They've got an induction powered bus loop running OLEV buses in Gumi, South Korea.
I'm all for electric cars but....
- Thread starter swain90
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They've got an induction powered bus loop running OLEV buses in Gumi, South Korea.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source. It has to be made out of something.
Sulphur/Iodine process could work well with high temperature reactors as a means of producing Hydrogen.
But apart from rocket propellant Hydrogen is pretty useless as a day to day fuel. Either as a gas or liquid it is difficult, dangerous and expensive to transport and store.
The best thing you can do with hydrogen is stick it onto Oil/Coal (Or eventually atmospheric CO2, but that is some-ways off) to make synthetic LPG/Petrol.
We already have a very reliable and well established global infrastructure that can handle this material and over a billion vehicles worldwide using simple and well understood technology that can already use it either as is or (as for LPG) with simple modification.
This way we could phase in non-fossil based transport fuels without having to uproot our existing transport infrastructure and start from the ground up with a completely new one.
Vehicles using internal combustion engines and a room temperature liquid chemical fuel (Either at atmospheric or just over atmospheric presure) are actually a very hard technology to beat!
I am obviously missing something but for me it all seems so easy 
1 We push for electric cars with constantly improving batteries.
2 We convert as many parking spaces as possible to charging spots in particular at service stations and peoples homes and work.
3 We continue to invest heavily in "renewables" Solar , tidal and wind with the latter 2 being particularly useful for electric vehicles.
At the moment most of our energy use is through the day and this has a negative impact on the efficiency of Wind and tidal power generation as these are 24 hour technologies.
With electric vehicles they mostly charge through the night making the above more efficient.
4 Investing in energy storage should also be an absolute priority.
Unfortunately investing in the future and on infrastructure is never the priority and so I am not that hopeful but I can never understand why as a country we do not have the goal of being energy self sufficient.
1 We push for electric cars with constantly improving batteries.
2 We convert as many parking spaces as possible to charging spots in particular at service stations and peoples homes and work.
3 We continue to invest heavily in "renewables" Solar , tidal and wind with the latter 2 being particularly useful for electric vehicles.
At the moment most of our energy use is through the day and this has a negative impact on the efficiency of Wind and tidal power generation as these are 24 hour technologies.
With electric vehicles they mostly charge through the night making the above more efficient.
4 Investing in energy storage should also be an absolute priority.
Unfortunately investing in the future and on infrastructure is never the priority and so I am not that hopeful but I can never understand why as a country we do not have the goal of being energy self sufficient.
Electric motors are the solution. The problem is powering them with batteries is not, and at the moment is actually holding EV adoption up, and diverting research into something which is quite visibly a dead end rather than focusing on genuinely realistic long term, mass adoption solutions.
True, but its swings and roundabouts. There are massive benefits to it over petrol and electricity too, so its about the balance. I'm not sold that Hydrogen is the solution either though. I genuinely don't know what is, but I'm 100% certain it isn't batteries.
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As a variation of Litium-air technology?
Litium-air looks, on paper, like the solution to everything. But in reality its been 50 years since they were first proposed and more recently there has been 15+ years of hard core research, yet the outlook is still that there is just too many issues with them.
The Wiki on them is full of quotes from industry experts talking them down or suggesting that they are not a solution worth pursuing, unfortunately.
Plus, you still have to charge them.
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I might have agreed with that statement 5 years ago but not anymore.
EV battery price and efficiency has and continues to improve far beyond what anybody expected a few years ago.
Electric cars with a 300+ mile range that cost almost the same as a conventional vehicle are just around the corner maybe less than 5 years away.
Honestly for most people you would have to be a fool to buy the diesel/petrol variant of such a car if an electric cost the same with a similar or slightly lower range.
The problem isn't size, its charging. It seems feasible that in 25 years we could have batteries 1/4 the size of current ones with the same range, so in theory that could be batteries the same size with 4x the range! 1,000 miles range sounds brilliant!
And then you realize it would take a home charger a week to charge that.
The fast chargers are already giving an 80% charge in 30 mins and most people will be charging at home overnight or at work.
Honestly I used to drive 50-60000 miles a year way way above average but even under those circumstances to be forced to take a 30 min break after 250 miles (easily 4 and a half hours on todays roads) is perfectly acceptable.
To have lots of fast chargers in every motorway service station would be relatively simple to accomplish and is well on its way to happening.
For most of us even now if we had access to plenty of chargers 150 mile range would be more than adequate and a 300 mile range would last most people a full week without even bothering to charge.
