i'd pay for a multiparty open investigation
Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
251–260 of 387 posts
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 50Hz and 60Hz is an accident of history and neatly splits the country in half. It's not a problem.
It is a problem, because there's limited capacity to move electricity between the systems. You can just plug them together, they have essentially two separate grids.
I think it would be a problem if they had ten tiny grids, but is two decently sized grids that are in roughly the same time zone (so peak solar doesn’t need to go from A to B) a big deal?
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#253People who are bullish for EVs I implore you to reconsider - current EVs containing a literal ton of batteries with limited lifespans belong in the green future, especially 80% of that doesn't get used for daily commute. It's obvious to me that considering the full-lifecycle costs (both manufacturing, usage and ownership), some sort of hybrid solution is the greenest, for the current crop of personal cars. But I beli…
Batteries mostly outlast the EVs they are in and are being recycled when they don't. Most EVs produced since they entered the market a bit over a decade ago are actually still driving fine. Most of them even have their original battery. You can get some really nice second hand models at this point. Of course they hold their value pretty well too. That's why manufacturers give eight year warranties on their batteries and drive trains. Basically, very little risk for them.
Hybrid is for people that are confused about what they want or need. You basically get the worst of both worlds: lots of maintenance and fuel cost, pollution, and they aren't that much more efficient. Or green. Lots of fiddly bits that break down and need maintenance. And the fuel economy isn't that great either. And the battery range is tiny.
Range anxiety is going to be a thing for ICE and hybrid car owners pretty soon. As petrol demand collapses, the infrastructure for filling up cars is going to start disappearing. Starting with the least profitable, remote petrol stations in the middle of nowhere that are already struggling to get by. What happens when 20-30% of their customers start driving EVs that they mostly charge at home? Exactly, they won't survive that. Not a chance. And of course, that 20-30% is just a brief moment in time on the way to 50, 80, and eventually 100%. Between now and 2030, there's going to be increasingly more struggling gas station owners. And beyond that it's going to be a massacre. Year on year declines in business with no end in sight.
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. I don't know that people's cultural attraction to fueling at the gas station is high at all. After we got an EV I realised how much I had actually disliked filling the car. Smelly, every time an in your face reminder of the fossil fuels you are burning. Having to go in an queue. Having…
> Unable to use cellphone and take calls. Why are you unable to use your cellphone?
They're apparently "banned" or "dangerous" at fuel filling stations. Whether that's actually true is a different matter, but all the stations I've been to have had prominent "cellphones not allowed" signs displayed.
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen. The basic mistake you're making here is thinking that "carbon free" is key. It is not, what matters is that a given energy source is carbon NEUTRAL . Anthropogenic global warming is driven primarily by net increase in atmospheric CO2 on our timescale. When CO2 in consumed from the atmosphere, and then shortly released again (textbook example bein…
The processes to make synthetic fuels are well known have proven to scale to a countries needs for energy. Germany did it in WWII, South Africa did it for a while too. The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.
>The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.
The real problem there though of course is that oil from the a well has always been cheating by not pricing in its externalities. To get an apples-to-apples comparison with synthetic fuel, fossil fuel would also have to be made at a minimum [0] carbon net neutral too, such as by running an atmospheric scrubber and ensuring that for every ton of carbon coming out of the ground a ton was getting captured again in an equivalently long term stable way.
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0: Fossil fuel extraction has always resulted in a ton of other externalities too, not just in terms of massive non-carbon pollution but geopolitical costs. That itself may well be a driver, if a country can switch fully to renewable/nuclear power and then run its entire economy solely off of that via grid/batteries/synthetic hydrocarbons the security implications alone are pretty massive. No more fossil fuel blackmail from hostile regimes, ever.
