Short version: cheap electricity + water

  • @schroedingershat
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    11 year ago

    FCEVs are a scam. The mirai is heavier than BEVs with similar range, bulkier, and has a much smaller internal volume. BEV busses are volume limited not weight limited and are already capable of covering most routes with only overnight charging (so hydrogen is worse there). Fuelling time in real world situations favours the vehicle that is sitting at 80-100% full every morning over the one you have to visit a fuelling station for. Heavy trucking is cost limited, not time limited – so filling the trucj with the cheap electricity directly at 4x efficiency is better even in the low production season.

    It’s also not “the only way” for air travel because there are no planes that use it, volume constraints limit use cases to those that mostly overlap with batteries (and don’t replace liquid fuels) and battery aircraft are much closer to production (albeit limited in niche so far).

    Every single use case of hydrogen has better alternatives.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      11 year ago

      It’s very hard to work out how much you know and how much you are making up.

      World’s first hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft takes to the skies above Bedfordshire

      Fuelling time in real world situations favours the vehicle that is sitting at 80-100% full every morning over the one you have to visit a fuelling station for.

      Not unless the batteries have enough capacity to last all day. And hydrogen refuelling stations are being built at bus depots because obviously they are. Do you imagine carbon-fuel busses head to their local filling station when they run low?

      • @schroedingershat
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        1 year ago

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeroAvia

        They tested a small aircraft for a few minutes at a time (using batteries for flight times that are low for batteries) before crashing it and it’s nowhere near production. Compared to 2 seater electric planes in production for years, or actually serious passenger planes, ZeroAvia is a joke.

        There are less clownish hydrogen plane projects, but they are flight testing redundant hardware with full ICE main systems.

        Not unless the batteries have enough capacity to last all day. And hydrogen refuelling stations are being built at bus depots because obviously they are. Do you imagine carbon-fuel busses head to their local filling station when they run low?

        Then you’re adding a redundant $5-10million high capacity filling station to the depot cost on top of the other costs. Also you need more depots because hydrogen busses (at least the ones that don’t get at least half their energy from a battery) have lower range than the top end battery busses.

        As I said before. Op charging and pantographs are being abandoned already because overnight charging is more than sufficient. 0.7-1kWh per km is perfectly doable and 500kWh batteries even without current gen LMFP (which reduces weight by 30% vs lfp in use now) has no impact on payload, any route that isn’t non-stop can run all day with just a single charge during lunch breK. 1000kWh raises the floor or reduces clearance (but still less than hydrogen) and the bus will run for longer than a driver can legally.

        Realistically most batteries are in the 250-350kWh range because more is unnecessary.

        The only people still pushing hydrogen busses are platinum miners or oil and gas shills.

        Heavy trucking is less absurd, but they can already drive for the maximum 11 hours in a 13 hour shift so there is little benefit.