358
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
358 points (98.1% liked)
politics
18924 readers
3821 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Hydrogen is completely unsuitable for land based transportation because building the infrastructure and actually making the stuff is pretty hard to do at scale. The electricity grid, on the other hand, already exists. And once you've built the charger, you don't need to send a truck to refill it on a regular basis.
H2 is way better for trucks and planes than batteries, because even with the reinforced tanks it doesn't weigh much, and the refueling does not take long.
I agree that battery electric is probably the way to go for consumer passenger vehicles, though.
/owns a hydrogen car
The problem is that batteries keep improving--about double capacity by weight every 10 to 15 years. I've been following hydrogen development for decades now, and fundamental problems in storage and efficiency have yet to be solved. If you were to start building hydrogen truck infrastructure today, batteries would catch up and everyone would just use that.
But ultimately, we should look to replace 90% of long haul trucking with trains.
*if we can find a clean way of producing H2 at scale
Electrolysis works, though as with everything, nuclear is the best option.
Sure, but electrolysis is only around 30% efficient — so you need 3 units of energy to produce the hydrogen to drive a vehicle x distance, whereas a BEV would only need one unit to travel the same distance.
That is, you can use the electricity generated from that nuclear power plant to drive three times the distance with a fleet of BEVs than you’ll get out of a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles.
electrolysis requires a lot of input energy so it's not very efficient, and nuclear is still very expensive and politically contentious. And if we were somehow able to get new nuclear plants built they'd be put to much better use replacing coal plants than for H2 production.
Like I said the problem is the infrastructure. Building this out at scale would require a massive effort that nobody will want to pay for. And rightly so because electric trucks are already a thing and will get a lot more popular in the next few years.
To piggyback off this though, there are areas where the infrastructure would make sense, like long distance shipping trucks and busses that have pretty well defined areas that they could regularly dock and refuel at, and those are the exact situations where electric is struggling the most.
All to say, the research into hydrogen powered vehicles isn't useless, even if it's not going to offer anything at the consumer level.
Electric trucks are lugging around their batteries moreso than their payload.
...largely in the same appalling, copper-line state it has been in since its original installation 100 years ago. Which is woefully and catastrophically unprepared for an America full of EV drivers.
Not disagreeing with your core point, but just saying. The American electrical backbone system is absolutely in no way prepared for a mass shift to electric vehicles at this time. We're getting there, and if EV adoption continues at its current pace we run a pretty good chance of being fine so long as proper upgrades are actually being made, but we're not there yet and demand for EVs absolutely could still outpace the ability of our electrical infrastructure to support them.