TonyWilliams
Well-known member
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5626/1740
Hydrogen and FCEVs discussion thread
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GRA
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I see the date of that paper is 2003. IIRR the UCS paper which has previously been linked here concluded that it wasn't an issue. Couldn't find it although I quoted it upthread, but did find this from 2000, which among other things (safety versus gas, propane, NG etc.) points out that ICEs running on gas emit considerably more water vapor than fuel cells do:TonyWilliams said:
http://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=104
OTOH, this article, http://www.roperld.com/science/GasolineVsHyFuelCell.pdf
concludes that the amount of water per unit of energy released is about twice as high with an H2 fuel cell as is the case with a gasoline ICE. The H2 fuel cell is about 2 -2.5 times more efficient, so it sounds to me like it's a wash. The article does raise another point:
How much of an effect this may be in the real world remains to be seen.
RegGuheert
Well-known member
Agreed. Good find, Tony!GRA said:
Also agreed that they are working through teething issues and passing knowledge along.
But let's not kid ourselves by trying to imply that "teething issues" are all (or even the majority) of what is faced when trying to proliferate H2 refueling infrastructure. The article touched on some of them:
- Complexity: We have discussed this issue extensively earlier in this thread. Simply put, the difference in complexity of these stations compared to a gasoline or electricity refueling station is immense.
The result of being complicated is that there will tend to be more failures. These additional failures result in higher (likely much higher) operational expenses and greater downtime.HybridCars.com said:
- Unreliability: You can see from the above quote that the stations are "delicate." In other words, they break easily. This is primarily the result of two things: new technology which has not had many generations to wring out design weaknesses along with operating near the limits of the technology. While both of these will improve with time, they cannot be considered "teething" issues since they likely will not be resolved without wholesale replacement of the equipment at a much later date.
- Highly Technical: Let's make no mistake about what a hydrogen refueling station really is behind the pump: It is a chemical processing plant - the stronghold of Rube Goldberg engineering. This is contrasted with a gasoline refueling station which simply receives the liquid fuel from a truck (gravity can do the work) and the already-processed fuel will stay safely put without much intervention. Hydrogen requires advanced equipment to pressurize, monitor and deliver the fuel once it delivered by a truck. If it is created on-site, either through reforming of methane or through hydrolysis, then the complexity goes much, much higher.
There is a reason early TV shows portrayed gas-station attendants by characters like "Gomer Pyle:" it was a job which did not require a lot of specialized knowledge. Contrast this with what is require to keep a modern H2 refueling station operational:
Simply put, these stations require an extensive, highly-trained workforce in place to operate them. Gomer Pyle need not apply.HybridCars.com said:
- Very Limited Life: Teething issues can be resolved, but component wear-out issues may take many years or decades to resolve. Some will never be resolved and instead will require frequent inspections and replacements. There are two main issues that dictate this reality: frequent cycling to very high pressures and embrittlement due to hydrogen encroachment into metals and other materials. The aircraft industry has learned over many decades that structural cracking is an unavoidable part of that business. They maintain safety through rigorous scheduled inspections and repair. These inspections become so onerous as the planes age that they often define when an aircraft is removed from service. But some of the hydrogen refueling equipment will experience pressure cycles much more frequently and to much greater pressure differentials. The result will be a very costly maintenance program to keep hydrogen refueling operating safely.
- Very High Cost: The result of all of the above is very high cost. Long after any "teething issues" have been resolved, these stations will continue to depend upon expensive, limited-life equipment as well as expensive highly-trained support staff to keep them operating.
TonyWilliams
Well-known member
GRA said:
Yes, heavy and expensive. Still likely cheaper than an equivalent hydrogen car (that doesn't exist).
GRA
Well-known member
Maybe closer than you think, and in the same general timeline as Teslas with true ICE range year-round, i.e. 2020:TonyWilliams said:
http://www.bmwblog.com/2015/07/02/bmw-prototype-with-hydrogen-fuel-cell-first-drive/
They'll need more power to boost the accel, but it seems like they can go the dual-drive route without too much trouble. Or they can install a more powerful battery for boost (and regen), sizing the fuel cell to handle cruising loads. Or do both. They've also got a 7-series fuel cell.
