▲ | jillesvangurp 4 days ago | |
Actually all the vehicles you mention are already available in battery electric form and typically already far more common than their hydrogen equivalents. Everything from mining trucks to scooters. Batteries are cheaper than fuel cells. And electricity is cheaper than hydrogen. You are right that there's a lot of potential for further cost reductions with battery electric through innovation and numerous paths for doing so. With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged. With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly. Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever. > Hydrogen is a quicker refuel Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster. |