
> Maybe, but a tank of hydrogen burnt through an ICE is much cheaper than either
It's really not. Most of the hydrogen bus projects were killed by the surprising cost of fueling - approximately 4x the cost of electricity.
And no wonder: just the energy wasted producing hydrogen and then using it in a fuel cell is enough to build a battery pack that will last the equivalent.
At its best, generating hydrogen and then putting it through a fuel cell is less than 50% efficient, and that's discounting all the losses present both in BEVs and hydrogen cars.
Hydrogen combustion engines slash that efficiency in half.
Even if you handwave over the hardware required to do all that, the cost is double that of equivalent electricity.
Hydrogen vehicles are EVs too. They don't run H2 through a piston engine, it goes through a catalytic converter that generates electricity, aka Fuel Cell.
Toyota FC stack costs ~$11k, about the same if not cheaper than a 100kWh worth of Li-ion cells.
Because only Toyota makes them and mostly for publicity, yes. But my points are 1) hydrogen cars are pure EVs too, just not lithium, and 2) hydrogen primary battery thing isn't that expensive, or finicky for that matter.
I'm not like a hydrogen believer, I just loathe incorrect technical understandings on the Internet, like any techy person would.
The neat thing with JCB is the hydrogen engines are very similar to the diesel engines, and everything else (transmission etc) is the same. In fact, the engines use the exact same block but with a slightly different head. That means all the expertise and parts required to service these machines in the field is already there. If a battery bus breaks down it'll be on the back of a diesel lorry and back to the depot.
Ever met a diesel mechanic? Every one I've ever come across has a very distinctive diesel cologne. I worry how this plays out in the field when combined with a 10,000psi gas which is explosive is almost any mixture including oxygen.
The greatest tonnages are dug out with bench mining excavators. These work 24/7/365 round the clock to fill trucks from bench faces and empty into trains.
An area such as the Pilbara region moves a billion tonne of raw material a year and ships most of that.
These excavators are electric with cables that drag behind them .. they move very slowly across bench faces and then move back across the face again, it's not like they are very mobile (aside from swinging, dipping, lifting, dumping, returning, etc.)
If you could solve the problem of running electrical cables to mobile equipment that is used in farming, road building, forestry etc. then you'd change the world and put entire industries out of business.
Your example is not very different from how they did mining at the beginning of the industrial revolution: the equipment is tethered to the mine. Electric railways have been thing for almost 150 years now, but the vehicles are still tethered to the rails.
If we could start from scratch we probably would choose your solution and not worry about mobile energy storage at all. We'd just build stuff around that constraint that equipment has to be tethered. But unfortunately a world has already been built that involves mobile equipment and you won't find much support for tearing it all down and starting again (alas). Greenfield development is engineering on easy mode. The real challenge is figuring out how to move forward given the current world.
I've got a mixed old school capital 'E' Engineering and applied math bachground coupled with a lot of exposure to mining, cattle stations, and wheat farms.
For forty odd years I've been involved in or tangential to projects related to exploration, cost cutting, new technology, optimised processing, etc.
> If we could start from scratch we probably would choose your solution
Not my solution, I first saw electric powered heavy earth moving equipment in th early 1970s.
The greatest savings to companies and greatest benefits to the environment (aside from somehow getting people across the globe to consume less) come from making the greatest consumption areas more efficient.
Mining equipment runs 24/7/365 continuosly, idealy every hour of every day of the year at near maximum capacity allowing for maintainance.
It's a sector that consumes extremely large amounts of transport energy, more than agriculture.
It's open to innovations such as "infinity trains" and massive dedicated solar farms to generate direct power in sunlight and generate on site hydrogen derivitives for generating power at night.
Farming equipment works "hard" (heavy earth turning plowing, harvesting) for a few weeks a year. Other farm activities (seeding, spraying) happens at other times in the year and doesn't require quite the same horsepower.
There's scope to split ag activity between heavy high horsepower peak usage and lighter continuous pass work.
Already we see consumer ready (but not yet widespread) Agri-bots for weeding and spraying - solar charged, battery powered, no human on board, vision enabled self driving devices that can run near continuously (half the night on battery charged during day) that can minimise spraying to "just the weeds".
I don't think a tractor is necessary a bad use case for batteries. They just need battery packs which can do the equivalent of a days work. Electric motors are almost better suited to the use case due to the torque. I'm sure some of the US mega farms have tractors which run all night (and the emissions of those are the least of their environmental issues) but this isn't common elsewhere.
I believe the problem is that a tractor runs for much of the workday at a very high load. Pulling a plough is constant hard work, not like a car that is only using a lot of power while accellerating hard. If you had your foot to the floor in a Tesla constantly you would run your battery flat in a lot less than 8 hours. I have read that the batteries for this application would therefore be infeasibly large.