80% of current batteries. If the chargers don't get any faster, making the battery 4x larger will mean it takes 4x longer to charge to 80%.
It's really not. The UK currently has just under 6,000 public chargers, of which only 114 are Super Chargers.
It's really not. The UK currently has just under 6,000 public chargers, of which only 114 are Super Chargers.
Soldato
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Recycling.
And every year battery technology is improving so no doubt they'll find greener ways of producing and recycling them.
Now all gather around with me and say a prayer to our lord Elon Musk, who will deliver us from this evil known as petrol.
And every year battery technology is improving so no doubt they'll find greener ways of producing and recycling them.
Now all gather around with me and say a prayer to our lord Elon Musk, who will deliver us from this evil known as petrol.
In all seriousness, Musk NEEDS to be solving this problem, as he is building factories planning on producing half a million 500kg batteries a year!
If his plans come to fruition his company will be spewing out 250,000 tonnes of battery a year while claiming to be saving the planet!
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Unfortunately not. As others have said, that would be a huge amount of power required, and the cost to increase the electrical capacity of a service station is currently prohibitive (think in the region of £100ks per service station). I read an article a little while back (can't remember where though) that worked it out that even if you charged for the electricity (at a fairly average price), it would take around 70 years to make back the cost of putting in a DC fast charger assuming no additional infrastructure costs are incurred, so with the addition of an uprated substation etc for the service station, it's not financially viable for a company to do.
Soldato
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But that's basing it on current technology and infrastructure, rather than what is actually happening in that charging technology and power/Nation Grid infrastructure is improving alongside battery technology.
There's already talk of Tesla trialing 200KW plug-in chargers and similarly there is inductive charging (look at Bombardier, Opbrid, Proterra etc) that's used on EV bus services that'll do 700KW (granted that's peak).
So whilst we are a long way off battery EV's being completely viable, it certainly isn't "dead".
However i am curious to know what you believe the best alternative is if you don't believe battery EV is the answer?
Certainly continuing to burn fossil fuels isn't it though.
As for regards to three-phase (which you brought up in the Tesla 3 thread), whilst it isn't common in new properties, it isn't uncommon to see it in older properties - certainly the entire estate here has it running to the board (obviously only a single alternating, for load balancing, phase is used).
What percentage of properties have it versus those that don't, i'm not sure, but quick-chargers for homes is certainly doable.
Rubbish, rubbish and rubbish, respectively. I'll back that up.
Expensive is relative, as are most things. If your base of comparison is petrol then yes, it's expensive. As are batteries and anything else. Petrol is cheap because it's both a very mature technology and plentiful. It also has downsides which is why our basis of comparison is not petrol but batteries = this whole discussion is based on the a priori assumption that you want to move away from petrol. And hydrogen can be cost competitive against batteries. As I said, there are already commercial vehicles you can buy right now that work on HFC technology. Toyota has a family car that uses it right now.
Dangerous to store. Again, relative. It has its own unique challenges but so does anything else. For example, if you get a leak of hydrogen you pretty much rapidly end up with... no hydrogen. It is the fastest rising gas in existence and disappears into the upper atmosphere in a fast, narrow jet. What does petrol do? Pools around on the ground and even petrol fumes (still flammable and easily ignited by any random spark) are heavier than air and pool. A petrol leak is more likely to lead to a big conflagration than a hydrogen leak. Sure, I can search up an image of a burning hydrogen leak if you want, but on the whole, whilst hydrogen burns hotter, there's a LOT to be said for having a 5 second narrow flame right up than a gathering pool of flammable liquid and heavier than air gas.
As to requiring fossil fuels to produce - disprovable by any child with a chemistry set. You're confusing the fact that it's currently cheap to produce hydrogen from fossil fuels with the notion that it needs to be done that way or that this is the only cost-effective way to do so. You can produce it by electrolysis. And High Temperature Electrolysis (use hot water instead of cold in simple terms) is pretty efficient. You know what nuclear power stations have? Copious amounts of hot water and power. Hydrogen is not a fuel source, it's a means of storing energy. Nuclear power is very cost-effective but doesn't ramp up and down efficiently. Meaning that when it comes to the peaks and troughs of demand, you either aim low (and need some more variable power source such as gas to supplement it) or aim high and waste production. Hydrogen gives you a means to store that energy. They're perfect siblings and it has huge potential. Though the sourcing of hydrogen from fossil fuels can provide a smooth transition in our energy sources in the meantime if we want. In any case, it's cost effective to produce it without fossil fuels if we wish. Just as currently most battery charging takes place from burning fossil fuels.
