• 5 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 21st, 2024

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  • You are imagining BEVs with ever larger and ever less cost effective batteries.

    The problem is that the BEV was never intended to replace all cars. To even push this idea just means extremely expensive and non-environmental friendly batteries. You are just wasting your time on pushing greenwashing.

    In reality, hydrogen is the only possible solution for most of transportation. Electricity should be reserved for directly electrified vehicles like trains or trolleybuses. Batteries powered vehicles only happened due to massive subsidies. It will revert back into a tiny niche or disappear entirely once those subsidies go away.



  • Because a fuel cell is type of electrochemical device. It is literally a type of battery. So whether you are using a li-ion battery or a fuel cell, you are turning chemical energy into electrical energy. Also, the process of distributing hydrogen is comparable to the grid and has similar losses. The latter of which will see a dramatic reduction in efficiency as more renewable energy go onto the grid. Specifically due to the need for energy storage.

    There are no experts saying hydrogen for cars is stupid. You are just hearing a lot of pro-BEV marketing and their fanboys. Of course, some of them pretend to be experts, but they are not.

    In the long run, BEVs are going to die off because they are not economical vehicles. They cost far more than conventional cars and require huge amounts of new minerals for the raw materials used to make them. If the goal is just to have an EV, then the answer is a type of EV that does not so much raw material nor cost so much. That leads to ideas like PHEVs or FCEVs.



  • Which is about the upper limit of a reasonable powerline. I’m pretty sure they had to resort to HVDC to get it that long. Note that I did not say it was impossible, only impractical. You lose a lot of energy when it gets very long.

    I also know that Quebec is making hydrogen with their hydropower. Clearly, they know something you don’t.

    Pipelines go for thousands of km too, and send far more energy with smaller losses than wires. This is due to physics: A pipe is a hollow tube and scales up better the larger the diameter of the tube. Wires do not scale up as well.

    A battery car does not “skip the middle part.” It relies on a huge and resource intensive battery to store energy. This is electrochemical energy storage, and works the same way as how a hydrogen car stores energy. As a result, there is no fundamental advantage to using a battery. As costs comes down and as fuel cell technology advances, it is likely that there will be zero or next to zero efficiency advantage for the battery car.


  • We do not send much electricity over that amount of distance. More than several hundred km, and most conventional wires are cannot send much power through them. For thousands of km, we have to use HVDC, but that is very expensive. In reality, we tend to switch to pipelines instead of wires for long distance energy transfers.

    Put it this way, if wires could really send power thousands of km without any hiccups, then why do natural gas pipelines exist in quantity? After all, most of them are just delivering natural gas to a gas turbine to make power. So why not put all the gas turbines in one area, and use wires instead? Because in reality, pipelines are much better at moving energy than wires over long distances.












  • Then you are creating an imaginary set of problems for hydrogen. We already have hydrogen cars that can go 400 miles. The range problem is already a solved problem. Future innovations will improve this even further. We already have hydrogen drones and bikes too. So there is no problem scaling down. Not to mention SUVs make up nearly 80% of the market these days. You’re basically inverting how the real world car market works.

    As we run into the fundamental problems of batteries, such as needing charging stations everywhere, and very high powered ones if we want fast charging, it will eventually become obvious that no amount of advancements will solve some of those issues. We will want to look at alternative solutions.

    And again, BEVs are not competitive right now. They are a artificial market propped up by governments around the world. ICE cars still rule the world. And likely BEVs will retreat in the market as subsidy reductions and trade wars make them even less uncompetitive.


  • Hydrogen got a tiny fraction of the subsidies that batteries got. We probably looking at well beyond $1 trillion for the latter, if you include everything, such as all the subsidies and government loans from China. If were serious about making hydrogen a thing, we would’ve increase subsidies by a factor of something like 100x.

    Battery cars have not “won.” In fact, they are barely alive as a self-sustaining industry. ICE cars still dominate, and if anything they are gaining ground with blended solutions like hybrids or PHEVs. This is what I mean by “drinking the kool-aid.” BEV fans are making claims that fly in the face of reality. And it’s more than likely that if we take away the subsidies, the BEV industry would quickly collapse and shrink to a tiny niche.

    The problem is that BEVs only really make sense as urban commuters for people with garages, and smaller ideas like e-scooters or e-bikes. It’s not really something that make sense for larger vehicles or long-distance vehicles. And trying to force the issue just means a lot of SUV sized BEVs, which are definitely not a solution to anything. By admitting they’re not perfect is admitting we should scale back BEV subsidies and start seriously promoting alternatives.