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. Even Toyota, a big H2 promoter is bailing and announcing high-range. solid-state, fast charging batteries [0, 1, 2]. Makes me wonder if the H2 promotion was just a ruse to misdirect the rest of the industry while it caught up, and possibly even leapfrogged (we'll see if their announcements play out), on battery tech? [0] Toyota Teases Solid-State Batteries in 2027 https://spectrum.ieee.org/toyota-solid-state-bat…
I think Toyota also had their hands tied a bit because the entire country of Japan has heavily invested in hydrogen. I can understand why it makes sense strategically for a country like Japan without their own oil (or lithium?) reserves. Toyota is a Japanese industrial powerhouse so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were receiving subsidies and maybe even direction on hydrogen research. Only now that they have invested…
Maybe it just needs to work in their borders
Japan had a unique response to the 1973 oil crisis. Given recent instability in Russia/Ukraine, Afghanistan after the Withdrawal, and now Israel, having a hedge against petroleum primarily sourced in the Middle East and Russia it's a smart hedge to have.
Besides, Americans have switched from wanting big extravagant American Made cars to small fuel efficient ones from Japan before
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a diesel car. Every 3 weeks I have to fill my tank. This wastes me around 5/10 minutes, depending if the gas station is full of person that want to fill their tank. And this only thanks to the fact that I've one of the gas station with the cheapest price of my city 50 meters from where I work. Otherwise I would need to spend time (and gas) to get to the station with the cheapest price, because paying 2 euros f…
>This means that the government cannot add taxes on electricity used in vehicles, as it does with gas. You don't think you'll be paying a significant electricity tax once ICE cars are fully phased out? Also, I don't know what you drive but my diesel has quite a bit more range than 350 km. Yours must be quite the guzzler.
Yeah, Texas already charges an additional $400 for EV registration and then $200 annually.
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#258People who are bullish for EVs I implore you to reconsider - current EVs containing a literal ton of batteries with limited lifespans belong in the green future, especially 80% of that doesn't get used for daily commute. It's obvious to me that considering the full-lifecycle costs (both manufacturing, usage and ownership), some sort of hybrid solution is the greenest, for the current crop of personal cars. But I beli…
I would encourage you to educate yourself more on this.
The crossover point is 1.5 years for EVs to be net better than ICE cars, for one thing.
Also electric motor drivetrains make much more efficient use of energy, so even when powered by coal-generated electricity, EVs still win. Meantime power sources are getting more clean over time.
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#259Not saying the oil sector is powerless by any means, and I guess maybe they're going for regulatory capture, but this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it. The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles. I believe every car maker (save 1 that I know about) is fully committed to 100% electrified vehicles in the not-too-distant future. I feel like eventually…
Would gasoline be anywhere near something people wanted to use if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities? Petroleum is a huge industry and they could make a big problem by getting subsidies to make some other fuel look competitive even though it’s a disaster. Look at biodiesel.
> if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities?
I think you kind of identified the issue there, though. Externalities are notoriously difficult to tax and account for. The issue with EVs is that they are intrinsically better than hydrogen in nearly every way. Even issues with long distance driving and recharging are quickly improving with EVs, and the improvements are happening much faster than anything going on with hydrogen.
Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification
#260The argumentation is flawed. 1. Just imagine the required charging infrastructure if all vehicles were suddenly battery powered. Charging electric vehicles requires quite some power. Can the power grid installations sustain that (power lines, Transformer stations...) ? What resources (financial and physical (e.g. Cooper)) are required in order to adapt the infrastructure ? Just an example: A supercharger station whic…
Your argument is textbook anti-EV propaganda that has been debunked for over a decade now.
Ask anyone that owns an EV how many times a month they go to a super charger. The answer is probably zero because unless they went on a road trip, they are definitely charging at home. You don't even need to install a 240V charger. For most people's commute a 120V charger (which can charge at ~1.4 kw) can recharge about 40 miles over night which is equivalent to the average American's commute.
It's still not ideal for apartment dwellers yet, but they don't need a super charger in their complex. They just need a standard power outlet accessible from their parking space.
I know managing the grid is probably really hard. But if we can power every home in America in less than a century, I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to add standard power outlets to parking garages without crashing the economy.
EV's are in fact a solution to the sporadic nature of renewables since they can charge anytime the car is sitting still such as for the 8 hours of sunshine that people spend in office buildings every day.