RegGuheert said:
AndyH said:
GRA said:
FCEVs may not be the best solution from the standpoint of energy efficiency, but I don't think that's necessary or maybe even desirable.
Bloody brilliant, that.
It figures. Andy thinks the one statement in Guy's post that I disagree with is "bloody brilliant".
Simply put, efficiency is key to an energy system if it is proposed to replace the current infrastructure. <snip rest>
Let me be clear. I wrote the above because I'm a firm believer that 'the best is the enemy of the good enough, for now'. Sure, I'd like to see energy efficiency maximized, and whichever AFV system we ultimately settle on needs to be as efficient as possible, within the constraints of available energy and costs. BEVs may ultimately reach a stage (and price) where everyone will be satisfied by them. But we obviously aren't there yet, and I'm willing to take what I can get ASAP as long as it's more efficient than an ICEV and can use renewables for generation, because I think smaller individual improvements on a larger scale sooner will be critical to limiting the effects of climate change, even if it's unlikely that I'll be around for the worst of that.
Hell, if we could get 50% of the population into 40 mpg HEVs and PHEVs in the next 5 years, by momentarily curtailing both BEV and FCEV introduction and instead incentivizing the two gas burning techs, I'd be for it, because it will cause a more rapid reduction in GHGs in the near term. Sub 1% adoption rates of the latter two aren't going to get us far, no matter how much they are individually better than ICEVs.
My opinion of FCEVs and the hydrogen infrastructure has come around considerably in the past year. It had been entirely negative, largely formed by Joe Romm's book "The Hype about Hydrogen." Many of the problematical issues remain unchanged since that book was published in 2004 (and presumably written the year before), but some of the major issues, such as the cost of fuel cells and the amount of renewables have changed a great deal. In particular the amount of natural gas available has altered considerably since then. We were supposed to become a NG importer rather than an exporter; instead, we recently surpassed Russia to become the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas combined, something no one would have predicted in 2004.
FCEVs, despite their energy inefficiency vis-a-vis BEVs, represent an improvement over ICEVs and (I believe) have acceptable operational characteristics _now_ to a mainstream population - what remains to be done is to continue to reduce the price through scale, and to reduce the efficiency disadvantage through improvements in storage and electrolysis.
All of these techs are moving ahead at a relatively rapid pace, and I don't think it's wise to strand a whole lot of capital in infrastructure which may be made rapidly obsolete. OTOH, we need to balance the need to keep costs down with the need for speed, with the inevitable result that some waste is unavoidable. It's trying to strike the right balance with a large quantity of unknowns that's hard.