RegGuheert said:
drees said:
Thanks. It's good to see actual owner reports. No more comparisons between actual EVs and H2 vaporware in which optimistic assumptions are used for the FCV and pessimistic ones are used for the EV.
drees said:
Big range in fueling times - 10 minutes when no one is there and station is operating normally.
But adding 30 minutes for one fill and 80 minutes for another fill gives you 120 minutes for 3 fill ups - and he can only fill up to 85%.
Actually, that comes to 140 minutes for 3 fill-ups, so about 47 minutes per fill-up.
drees said:
Now, the person is a bit misguided as it takes about 40 minutes to do a full Supercharge from low SOC to around 80-90%, so the total time would be about the same for 3 fill ups.
Not with the corrected values, at least in warmer weather. (Tesla charging will slow in cold weather.)
So,
what did Hyundai tell him?
Hyundai USA said:
It takes less than 10 minutes to fully fill the Tucson Fuel Cell,...
So they are in the ballpark on a good day, except for the fact that the tank does not "fully fill" in that time. They also did not mention the fact that the station may need time to recover before his fill-up and that many stations only have one pump. They also did not point out that H2 refueling stations are likely to be even more unreliable than CHaDeMo station due to the high level of complexity.
BTW, I wonder how much *additional* electricity it takes to cool the hydrogen gas as it is pumped into the cars for the new stations that can fill on in three minutes on a good day (longer if warmer outside).
The station at UC Irvine opened 8/31/2006, so it's at least one and maybe two generations behind the state of the art. My understanding is that new stations designed to refuel cars to 10,000 PSI/700 bar store the H2 at 875 bar, specifically to allow for rapid recharging intervals and less need to run the compressor or cooler during refueling. The CARB report I linked to upthread, among other things, describes the steps needed to increase the daily throughput of H2 stations and meet the demand, as well as discussions of the existing stations and their limitations:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/ab8/ab8_report_final_june2014.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Starting on page 29 is a section titled "Evaluation of Current and Projected Hydrogen Fueling Capacity"
From that section (pg. 30. I've added the
emphasis):
"Stations in the southern half of the state have an expected average capacity of 150 kg/day, while
those in the northern half have an expected average capacity of 210 kg/day. This is largely due
to the fact that there are
numerous small capacity legacy stations in the South Coast, Torrance,
and Los Angeles areas that were built at times when technology was not as mature as it is today
and the expected vehicle fleet much smaller.
Additionally, these stations were built when FCEV
and hydrogen fuel station technologies were largely in their demonstration phase. By contrast,
most of the stations planned for northern California are still in the process of construction or
planned for future construction, using newer technology with higher design capacity for a larger
customer base."
Section VI, "Hydrogen Fuel Station Performance Standards and Technology" starts on page 34 of the report. Here's a part of that:
"There are varying station designs across the state’s current and planned installations. It is not
yet known if these earlier stations will meet customer fueling habits in the future. With the
current numbers of FCEVs on the road, most station operators are concerned primarily with
improving the reliability and maximizing the availability to fuel single, intermittent customers.
Future stations will need to address the needs of multiple customers simultaneously; maximizing
throughput, rather than availability alone, will begin to take more focus. The intermittency of
current operation will quickly become insufficient under current plans for vehicle deployment.
Going forward, it will be necessary to analyze and distinguish between customer usage habits at
various stations. ARB proposes three station classifications be considered for the next round of
funding, as detailed in Table 2."
Skipping down a bit:
"The next steps in funding hydrogen fuel stations should combine the need for larger, High Use
Commuter stations with the need for more supply inside the clusters. Therefore, a priority
should be placed on large (500+ kg/day) stations within the five clusters. Outside of the clusters,
the majority of the stations should then follow the Low Use Commuter plan, as they will likely
serve similar customers as the in-cluster stations, but may have fewer vehicle visits on a daily
basis."
From page 37:
B: Higher Capacity Stations
While the largest hydrogen fuel stations should continue to grow in capacity in order to fill the
high daily-use commuter-supporting role, it is also necessary that all hydrogen fuel stations
should eventually become larger to satisfy long-term projections of demand. This can be
achieved through new installation of larger stations or upgrades to the capacity of existing
stations. To balance the near-term costs and demand, today’s funding programs do not yet
require very large station capacities for eligibility since the earliest market demands will be
sufficiently met with today’s typical station capacity. The recently-awarded stations required
a minimum capacity of 100 kg over a main operation time of 12 hours, though nearly all of the
awarded stations were designed to surpass the minimum requirement (the awarded average
capacity was 180 kg per day) [12]. Considering all built and planned stations, the present-day
average capacity is 173 kg. The largest stations have a capacity of 350 kg per day.
Figure 16 shows the breakdown of California’s full historical record of hydrogen fuel station
capacities according to 50-kg increments of station size. As can be seen, the vast majority of
stations have a daily capacity of 200kg or less (e.g., there are 31 stations representing 54% of the
total; these stations have a capacity of 150-200 kg, with an average capacity within this group
of 181 kg.). Combined with the information in Figure 15, it is clear that a steady transition to
higher capacities overall will need to occur in the future in order to provide a familiar retail
experience for the customer. On an energy-equivalent basis, today’s gasoline stations provide 24
times the amount of fuel on average; the largest gasoline stations provide 80 times as much fuel
as the largest hydrogen fuel stations.
And so on, with details.
