Here is one where I completely agree with you. However, who were the people/groups pushing hydrogen over the last 20 yrs? [In the same vein as CA mandating an EV as if the capability would magically appear if a law was passed. ] I can remember many a press piece touting the virtues of pollution free hydrogen but never mentioning how one obtained hydrogen. Like you could mine it or drill for it.

The basic problem is ideology. They think govt should not “choose” winners in alt fuels.

Battery only, series or parallel hybrid, and PHEV are inside the box of possibilities we are considering. Joe puts fuel cells way outside the box. But are there any other ways to get juice to the wheels? Catenary wires are ugly I guess (except for trains like TGV), but there are other ways to induce current. EM induction? Microwaves? Anything else out there?

Clearly we want better batteries, lighter more aerodynamic cars, better mass transit, more bikes and even more shoe leather in the transport mix, but how do we best get electric current to the wheels? That appears to be the big question.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ servlet/ story/ LAC.20080813.BCWHISTLER13/ / TPStory/ Environment

I find it amusing that people get all up in arms about lip-syncing fakery at the olympics, but will swallow hydrogen fakery without much criticism.

My more general question: how can we provide electricity to vehicles safely and reliably while they are moving?

Honda is sending 200 Hydrogen cars to Calif. next year. Off their production line. Which they are selling to other countries. What are those countries doing for infra structure, (production and distribution of Hydrogen). curious. Why can’t we do the same?

It isn’t that big of a question. It is hard to beat delivering electricity over the grid to your garage plug at 93% efficiency, converting it to DC in the car at 92% efficiency, and then charging/discharging batteries at 94% efficiency. Until something else can come close, there’s no real question there.

I’m waiting for my check in the mail

If you want something shorter, then I highly recommend the paper “Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?” (12 pages, 459KB PDF) (http://www.efcf.com/reports/E21.pdf) by Ulf Bossel, which I mentioned over on The Cost of Energy several times, including the following post:

http://www.grinzo.com/ energy/ index.php/ 2008/ 02/ 28/ hydrogen-still-not-so-much/

Bossel does a detailed analysis of the energy losses at every stage of creating, transporting, compressing, dispensing, and using hydrogen in a FC vehicle, and compares it to a battery electric vehicle. The BEV wins by a factor of 3.

My current thinking can be summed up as this: hydrogen is not competitive against battery-electric serial hybrids, but may become so against biofuels. At least for large-usage cases such as airplanes, ocean liners/freighters, and large trucks — applications that truly require high on-board energy density, unlike 90% of auto usage.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs, and estimated that, for the same land area, hydrogen from a PV installation could yield around 10x the mileage to a car as can cellulosic ethanol (both as the range-extenders in a serial-hybrid setup). I had to use auto mileage for comparison, as I don’t know any hydrogen or electric numbers for large trucks/ships/airplanes. I also have no idea about biodiesel from algae, as I have not seen any numbers for that.

On top of the simple land-area advantage, solar installations will of course not be competing with food crops for land (and perhaps fertilizer and irrigation) as cellulosic ethanol would, and would have more-reliable yields to boot. Again, I don’t know about algae, but algae would require significant infrastructure — perhaps more intensive than a solar installation, due to the need for all sorts of fluids shunting about. Algae certainly will require plenty of water.

For jets, I don’t know if hydrogen will be an adequate substitute for injecting into the air stream instead of a hydrocarbon; but if it is, a big jet is so expensive already that hydrogen storage might be fesable (e.g. in liquid form).

For large ships and trucks, the transition to diesel-electric either is already underway (ships) or will be soon (e.g. Wal-Mart’s fleet-efficiency project to double mileage by 2015). It stands to reason that adding battery capacity will follow soon after. But it will be quite a while before such huge batteries could even be charged easily, on a widespread basis, due to the amperage requirements. So a secondary fuel source will be needed for quite a few decades. Due to the massive fuel requirements of these applications, I worry that it will be difficult for biofuels to accommodate it. That’s where hydrogen may come in.

So continued research into improved H2 storage, fuel cells, and electrolysis is warranted; but probably not to be targeted for production until at least a decade from now. Compared to the multiple billions we should be spending on PV, solar-thermal, batteries, and grid improvements, 300 million for hydrogen sounds reasonable. It’s just that we need to get those other billions actually allocated!

Unless they ship the precious cargo using the CN train line.

Earl Killian is certainly correct that EV is the best path and I wish he could have been one of the Californians allowed to lease a hydrogen car.

nataraj: They think govt should not “choose” winners in alt fuels.
This is why some climate voters will vote the other way.

http://www.efcf.com/reports/E21.pdf

is certainly a damning indictment of the extreme energy inefficiency of the hydrogen economy.