Strange, because this already happens. You need a pump that can handle hydrogen (these exist) and a tank that can hold hydrogen (these exist) and neither are technically or financially show-stoppers.
Yes it does. And yet we have hydrogen vehicles on the road right now doing fine. You're going to have to qualify your statement with some numbers if you want to argue against the viability of things that actually exist. Yes, Hydrogen can slowly escape from even a steel container. And... so what? If you want to come back to a full car after five months of no use and still find it perfectly full rather than at 80%, maybe Hydrogen isn't for you. But if you just want to drive your car around why is the slow leakage of hydrogen a concern for you? Any leakage is several orders of magnitude less than actual consumption - and that goes for both vehicles and stations that distribute it. That's not a figure of speech, btw. So let's be explicit here - one of the arguments you're listing against hydrogen is an inefficiency due to leakage of maybe 0.1%.
It's irritating when people throw around facts with no context as if they're significant barriers.
Relative to petrol? Yes. But this whole discussion is based on the assumption that we need to get rid of petrol. If you're rejecting that premise then you have to reject batteries, too.
You said that one already. And it remains not the issue you present it as.
Now there we agree. US and UK governments are happy to subsidise batteries all day long. Yet are rather quiet on the subject of hydrogen. These are the same governments that subsidize wind farms as well! Government subsidies do not equate to "best technology", I think that much is obvious. (Unless you think wind power is viable without subsidies in which case Friends of the Earth are waiting for you).
Public transport is already using hydrogen in London and other places. There are garages in the USA that are converting to support it. Japan it is taking off. This Chicken and Egg attitude of it doesn't exist and therefore can't exist could have been applied to countless technologies we have today - and yet these technologies took off. Given that, despite your disbelief, we already have a VERY good infrastructure for hydrogen in our national network of garages which can be converted to add hydrogen, you're wrong.
And major vehicle manufacturers like Toyota have released HFC vehicles. So don't pretend nobody is "planning" or "testing" HFCs because you're factually incorrect.
But not greener than hydrogen which can be produced from any power source that batteries can be charged from and doesn't involve any unpleasant materials to construct a tank. The output of a battery is a used battery (and is today still charged from fossil fuels). The output of a HFC is water vapour.
As I said earlier, the most vicious opponents of hydrogen, are unanimously battery proponents.
taking my term of "super chargers" to just mean teslas branded version is a little off.
fast chargers sit at about a 1000 devices.
I do not know how many motorway service stations there are in the UK but I would be surprised if less than 80% of them do not already have a fast charger.
Those numbers also only account for PUBLIC chargers any business with multiple EVs will have its own chargers and many simply provide them to staff but are not public.
At home on 240v you will get 3kW or 7kW. If you can get 3 phase 400v you can move to 11kW, or if you are lucky and have a double charger in your Tesla, 22kW.
And thats it. Thats the capacity. That is as far as any plans for any improvements to the National Grid go. At most any UK home is only going to provide 40 miles per hour of charge ever. And that capacity needs to be split among the cars you have in the household.
Then your looking at public charging. Yes, they are up to 120kW, but its very easy to be seduced by the marketing. Loads of people willy gleely quote the "30 minutes to 80% charge" line as if its available to everyone. Its not. Its really not. 114 out of the UKs 6,000 public chargers are 120kW Super Chargers (2%), and only people with Teslas can use them. The majority of chargers and the majority of cars are much slower than the headline Tesla figures.
Putting 120kW chargers everywhere requires a home electricity network not even being rumoured, a National Grid supplied by a vast increase in power stations (nom nom fossil fuels), and everyone to be driving Teslas.
I've said many times I don't know what the solution is. But I wish people would invest in finding it rather than wasting money on batteries, which are so obviously limited.
This is correct. At no point is the hydrogen in a HFC ignited. You remember how when you run a current through water you can split out the hydrogen? It's a bit like that but in reverse. Hydrogen ions combine with electrons but to do so the electrons have to follow a path to get there and electrons following a path are more commonly known as "electric current". The hydrogen combines with Oxygen to make H2O.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Solid_oxide_fuel_cell_protonic.svg
EDIT: Hmmm, wont let me embed SVG diagrams.
Fast Chargers = 22kW and above.
Super Chargers = 120kW.
You cannot use the "80% in 30 minutes" line and "Fast Chargers" at the same time. Only Super Chargers provide the 80% in 30 minutes, and only to Teslas. Fast Chargers take a lot longer. Its marketing hype, and its clearly working.