Given the unexpectedly rapid growth of very-high-speed DC charging there should be no role for hydrogen in road vehicles. It needs to be reserved for the sectors that potentially really need it like steel production and aviation. Whacking hydrogen in a vehicle that can be recharged in under an hour anyway is a false economy in a very similar vein to biofuels. Looks green but you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. That will only change if and when Green Hydrogen is a reality. That'll probably come around the same time as economical carbon capture and cold fusion.

I can see a role for lorries, but for vans and smaller you're right - DC charging for the relatively small number of long journeys is a better approach than hydrogen - there might even be an intermediate technology, something like Al/Air as a safe and easy "extender" with similar energy efficiency to hydrogen but without the storage/transport issues of hydrogen

You might be content to sit around twiddling your thumbs for an hour waiting for a "quick chrage"on occasion. But when you need to do this at inconvenient times of the day, and every day, it soon becomes a major hassle factor and lack of productivity. If you then add in the (no doubt) extortionate costs of (quick) charging at places like motorway service stations, it gets even less appealing.

EV's need to have lightweight batteries with a range of 600-1000 miles to become practicable for many business. There are vans on the market at the moment, which claim c. 150 miles range, but in real world turn out to be between 40-60, which is just a joke and wouldn't even get the driveer to the first job of the day. Also, the current weight of batteries takes a significant portion of the payload capacity of vans and cars. No point buying a 2800kg van and finding it can only carry 250kg!

An ICE running on hydrogen could be a possibility if fuel cells turn out to be too much hassle.

>You might be content to sit around twiddling your thumbs for an hour waiting for a "quick chrage"on occasion.

EU driver safety rules require 45 minutes unbroken rest time every 4h30 anyway, so this "on occasion" is already largely accounted for. This would require deployment of significant numbers of high voltage DC chargers but this is no different to the enormous amount of infrastructure required to safely transport and handle hazardous, high-pressure compressed hydrogen gas.

The real difference is in process efficiency. You can rule-of-thumb the generation of "green" hydrogen from electrolysis at something like 75% efficient, followed by 60% efficiency in the fuel cell. It's a double efficiency hit. Every unit of energy put into a battery gets you something like twice as much useful work as when put into a hydrogen fuel cell. We all know how sensitive transit is to raw energy costs. Nobody is going to accept a 2x multiplier on their operations.

So are batteries bigger? Yep. Are they heavier? Absolutely. Will they take 10-30 mins extra per day of charging time? No doubt. But they are massively cheaper to run and - bear with us here - are actually feasible. We do not produce anywhere near enough hydrogen gas (of whatever colour) to run something like the world's HGV fleets, and 95+% of what we do produce is a near-accidental byproduct of hydrocarbon processing. The economics only works today because "waste" hydrogen is so cheap. They completely break down for anything even remotely "green" or "blue", and neither of those products even really exist today or in the near future. They're a myth. When they do exist we'll probably need them for little things like smelting steel and shipping and aviation.

Practical, ubiquitous battery-EV HGVs are within touching distance. BYD, Freightliner, Volvo, Tesla and so on all produce or are about to produce 300-mile class vehicles, and much like cars 95% of journeys are for substantially less distance than that (~170mi per day in the US, for example). Range is a solveable problem. If it's not there for your use case yet it will be in five more years, probably before this Hydrogen FC factory is even running in serial production.

Go back in time five years and you'll find people making these exact argument about battery-EV cars. They'd never get enough range for normal people. What about long distance driving? Hydrogen just "makes sense". Those arguments turned out to be nonsense there and they will here.

The number of downvotes the OP accrued is absurd. Hydrogen has practically no place in road freight, not unless someone comes up with a smart way to produce 10,000x more of it than we do today with half as many efficiency losses, and gets there (with all the requisite infrastructure) faster than batteries. Or a pantograph network.

"EU driver safety rules require 45 minutes unbroken rest time every 4h30 anyway, so this "on occasion" is already largely accounted for. "

Bull. For HGV's over 7.5 tonnes yes.