For longer distance trips, electric would seem to have a major drawback. With gas, when one runs out after 300 or so miles, one merely pulls into a service station and refills in a couple of minutes. With electric, what does one do? Recharging batteries takes a much longer time, I assume.

Obviously, most car trips are not so long that this is an issue. In addition, gas/electric hybrids can solve some of this. But presumably we don’t want to have the inefficiency of maintaining both gas and electric distributions infrastructures.

So, what is the electric car answer for long haul trucking and spring break road trips?

Thanks,

Martin

Two possibilities: recharging stations or swapping the battery for a fully recharged one. Both are planned for electric car initiative in Israel by Renault-Nissan. See for example:

http://www.batteryvehiclesociety.org.uk/wordpress/?p=412

Go to this Website:
http://www.acpropulsion.com/

Go to Resources and you can download the report.

The question about what to do with long haul trucking is harder. Batteries aren’t at the point yet of doing it yet and may never be able to. My thinking on the problem is that if fossil fuels are used, they should be used in the most valuable state for the end use, otherwise power, heat and cooling needs should be handled with the electrical grid and then feed the grid with as much Renewables (nondepleatables, nonexhaustables) possibles.

Example. Instead of heating houses in the Northeast with Fuel oil as many do now, they should be using Geothermal heat pumps that are powered from the electrical grid thats powered by Renewable low and non carbon sources. Then use the fuel oil saved from that to power the trucks needed for medium distance heavy transportation.

I guess if we already have 10 minutes/150 miles (refill time divided by range… a good measure of convenience, no?) for recharging batteries that’s certainly promising. Presumably, technology will improve on that. Gasoline gets a convenience ratio of what, 3 minutes / 300 miles? That’s about six times better than the previously cited demonstration before the CARB.

I’m not particularly enamored of the idea of swapping out batteries. The US, in particular, has issues with standards (witness our mobile phone “system”), and without a standardized battery system, swapping becomes logistically VERY challenging. Then there’s the labor. We’d be forced back into full service service stations! That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly an impediment to uptake of the technology.

In short, I’d put my money behind improving recharging technology. Or maybe solutions for the problems dogging hydrogen will be found. Ya’ never know. Just don’t count on it.

Cheers y’all!

–Martin

Actually there would be far fewer such service stations as there are gas stations now, as 90% of the electric fleet’s driving needs would be met by home chargers. But you’re right about the danger of too many proprietary battery types.

I skimmed the subject of long-haul trucking in my other post above. Basically, the battery needs will be enormous here, so the best hope is to transition as much as possible to biodiesel, ultimately derived from algae. In the meantime, battery technology does improve, and these trucks should switch largely to diesel-electric setups by maybe 2020. I base that date on the fact that Wal-Mart is already planning for that transition of its fleet by 2015 (that, together with numerous other measures, will double their trucks’ gas mileage by that time). So once that’s pioneered, the larger fleet should switch over — if gas prices remain high, it could be rather quick.

With diesel-electric in place, there will be a natural transition to start adding batteries in the middle, making the trucks into serial hybrids. Then the batteries’ capacities can increase until the technology hits a wall — or, if we’re lucky, it doesn’t, and the only issue is how to charge them fast enough. But if it does, then the question will be is hydrogen or biodiesel better as the range-extending energy carrier.

BTW, someone here mentioned fast-charging batteries. I don’t think they’re truly here yet, as schemes for quick charging can reduce a battery’s longevity considerably — or it means that the battery has much lower energy density than non-fast-charging types. It’s going to take a while to develop fast-chargers that have high energy density + low cost + long durability. Slow-charging batteries will meet those three requirements much sooner.

What is the best way to get electricity to the vehicle while it’s moving?

Earl Killian’s reply that grid to battery is efficient clearly holds, but only while the vehicle is parked at a charging station.

Electricity is a clean, efficient, simple, and inexpensive way to propel a vehicle. Batteries, HEVs, PHEVs, and especially fuel cells are complex and/or expensive.

So how do you best bet electricity to the wheels? Can you make electricity available at the right of way?

The ideal that I am looking for is that electricity would be available continuously, or in short bursts, for example at intersections or interchanges.

If this is even possible, it would require huge infrastructure investment, but battery production also requires investment.

One possible system would be buses that recharge briefly at every bus stop. With fixed routes, the infrastructure need is known and limited. The charging mechanism needs to be fast, safe, and reliable, but that is true for all energy transfer.

My apologies if this is too preposterous.

On the other hand, people have also experimented with generating electricity using the piezoelectric effect as cars drive over plates embedded in the road. So, at intersections, cars driving over piezoelectric plates going one direction generate electricity which charges cars going the other direction but stopped at the lights and sitting over induction plates.

As you mentioned, putting together the infrastructure could be prohibitive, but if it’s a closed system, as opposed to feeding off mains, it would be interesting to see what that does to the cast/benefit analysis.

–Martin