GRA
Well-known member
I don't disagree with any of your points, but the whole purpose of iteration is to make systems cheaper, simpler, more reliable, more durable and/or higher performance. I see nothing to indicate that this won't happen with H2 fuel stations just as it has with other fueling infrastructure, the only question is whether it will happen soon enough and be enough of an improvement, before some other tech overtakes it while providing the same or better capability. For that, we'll just have to wait and see. Edit: An addendum. I wanted to quote this section from the article Tony linked:RegGuheert said:
Reminds me of what it was like to be in early in off-grid RE - more cooperation than competition, but even the latter was friendly, as our customer territories rarely overlapped, we shared what we learned with each other to advance the tech, and the business was small enough that everyone knew almost everyone else, often face-to-face but otherwise by phone or (later) email. People were in it because they believed it was important, not to get rich. PV etc. is much more a standard business now, but that was the inevitable result of nurturing it so it transitioned from a niche technology for the counter-culture to the mainstream. Even in a much more mainstream, corporately-driven tech such as this one, it's nice to see that, for now at least, that attitude prevails. The cut-throat types will arrive soon enough, if it looks like being a success.
Note that this particular station is at a university, is too small to be a true commercial site, and exists primarily to discover and work through the issues before wide-scale commercial deployment, passing on best practices and allowing mistakes to be avoided as far as possible. Much as Tesla is doing, testing liquid-cooled cables in Mountain View before installing them elsewhere. Certainly beats deploying on a wide scale and then discovering a major problem (I'm sure a glaring example will come immediately to mind in this group).
GRA
Well-known member
Via GCR:
A quick skim noticed one erroneous claim. While the majority of current stations being built under PON 13-607 are designed with a daily capacity of 180 kg., stations will not be limited to a maximum of 180 kg./day capacity. One of the stations being built will be 350kg./day, and both ARB and the companies involved are already looking forwards to considerably larger stations to meet increased demand. Indeed, the ARB report states that stations being built from 2016 on would need to have average capacities of 390 kg./day to meet demand, if the forecasts for FCEV sales are accurate.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099548_gas-electricity-hydrogen-how-many-cars-can-fuel-and-what-will-it-cost
A quick skim noticed one erroneous claim. While the majority of current stations being built under PON 13-607 are designed with a daily capacity of 180 kg., stations will not be limited to a maximum of 180 kg./day capacity. One of the stations being built will be 350kg./day, and both ARB and the companies involved are already looking forwards to considerably larger stations to meet increased demand. Indeed, the ARB report states that stations being built from 2016 on would need to have average capacities of 390 kg./day to meet demand, if the forecasts for FCEV sales are accurate.
GRA
Well-known member
Rumors via ABG:
Check out the link to the Automotive News story for artist's renderings and more details: http://www.autonews.com/article/20150822/RETAIL03/308249960/toyota-plans-olympic-all-stars-report-says
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/08/26/toyotas-future-fuel-cell-vehicle-lineup-revealed/
Check out the link to the Automotive News story for artist's renderings and more details: http://www.autonews.com/article/20150822/RETAIL03/308249960/toyota-plans-olympic-all-stars-report-says
TonyWilliams
Well-known member
GRA said:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilwinton/2015/08/21/tesla-eats-into-bmw-mercedes-audi-high-margin-sales-as-germans-miscue/
"But in the race to provide green buyers with much better fuel consumption and lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, plug-in hybrids were thought to have the inside track on battery-power, at least until fuel cells become competitive by around 2025."
Like diesel fuel, the Germans truly believe the end game is hydrogen, which is why they can all just go through the motions now with EVs.
Toyota just skipped the "motions" part.
RegGuheert
Well-known member
It reminded me of the same thing. I almost mentioned this in my post, but it was long already.GRA said:
On that note, I will add that while off-grid systems have improved since those early days, they still suffer from significant reliability issues. I have a four-year-old off-grid system that is giving its owner fits right now. Fortunately the grid-tied systems have largely addressed that issue by greatly improving the reliability equation (as I covered in some detail in another thread).
But I see no indication that H2 refueling has a path to help it break out of Rube Goldberg mode. Are there chemical processing plants (of any kind) designed and built in some other fashion that eliminates the issues I outlined? (Not rhetorical. Is there something out there other than the massive-amount-of-plumbing approach? The reliability of electronics has been steadily improved during steady increases in complexity through massive integration. Another good example is Tesla is using high-volume automotive-grade electronics to make their charging stations reliable. I see a bit of this in Toyota's fuel cell itself, but nothing at the station level. )
TonyWilliams
Well-known member
Now, why do you suppose that a huge, arguably we'll run company like GE not use this new "space age" thing called hydrogen?
