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

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

#421

Post by youngtaff »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #235
bawolff wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its really viable to transport hydrogen via existing (oil) pipelines. Hydrogen leaks everywhere.

Oil pipelines, no. Gas pipelines, yes. The effort to requalify existing gas pipelines for hydrogen use is well underway in Europe. There might be a need to run at lower pressure, depending on the type of steel, but leaks are not an issue.

Leaks are an issue… hydrogen is a smaller molecule and leaks from natural gas pipes and there’s a lot of gas infrastructure in the ground in some countries e.g. in UK most houses have a connection

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

#422

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kelnos wrote: post #390
paganel wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "green revolution" coming, just the powers that be taxing us, normal citizens, to the hell and the back if we'd still want to hang on to our gasoline-powered cars, which taxing policies will for sure bring about the revolution of people choosing to not travel anymore, because too expensive. That's the revolution that they're now putting in place. Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the…

I think it's a bit weird to blame people who bought Teslas for the current situation with Musk. That's a huge, bad-faith stretch of an argument.

> it's a bit weird to blame people who bought Teslas for the current situation with Musk

It’s implausible to blame them. But they absolutely bear responsibility for giving him wealth and power.

(And politicians in Sacramento, who didn’t do a good enough job of forcing their subsidies to cause competition.)

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

#423

Post by zamadatix »

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/

Are you sure the hydrogen storage is still active? That page does say "This project has been operating autonomously since 2009" but the projects page on the same site lists the hydrogen village as lasting from 2008-2010 https://frontierpowersystems.ca/projects/. Frontier Power Systems is also a "wind-diesel" provider - so they certainly aren't separated from oil companies (though this doesn't automatically mean their intentions aren't genuinely to reduce fossil fuel usage as GP was saying, they even seem to be doing battery storage systems now).

Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.

Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.

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

#424

Post by [deleted] »

loeg wrote: post #220
bobthepanda wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the hills in Seattle are quite large, so you are going up for a long period of time and possibly not able to regenerate before you run out of batteries. The other problem is that because battery weight is so large, that in itself becomes a limiting factor for hilly operation where it is not really relevant for trolleybuses. And trolleybuses can feed current from uphill buses to downhill buses thro…

> The problem is that the hills in Seattle are quite large, so you are going up for a long period of time and possibly not able to regenerate before you run out of batteries. Is this deadpan sarcasm? Seattle isn't a mountain pass. The biggest hills are a couple hundred feet bottom to top. The "High Point" neighborhood, which is, uh, the highest point above sea level, is at 522 feet. Every other hill is smaller than t…

[deleted]

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

#425

Post by Retric »

pfdietz wrote: post #417
Retric wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there’s useful amounts of grey hydrogen but not enough for any kind of energy transition. We’re talking about the useful energy from ~1 number power plant over its lifespan. So find ~1,000 such locations and that would be a big deal.

This is white hydrogen, not grey hydrogen. It's not clear what would be available globally if it were looked for as it was in France.

Ahh ops flipped though there’s a really long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

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

#426

Post by adamsb6 »

culi wrote: post #416
chrisco255 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was alive in 2003. There were no mass market electrics on the road. The RAV4 nickel-metal hydride plug-in hybrid from 97-03 sold a grand total of 1400 units. Nickel MH batteries were notorious for losing range quickly, having a memory if recharged frequently from only partial discharge, losing 20-50% of their charge per month on self-discharge alone, having far less energy density than lithium, only lasting for 500…

Tesla succeeded because heavy and intense government subsidies and investment into making electric cars a thing The fact that an EV failed without that kind of publicly funded support is only evidence that furthers the point GP was making

They succeeded where others failed because they are fun to drive.

There were no fun EVs prior to the Roadster. And the Roadster was a small production precursor to Model S, which transitioned from boutique-ish to mass production, and which led to the Model 3, and then the Model Y, the number one selling car in the world.

Until the past five years or so almost every other EV was still an oddball whose design language seemed aimed at screaming "EV" over anything else. Look at the i3 or the Nissan Leaf. Until Cybertruck all Teslas retained a fairly conventional appearance.

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

#427

Post by idiotsecant »

rnewme wrote: post #385
idiotsecant wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

To be fair a lot of us had a lot of education on the topic, and come from engineering backgrounds.

That's the problem. I often tell engineering interns that school gives them just enough information to be dangerous. This is doubly true for software developers.

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

#428

Post by beAbU »

jeffbee wrote: post #156
fraserharris wrote: post #119

AC Transit (eg: East San Francisco Bay) performed a detailed 2 year study (July 2020 - June 2022) comparing newer Hydrogen Fuel Cell & Battery -powered buses to existing Diesel, Fuel Cell, & Hybrid -powered buses, 5 of each type. The key results are the Hydrogen Fuel Cells have significantly more expensive infrastructure, fuel, and maintenance costs than Battery. However, both technologies are still less reliable tha…

They're much quieter however.

Limerick City in Ireland has electric double decker buses. They are dead quiet and it's a total treat to be a pedestrian without the buses passing by and blowing my ears off.

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

#429

Post by mrWiz »

fulafel wrote: post #364
VBprogrammer wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel. This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.

The relevant comparison is to an equivalent energy battery, not the tank enclosure vs fuel.

I think the relevant numbers here (to evaluate the statement "The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel.") would be the total weight when empty vs when full.
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