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For people who don't have access to charges at home, like apartment dwellers. Owning an electric vehicle becomes a lot less convenient, cuz you're not getting the efficiency from solar panels, or late night charging. You're at the whim of the price of fast chargers.
But the math is constantly changing, it's good that it's a viable option for a lot of people. I look forward to a more sustainable future.
To put on my engineers hat for a minute, I honestly would prefer that we switch over to hydrogen fuel cars rather than electric battery powered cars. Batteries are more e-waste, not recyclable, unlike hydrogen.
But that's a pie in the sky dream
Car batteries last more than 10 years in cars, have a second life as static storage for likely much more than 10 years, and we currently have the ability to recycle over 95% of battery materials into new batteries.
Hydrogen used in fuel cells has a round trip efficiency of around 30% (compared to 90%+ for batteries). If the hydrogen was generated from solar power, we would need 3 times as many solar panels to drive hydrogen cars vs battery cars.
Most (98%+) of all hydrogen is currently made using fossil fuels. The most common method is methane steam reformation. The methane (natural gas) is combined with high pressure, high temperature steam. The methane reacts with the steam to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide is usually vented to the atmosphere (some places capture the CO2, and use it to pump oil out of the ground where the CO2 is also released into the atmosphere).
The hydrogen also contains less energy than the methane that was used to make it.
You're absolutely right. But hydrogen is the only path for steady-State totally renewable mobile power. Batteries are consumables, yes the time horizon is long. But they are consumables. Hydrogen is totally renewable. Yes hydrogen manufacture today is usually not renewable, but it can be. We have all the Lego pieces to do it
What's your definition of consumable?
I would have thoughy that recycling almost 100% of a battery into new batteries would be considered renewable.
95% of the nickel and cobalt. But batteries are more then just the expensive metals.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-be-recycled
I see great potential in hydrogen, because we could produce lots of it by dumping excess solar and wind energy into electrolysis. That would mean that instead of burning coal, oil and gas in peaker plants, we could use hydrogen for grid balancing. Assuming we had that sort of hydrogen infrastructure for the grid, we could obviously put some of the hydrogen for road vehicle use as well.
In the short term, cost is going to be an issue, but that can be overcome through economies of scale. However, safety is a bit tricky due to the explosive nature of hydrogen. I’ve heard of various creative solutions but they always come with serious drawbacks. So far, storing hydrogen in a pressurized tank seems to be the least awful option out there. On the other hand, electric cars will happily ignite from time to time, so I guess we’ve already accepted a certain level of danger when it comes to vehicles.
Historically, electric cars have caught fire much less often than petrol cars (even accounting for the lower number of EV's on the road). Most of these have been from a single battery manufacturing line and caused by a single misaligned robot that placed the battery terminals too close together. These batteries have all been recalled under warranty.
There are battery types that are better for grid storage than hydrogen. One of the main drawbacks of hydrogen storage is its low round trip efficiency of around 30%.
Redox flow batteries are easily scalable, liquid metal batteries have very low maintenance costs and long lifespans, and sodium ion batteries are much cheaper than lithium ion batteries. It will be interesting to see if any of these options make mass market.
I’ve seen some videos about redox flow batteries and a bunch of other options that appear to be suitable for the grid. I’m really looking forward to seeingt hose in action, because I believe grid energy storage is absolutelyt crucial for getting rid of coal and oil.
However, even though converting electricity to something and then back to electricity is nice, there are many cases where you can take a shortcut. Various types of industry are using fossil fuels to produce heat, so if you give them electricity, they can produce heat when they need it. That’s not the only way, because you could also reduce the number of conversions by using the energy of windy and sunny days to produce heat and store it in hot sand. Later, when the factory needs the heat but the sun isn’t shining, they can just the heat stored in the sand.