What factors led to shift away from pursuing hydrogen-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles?
In: Other
It takes a lot of energy (often electricity) to produce hydrogen in a usable manner for cars. It’s a lot easier to just put that same electricity directly into a battery electric vehicle
Also what is a fuel cell and how does it work?
Lots of things, cost, how efficient they are, also they don’t really solve an issue. The byproduct of hydrogen engines is water vapor, which is about 4x worse than what we release now when suddenly dumped in mass quality into an environment such as a state or city etc.
[deleted]
even where there were infrastructure to fill up a tank, it was extremely expensive. Like $30/100miles. People rather charge EV than pay so much. So sales never picked up and thus even those few filling stations started to close.
Not to mention that EV charging costs about $30k per charger, so maybe $120k for station of 4, while hydrogen station is closer to $2 mil.
Basic economics. Handling hydrogen in a portable manner is bleeding expensive, and energy efficiency is poor in comparison to batteries.
Now, if you had an overabundance of renewable energy and more hydrogen than you knew what to do with, that’s another matter. But building hydrogen cars before that situation is putting the cart in front of the horse.
The hydrogen economy will not start with cars. It’ll start with stationary industrial uses.
Hydrogen is inefficient. First, you have to put it huge amount of energy to split water which has losses. Then converting it back to electricity too has losses. You could have used the same energy to charge a battery instead which are like 95% efficient.
This is one of the most important factor other than the issues with hydrogen generation, storage, and safety challenges.
The storage and transport of hydrogen is very difficult as it can very easily leak. It’s also a bit expensive currently because most hydrogen being produced is a byproduct of other processes and we have no large scale production for it which would make it cheap enough to compete with gas.
However a lot of these issues are being worked on and solving them would be a massive breakthrough, mainly because hydrogen powered cars can provide good alternatives to both internal combustion and electric cars.
1. Hydrogen keeps failing in the market. You can go buy a hydrogen car right now. Nobody is… But you can. They’ll even give you $15,000 worth of free fuel. Still no takers.
2. After all these decades and decades in development, hydrogen still hasn’t overcome most of the initial problems. Storage, generation, handling, using platinum group metals in the fuel cells. Basically everything you see on the road is still in the experimental stage.
3. It’s completely unaffordable. You may have gotten a clue with all the free fuel Toyota was willing to give you with the purchase of a hydrogen car, but if not, it bares emphasizing that there’s no company on earth that could afford to install the infrastructure necessary to make hydrogen refiling easy and ubiquitous. It will require massive government subsidies, to the tune of the GDP of all the large developed countries in the world. How do you think taxpayers will feel to double their respective national debts just so we can have hydrogen instead of pure battery electric.
4. Keep in mind, fuel cell cars ARE battery electric cars. They just have an exotic range extender that enables the consumption of very expensive fuel bolted on. So any criticism one levels against electric cars ALSO APPLIES TO FUEL CELL CARS.
5. We could go on and on and on about all the issues with hydrogen, but fundamentally it’s an exercise in greenwashing and delay. “Look, we’re developing a hydrogen car so don’t bother making us offset ICE sales by shipping something that’s going to actually work!” Or “The world needs energy, we’ll just keep fracking up all the methane we can till hydrogen is ready, and whenever that is we will be able to supply hydrogen by cracking off the CO2 and venting it to the atmosphere so that some well meaning soccer mom can pretend she’s saving the planet because she has no TAILPIPE emissions.
All industrialized countries have power grids throughout the country, which means it’s not outrageously difficult to build charging stations for electric cars.
Hydrogen vehicles need hydrogen fuel cells, which require special hydrogen refueling stations that cost many millions of dollars to build. To make hydrogen work, we’d need to build many hydrogen plants, and fleets of special trucks to transport it.
In my opinion, hydrogen power could work well for commercial aviation and cargo shipping, since you could have a modest number of large refueling stations at airports and seaports, instead of trying to build a huge number of small stations for personal cars.
Latest Answers