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Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

cleantechnica.com

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Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#371

Post by TrexArms »

chrisco255 wrote: post #329
calibas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about electric cars wasn't "viable" in 2003? That was the year Toyota released their all electric RAV4 in California... Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity. Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!

Sure, they achieved it in 2003, that's why they signed an agreement in 2010 with Tesla to produce an all-electric RAV4: https://archive.nytimes.com/wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07...

You understand that GM sold the patent to Chevron and they forced Toyota to quit making the vehicle right?

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#372

Post by AtlasBarfed »

BirdieNZ wrote: post #190
somat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on personal experience my guess is that the unreliability would be in the battery not the drive train. Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.

Batteries aren't unrepairable; you wouldn't open one up in the middle of the road to try fix it but at the bus depot with enough volume of battery electric vehicles, they'll have reason to hire repair technicians that can refurbish and repair batteries.

Obviously anything has a bunch of single points of failure, or catastrophic means of failure, but a battery isn't like "one engine". It's basically hundreds of little power modules wired in parallel, so an individual battery cell loss shouldn't bring down the whole pack.

So a battery pack should actually be heavily redundant ... assuming the pack has enough modules for a loss of vehicle to get to some charging station.

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#373

Post by AlexandrB »

MayeulC wrote: post #312
jasonkester wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you define your hydrogen colors for us? It sounds like you have something interesting to say, but I can’t parse what it is out of your company’s jargon.

These are common terms. A random link: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/clean-energy-green-h... * Green: produced from surplus renewable capacity (electrolysis) * Black, brown, grey: convert various fossil fuels to hydrogen via steam reforming. Basically strip carbon from hydrocarbons, emitting a lot of CO2. * Blue: same as black/brown/Greg but with carbon capture. There are other (less common) shades as well.

And Green is a huge efficiency loss. I suppose if the energy used to do it truly "green" and "surplus"...

> As of 2022, commercial electrolysis requires around 53 kWh of electricity to produce one kg of hydrogen, which holds 39.4 kWh (HHV) of energy.

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

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#374

Post by dghughes »

neves wrote: post #125

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog... > The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real bene…

My province has a hydrogen village powered by windmills no oil companies involved.

https://frontierpowersystems.ca/hydrogen-village/

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#375

Post by javiramos »

drdirk wrote: post #65
javiramos wrote: post #54

Please also electrify garbage trucks

Here in Barcelona Spain they are electric!

I recently visited Barcelona — it is a fantastic city. A perfect intersection of amazing food, friendly people, vibrant culture, great weather. Is life in Barcelona as good as it seems from the outside?

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#376

Post by idiotsecant »

neves wrote: post #125

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog... > The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real bene…

Sure are lots of HN software developers that confidently know everything about everything in this thread.

I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#377

Post by AlexandrB »

baq wrote: post #360
rocqua wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dollar costs of physical things (pre tax) quite accurately measure how much effort it takes to produce/acquire that thing. Hydrogen being more expensive than X quite stronly suggests that it is much more effort to get than X.

I agree, that’s why I say tax the right things and subsidize the right things.

All well and good until you have producers burning (or otherwise using) the cheap, taxed fuel to produce the expensive, subsidized one while creating more net pollution in the process. It's hard to get this stuff right at the best of times.

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#378

Post by lambda »

MayeulC wrote: post #312
jasonkester wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you define your hydrogen colors for us? It sounds like you have something interesting to say, but I can’t parse what it is out of your company’s jargon.

These are common terms. A random link: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/clean-energy-green-h... * Green: produced from surplus renewable capacity (electrolysis) * Black, brown, grey: convert various fossil fuels to hydrogen via steam reforming. Basically strip carbon from hydrocarbons, emitting a lot of CO2. * Blue: same as black/brown/Greg but with carbon capture. There are other (less common) shades as well.

There's also "white" which is naturally occurring pure hydrogen.

Mostly it's seen as being economically infeasible to extract, though there is one working well in the world, and some other potential sources that may be feasible to extract discovered recently.

But the big problem with hydrogen is that right now, the majority of the supply is grey/brown/black, which all emit CO2 to produce. Green is far more expensive, and the carbon capture needed for blue is also expensive and the methods of storage are dodgy.

The thing about green hydrogen is that it's more efficient to transmit and store electricity than convert it to hydrogen and distribute and store that, so it's basically just a worse way of utilizing green energy sources. The only reason hydrogen is at all economical is that grey/brown/black are cheap, and it's hard to see any path for green or blue to become competitive (and truly zero emissions for blue).

It's possible that we'll find reserves of white hydrogen and efficient ways to extract it, but that's purely speculative right now, while building renewable energy sources, electric distribution, and batteries can be done right now.

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#379

Post by wisty »

AlexandrB wrote: post #373
MayeulC wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are common terms. A random link: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/clean-energy-green-h... * Green: produced from surplus renewable capacity (electrolysis) * Black, brown, grey: convert various fossil fuels to hydrogen via steam reforming. Basically strip carbon from hydrocarbons, emitting a lot of CO2. * Blue: same as black/brown/Greg but with carbon capture. There are other (less common) shades as well.

And Green is a huge efficiency loss. I suppose if the energy used to do it truly "green" and "surplus"... > As of 2022, commercial electrolysis requires around 53 kWh of electricity to produce one kg of hydrogen, which holds 39.4 kWh (HHV) of energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

20% loss isn't really "huge", is it?

10% of power is lost to distribution anyway. Batteries can also lose 10%.

The issue with hydrogen isn't producing it, it's that it's an absolute nightmare to transport and store. Hydrogen can soak into metals, causing them to become brittle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement and it leaks if there's absolutely any chance of it possibly leaking (thanks to the small molecules, and its tendancy to cause everything it touches to go brittle), and can cause a very big bang if it does leak.

It might work well for planes (where power to weight is at an absolute premium) but for cars and buses the weight of a bigger but tamer battery just makes more sense. It's absolutely a good rocket fuel.

The issue isn't that it can't be green. The issue is that it's rocket fuel - high performance but dangerous and high maintenance. Putting rocket fuel in a bus is just dumb.

Re: Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

#380

Post by pier25 »

dghughes wrote: post #374
neves wrote: post #125

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog... > The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real bene…

My province has a hydrogen village powered by windmills no oil companies involved. https://frontierpowersystems.ca/hydrogen-village/

this is amazing
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