Quote:
Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz
Okay, that's super, but that doesn't change how much hydrogen a station can store. Granted this isn't anything that will ultimately decide the fate of either technology, but the ammount of hydrogen (and the energy it carries) you can store in a given volume will never change, batteries are constantly improving how much power they can pack into a smaller and smaller volume.
|
Correct, battery technology and storage capacity etc, will improve, and quite possibly could outpace the finite power of hydrogen. As the technology improves, their capacity, power, charge times, and size will all improve. But I could see battery packs staying a finite size, with power and capacity improving. Like hard drives. Hard drive storage capacity keeps getting better and better, but the size stays the same.
That being said, for the "battery station" to be feasible, there would have to be a standard battery size that all vehicles adhere to. If there is any deviation, you could run into a problem of a service station not having the battery size that your vehicle takes. This probably isn't very likely. As I am sure vehicle and battery makers would come to agreement of standard battery pack sizes.
There could also be a situation of "battery pack tiers" as there are octane tiers at current gas stations. So you could use the latest and greatest battery pack in your vehicle, to improve performance. But then service stations would then have to store enough batteries to cover all the tiers.
Where as with hydrogen, because you are doing the conversion on the fly, you wont run into the same type of problems. There would be no "tiered" hydrogen, as it is all the same. If you want the latest and greatest fuel cell, you would get it from the dealer, instead of a service station.