By virtually universal agreement (and the agreement of Germany), hydrogen would be best suited for this task:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150820005157/en/GE-Signs-Largest-Battery-Energy-Storage-Deal#.Vd5re8RHarU
GE Signs Its Largest Battery Energy Storage Deal to Date
GE to Build 30-Megawatt (MW) Battery Energy Storage System for the Imperial Irrigation District in Southern California
Marks GE’s Third Lithium Ion Storage Project Announced in Recent Months, Totaling a Combined 39 MW of Capacity
By virtually universal agreement (and the agreement of Germany), hydrogen would be best suited for this task:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150820005157/en/GE-Signs-Largest-Battery-Energy-Storage-Deal#.Vd5re8RHarU
GE Signs Its Largest Battery Energy Storage Deal to Date
GE to Build 30-Megawatt (MW) Battery Energy Storage System for the Imperial Irrigation District in Southern California
Marks GE’s Third Lithium Ion Storage Project Announced in Recent Months, Totaling a Combined 39 MW of Capacity
GRA
Well-known member
It appears Dudenhoeffer missed the latest sales figures from Europe, where PHEVs are swiftly overhauling BEVs and likely to become the majority of PEV sales soon, and the Outlander PHEV is now the top-selling PEV: http://left-lane.com/european-sales-2015-first-half-ev-and-phev-segments/TonyWilliams said:
There's no question that ICE PHEVs are a transition technology to BEVs, FCEVs, PHFCEVs or maybe biofuels, but they will be viable for quite some time. As to the rest, we'll see how the BMW/Mercedes/Audi high-end PHEV sales do - the Golf GTE seems to be doing pretty well, and is outselling the e-Golf.
GRA
Well-known member
Inverter or charge controller issues, I presume? Other than through stupidity/ignorance, there's not a lot to go wrong with (L-A) batteries given reasonable care, and major panel problems tend to be binary; it's easy to fix, or the panel's useless.RegGuheert said:
Fortunately, neither of us is responsible for establishing that path; there's a whole lot of scientists and engineers working to build it, funded by a lot of money from both governments and companies. I have no way of knowing if they'll succeed, but I'm glad that they aren't just concentrating on a single approach.RegGuheert said:
GRA
Well-known member
I'm guessing enhanced crash requirements are a major part of it, but don't know.edatoakrun said:
I'm a fan of PHEVs as a transitional tech away from fossil fuels, whether you define that as EREV like a Volt, or BEVx like an i3 REx, and have said that PHFCEVs may well be the best option for those with convenient charging. But the i3 REx needs at least double the fuel capacity to be acceptable to me and (I suspect) most people, and the NVH of that motorcycle engine just doesn't cut it - IMO GM made exactly the right choice for mainstream acceptance to go with a larger, smoother ICE that uses regular gas in the 2016 Volt.edatoakrun said:
Other than that, a universal car needs to be able to do everything that an ICE can do (given the necessary infrastructure).
I assume we're both California taxpayers, and consider $200m from the state spread over 10 years to be chicken feed, if it means we don't have to put all our AFV eggs in one basket. My city passed a bond measure last year that was for more than $200m; my county passed a 30 year, $7.8 billion transportation tax bond measure last year, which required a 2/3rds vote to pass. We did that to ourselves with full knowledge of the cost, and I'm now paying 10% sales tax. I'm all for it, as the majority of the money is going to mass transit, local road and street repair and improvement, pedestrian and bicycle facilities, senior and special needs transit. There's even some going to highway infrastructure improvements, mainly at interchanges.edatoakrun said:
GetOffYourGas
Well-known member
edatoakrun said:
Well put. Sadly, there is a lot of truth to this statement. The silver lining is that PHEVs / EREVs / BEVxs provide not only that, but also the benefit of cheaper home fueling. I too see this as the most likely transitionary platform for the next decade, especially in regions with little to no QC infrastructure.
ydnas7 said:
If the price of hydrogen remained higher than gasoline yes you are absolutely right. Vast majority will choose cheaper.
But that doesn't mean they will switch to BEVs just for cost. Or that hydrogen pricing today is the hydrogen pricing of mass production.
