Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
I haven't really cared enough to look (mainly because petrol cars are the only ones on my radar and will continue to be so for a long time), but I don't get why hydrogen fuel cells aren't the next step instead of fully electric.
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I think I remember being told by someone actually working on these analysis here at a company that hydrogen isn't going away but that the ideas are shifting from using hydrogen as a fuel vs hydrogen as energy storage. He said that hydrogen will be the future as a storage vs previous attempts at hydrogen as a fuel. They're rethinking the idea and throwing it a few steps down the road.
The biggest issue he said was storage. In first world countries, storage generally can be fine for how we do things, but energy storage rapidly becomes a problem in second world or third world countries. This is because current ideas of energy storage is mainly batteries or letting it flow in an electrical grid system. This is problematic in third world countries if the systems are inadequate or if the system is damaged in a natural disaster etc. Something like a canister of hydrogen swap would be faster than a supercharger concept and then you'd have the best of both worlds for EV and ICE.
That's why Toyota and a few Japanese automakers are supposedly going down the PHEV route or producing very little or smaller sized pure EV for primarily two main reasons:
1. They're looking beyond just the first world market.
2. They're also looking at a business alternative rather than being caught up with paying premiums on huge electrical cell requirements of pure EVs.
I don't know if this is purely accurate, but the logic that was suggested seemed to make sense to me. The biggest hurdle for ICE/Hybrid -> Hybrid/PHEV is that it's more complex with more to consider and the transition is more clunky than ICE -> EV -> EV/PHEV. Plus it has to deal with the transition of the fuel from gasoline/diesel vs hydrogen. But once it's done, it'll rapidly replace pure EV.
Development of a small, cleaner power creation system to run a pure electric motor and the balances of motor, fuel/energy and storage (ie: Battery) is the challenge right now)
I think the guy doing the analysis specifically was saying that hydrogen was going to be both the fuel and the storage (ie: Same as gas/diesel) vs electricity + battery are separated "fuel and storage". This conversation was like 2-3 years ago, so my memory on it was kinda fuzzy. The PHEV part wasn't part of the conversation with that guy, it was a discussion about another report somewhere or something with someone else and when I put the two concepts together, it started to make more sense.
Battery storage of electricity using stuff like lithium is the short term, but longer term, you need another alternative to store before running into major issues with supply with finite resources. I believe Japanese automakers are hoping to gamble and be at the forefront of the next exit on the path. This expectation is that it will be hydrogen storage of energy vs battery storage (ie: Lithium) of energy.