Yes your example is extremely niche. It only works where you are going to work on one specific application for many years in the same place. It doesn't generalise to building a house, a supermarket or a road. It doesn't generalise to ploughing the Mid-West.
Even in your example it only works if you are taking all of the material to one destination, like an ore refinery. If it was road stone, the rock would get loaded onto a diesel truck for the final part of the journey. So again, the tractor, the excavator on a job site, the lorry, will all stay on diesel or hydrogen ICE
How are these buses refueled? Is it just like pouring gasoline into a normal car with a handle from the pump? Or is it an airtight pump like filling a scuba tank?
Scuba tank, the filling process takes several minutes I heard, think 15+ for a car.
The tanks in cars are around 800 bar, reinforce carbon fibre with a bladder inside.
To fill it the compressor station has to deliver higher pressure, I recall 1200 bar but not sure about it.
Also hydrogen has the oddity to produce heat when expanding, which means the filling process needs to be actively cooled.
Considering current CCS and future MCS charging ports and their speed I think the hydrogen lost another advantage if it ever had a refuelling time advantage.
To be clear no necessary corruption of the people in agencies themself,
- but of the people consulting them
- and/or influential investors in a sunk cost fallacy where they think they still can save their investments
- again often a place they ended up in due to corruption, not necessary them themself being corrupt but other which gave them wrong consultancy
Even when I looked into the topic around 14~ years ago it was very clear that hydrogen will likely not be a competitive technology for cars "in general", through maybe somewhat competitive in some niche (i.e. trucks). But the thing is if you considered marked dynamics back then it never looked long side promising. As whatever wins outside of the niche (batteries) will get so much more traction weather it's infrastructure or science investments.
Now the question is what kind of corruption?
Russian Money (and any other natural gas exporter, but in Germany mainly Russian Money)
Again not necessary Russia directly going to people and bribing them. But mainly by using co-investments, potentially with obfuscated source, to convince people that a lot of other reliable investors are investing into it and therefor you should, too. Which, with a bit of more direct corruption, is quite an efficient strategy to push investments into a specific direction. Because the more you convince ("in general" independent) investors to invest into hydrogen the more they will lobby for hydrogen themself.
Now the key question here is why would Russia want to convince countries to use hydrogen as a "green future technology"?
Because why it technically looks like it can work, _it practically does not_!
This isn't even about hydrogen cars by themself.
But about hydrogen production, the simplest cheapest way to produce hydrogen is from natural gas in a non green way. While you can produce it green it has a pretty bad efficiency and exiting (and long term planed!!!) infrastructure is barely enough to move the hydrogen usage from other industries which do not it anyway to green methane.
And while lobbyist go on and on about how it's just a question to spin up the infrastructure it not only doesn't seem to happen even ~14 years ago it didn't seem that likely and today it's very clear it won't happen because it makes no sense. I mean sure e.g. Australia will likely produce a ton of green Hydrogen in the future, but again in comparison of what is needed to move all trucks & busses etc. to it it's not that relevant.
This doesn't mean there is no use ever for green hydrogen (like mentioned various existing industries need hydrogen). But today you can very clearly say it doesn't make sense for PKWs (full stop) and due to constant battery improvements in all areas and high investments into future improvements and not having reached a wall in science in that are it has moved from "it might make sense for some decades for trucks" to, nah, seems dump for trucks, too.
So to sum up:
- It seems doable enough so that (potentially corrupt) lobbyist can be convincing.
- Russia spend a ton of money in co-investing into research to push research in the EU and especially Germany in that direction. Implicitly making it look like a good investment deal.
- Then a lot of people which can influence political decisions got stuck with it as they are worried about losing their investment and worse, having missed the window to get a foothold into the actual future technologies.
- Then this people using their vast influence, including e.g. the "Springer Verlag" (most influential new publisher in Germany).
- Leading to a loop where more people get mislead into tinging it's good and invest themself, and then lobby for it and then worry to lose their investment so now lobby against any of it's competition.
- And even companies and politicians not stuck in that loop in any way might thing it's not "viable" and as such don't push against that nonsense.
I would guess like myself you are denied due to geolocation. I'm in Australia using an Australian ISP. I could load a proxy but due to so many anonyphobic sites or scripts via their API that really try hard to detect and deny proxies, I am not that engaged with a news item to go to the trouble. Also looking at my earlier comment in this tread also pointing out the 403, apparently some people don't like me mentioning that -- I guess I can wonder how long before onion and nearly impossible to load links will be OK at HN.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog...
> The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.