Actually PHEVs are more likely to be a transition to FCEVs that plain EVs. They are probably popular due to range issues, and I don't see the range issue just going away. So unless battery charging becomes much faster it's more likely they will use FC for long range use as regulations get stricter and hydrogen/FC pricing goes down.GRA said:
RegGuheert
Well-known member
Actually, I did have the charge controller fail about two years ago due to something I did which resulted in an unforeseen short circuit. I was able to repair the charge controller and it is still going strong today, but I will say that this is precisely one type of failure that can and does happen in complex chemical processing plants. Operators misunderstand something during routine maintenance and cause a much more serious problem.GRA said:
But, no, the problem now is with the batteries. Due to multiple factors, the owners chose to not install flooded batteries, so we went with SLAs. I've read multiple accounts of people experiencing shorter-than expected life with these units. In this case, I think a big problem is that the charge controller was supposed to get a firmware upgrade to allow the metering of charge, but the manufacturer never finished that. As such it is difficult to prevent both overcharge and undercharge.
Tesla's PowerWall may offer an improvement in off-grid storage in this area, but it still is not where the technology needs to be.
Many technical issues do not get resolved even with the allocation of massive amounts of resources. If there are no ideas on how to address the issues we are discussing, then the problem is likely to exist indefinitely. If they are "barking up the wrong tree", as I expect is the case, then we should not expect them to succeed. As I have stated repeatedly, I have no problem with continuing research on H2 FCVs. The issue here is that many, many govenment officials not just in your state, but around the world, are currently focused on DEPLOYING this technology at a time when the clear result is massive damage to our environment.GRA said:
More importantly, the opportunity cost of deploying H2 FCVs is a significant slowdown in the proliferation in BEVs due to the fact that the resources needed to put one H2 FCV on the road could have been used to field about five BEVs instead. It's waste on a massive scale with no clear indication that FCVs will offer ANY benefits over BEVs at the end of the day. It's clear that they will always offer significant drawbacks.
edatoakrun
Well-known member
Well then, BEVs are indeed doomed to failure.
The cost of equipping my leaf with a device spewing 30 or 40 gallons of CO2 laced with trace poisonous gasses, for every mile I drove, would of course be prohibitively expensive...
I have no Idea where you got that figure, implying that the total cost to California taxpayers for FCEV support will be limited to $200 million over the next decade, if a substantial number of FCEVs ever actually are to see the road.
Care to explain?
On the other hand, I don't think there is any doubt that if California decided to spend ~$200 million, collected from any user base (ratepayers, taxpayers, or drivers) over ~ten years, that expenditure could result in ~500 DC charge stations, each capable of refueling ~ten to twenty BEVs simultaneously, located at suitable business locations located along California's highways.
This initially subsidized DC network would be largely sufficient to support the first ~million BEVs on California's roads, after which, I have little doubt we could depend on free-market developments to supply the next twenty to thirty million California BEVs.
There is no doubt in my mind that many of those promoting FCVs, both in both the ICEV and petroleum industries, are well aware of this reality.
And it largely explains those corporations enthusiasm in spending other peoples money to subsidize the development and sales of, and supporting infrastructure for, what can only be accurately described as POS vehicles, such as the Mirai.
GRA
Well-known member
I've spec'd SLA a fair amount for seasonal cabins and the like, where maintenance is likely to be intermittent, and the batteries may sit discharged for prolonged periods. I've used Johnson Controls and Sonnenschein gel-cells, and provided you've got a charge controller that will let you set it for a lower regulating voltage (typically 14.1V instead of 14.4V or higher, they should be fine - equalizing charges are a no-no, because anything gassed is gone forever, and the gel prevents the stratification that occurs in flooded L-As, so there's no need for equalization in any case. IIRR both of them use lead-calcium plates, so they're not really happy being cycled as deeply as a flooded L-A with lead plates would. They're really more of a float battery, so if you try to cycle them to 80% or even 50% DoD regularly, you're going to experience shorter life. On the positive side, they have low self-discharge rates, and are happy to sit at low voltage for several months without harm. I spec'd some for a ski cabin in Yosemite that's only used from Dec. to April, with no charging during the off-season (panels are stored for security), and after 22 seasons I think they're still on the 3rd set of batteries. After the first set, the battery bank was increased in size by 50% IIRR and there's now something like 7 days worth of storage, so deep cycling almost never happens during the season. The 2nd set endured one 21-day succession of storms following one behind each other with barely a break in between, and still lasted 6 years IIRC.RegGuheert said:
We'll just have to agree to disagree on the value of continuing with FCEV/H2 infrastructure deployment at this time, as our starting points are too different. As it happens, nothing anyone has said here, pro or con, has affected deployment decisions by any government, and probably not any company, in the slightest, so we'll get to see how it plays out.RegGuheert said:
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