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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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No it isn’t. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s much harder to wire up millions of charging stations with the necessary amount of power, than to deal with high pressure gas. We’ve just normalized the danger of high-voltage electricity. In reality, this is just as safe if not more so, and a lot easier to pull off.
Erm, no buddy. Everyone's entitled to their incorrect opinion, and this one's a doozy.
How much big of a tank of H2 do you need to effectively equal the energy capacity of a lithium ion pack? If the tank needs to be reasonably sized, how high is the pressure? How do you ensure hydrogen embrittlement isn't a problem on both the tanks and the transport pipes/storage tanks? How does pressure correlate with exfiltration?
Flying wires is a walk in the park, especially competitively.
A 700 bar tank will store more than energy than a similarly sized li-ion battery.
As an energy storage system for cars, the problem is already solved. People are just repeating the same anti-progress rhetoric that was used against battery cars.
700 bar?? 10000 pounds/in^2??
No, you've unfortunately lost your grip.
We've been doing it for over a decade now. It is shown to be safe.
No thanks. I'd much prefer electrified mass transit. I'm saying this as a former manufacturing engineer, there's quite a bit that can go wrong with cyclically pressurized vessels in subtle ways that are difficult to non-destructively evaluate.
This is not the path forward for anyone but heavy industry.
Then you are just being old and outdated. It is totally safe.
I understand your point, and disagree. Are you qualified to really understand this issue, or an opinionated enthusiast?
You can plug an EV into an outlet in your garage. No way could hydrogen be easier than that.
You have to have a garage to begin with. People have created a distorted grasp of what infrastructure even is.
Two thirds of Americans have a garage. Roughly zero can refuel hydrogen cells at home.
2/3 is still not 100%. And you can refuel at home if you really wanted. In fact, you can even refuel a gasoline car at home. But in reality this was never a major selling point. It's just the crutch BEV fans are relying on. The refueling infrastructure is the only thing that really matters.
Most EV users charge at home, this is absolutely a major selling point, and they would all lose this ability if they switched to hydrogen. Which is why they aren't switching to hydrogen.
And a lot of people can't charge at home. You will still need public stations.
In the end, this is just the whining of a handful of rich people. If it is more straightforward to get everyone to refuel at public stations, it is the better solution.
You will need public stations with hydrogen, too. But with BEV, you need a lot fewer stations. Which is why switching to BEVs is a lot more straightforward.
You will need millions of charging stations everywhere. Both AC and DC charging stations. It is actually less straightforward once you go beyond home recharging.
That's ridiculous, there aren't anywhere near a million gas stations in the US, and you will need a lot fewer charging stations than gas stations.
That's the point: If you can refuel instead of recharge, you don't need that many stations. The number of hydrogen stations would be the same as the number of gas stations. And you have it backwards: You need vastly more charging stations than refueling stations. The US has something like 150k stations, and it's not even close to being enough.
EV users charge at home. That means they make far fewer trips to charging stations than do hydrogen or gasoline users. In fact, many EV users never go to a charging station and only charge at home. Which means you need far fewer charging stations than refuelling stations.
Again, not everyone can do this. You will have to have public chargers. Plus fast charging for long distance driving. This will still require millions of charging stations, far more than any technology that allows you to refuel.
If there is less demand for charging stations than refuelling stations, then it is impossible that you will need more charging stations than refuelling stations.
One refueling station can serve thousands of customers, but a charging station needs multiple hours to charge each car. So you need far fewer gas stations. This is why the economics of gas stations worked out in the first place. Before, people bought tanks of gasoline and refueled at home. The gas station model was cheaper.
It takes 20 minutes to charge at a Tesla Supercharger. And their economics are working great, in fact Supercharger stations are more profitable than gas stations.
You mean from 20% to 80% charge? Which is realistically only 150 miles of gained range, and that's assuming everything is working at full power. The alternative gives you 0-100% in 5 minutes consistently. And best of all, it can be scaled up to trucks and above without suddenly realizing you need megawatts of power per station.
In reality, the charging solution is much harder. We've just normalized the idea of using electricity to charge things when it is actually a bigger challenge than dealing with fuels.