For van and car drivers no.

Dependable 300 mile class goods BEV vehicles? I doubt it within the next 15 years.

And even if you take the 45 minute HGV break, in a layby at the side of the road, or in the corner of an industrial estate or business park - how and where do you charge up? Drive 20 miles off-route to find a charger and hope that it is not already in use?

Electric cars still are nonsense for many people, other than as toys for the very well off or fools with more money than sense to act as prototype guinea pigs for the rest of us.

Aye fair LCVs are a slightly different set of circumstances, but you might want to check some of your numbers there. The first prototype light commercial vehicles are only clocking in at ~250mi range, as measured on the same standards. They're effective battery-hydrogen hybrids derived from the pure-battery EVs launched a couple of years back. They have to do this because today's hydrogen ECs simply don't produce enough power to actually drive the van. In return you gain a couple of hundred kilos of payload and 30 additional miles of range.

As to the main benefit of refuelling time? 3 minutes, so naturally faster than the ~30 an EV takes (assuming you actually need to refuel "on the road" rather than overnight). Definite win on that front.

But how long do you think it's going to take you to find a hydrogen fuelling station? There aren't even 100 of them in all of Germany. Barely 25 in France. The UK? Last I checked we had 10. Nobody's doubting hydrogen has some on-paper advantages. The reality is those advantages are nowhere near significant enough to overtake battery EVs, and certainly not if companies are forced to pay the true cost of "green" or "blue" hydrogen, instead of today's rates.

"And even if you take the 45 minute HGV break, in a layby at the side of the road, or in the corner of an industrial estate or business park - how and where do you charge up? Drive 20 miles off-route to find a charger and hope that it is not already in use?"

Not to mention the 40-50 or more HGVs commonly seen in motorway services all at the same time which, if EV, will be wanting to use the chargers for at least 30 minutes each during their 45 minute stop-over. There's not even the infrastructure to support all the EV cars at those services, never mind entire fleets of HGVs. That will take many years and much more power generation. I'd like to see it happen, but I don't expect to.

Just a couple of years ago, it was common to see empty spaces at motorway services charging points. Today, it's not unusual to see people queuing up to use them and that's going to get worse before it gets better. I will grant that it's more unusual to see all the Tesla charge points in use at the same time, but AFAIK, ONLY Tesla drivers can use those charge points.

Not true.

One a recent trip to Norway where EV's are everywhere I saw many non Tesla cars charging at Tesla Superchargers. Tesla is opening up their network to all EV's apart from those who use CHAdeMO connectors.

Then you have companies like Gridserve who are putting in EV Charging hubs with many 350kW chargers.

Then there is the new site that opened last week in Oxford. Much the same idea.

Then... the most recent EV's can charge from 10-80% in under 30 minutes. Just enough time for a comfort break and to queue up at a coffee shop.

The situation at Motorway Services is improving but TBH, I only use the one at JCN 1 on the M6 where there are 24 350kW chargers or the Instavolt side just off the M40 at Banbury.

Things are improving all the time. I've seen a huge change in Rapid Charger availability since I got an EV in 2019.

Norway should be used as a great example of how to do this stuff. Almost every village that has a supermarket and a filling station also have at least 2 DC chargers.

I travelled from Stavanger to Narvik and never saw queues of people waiting to charge on the main roads.

Yes, we have a lot to do but things are changing. Besides, my new EV can easily go from SW of London to north of Leeds on one charge. 30mins charge and I can get to Perth. I did that very thing in late May.

"Norway should be used as a great example of how to do this stuff. Almost every village that has a supermarket and a filling station also have at least 2 DC chargers."

Perhaps more importantly they are mandating that all car parks should at least have the routing for cables to provide AC charging to every spot (they don't yet have to install all the cable, but the routing has to be available). That immediately reduces the dependency on fuel station style charging.

"Almost every village that has a supermarket and a filling station also have at least 2 DC chargers."

Well, great, but as far as I know, there are 6 DC chargers in the small town I live in in Hampshire in the UK. Great, but to make electric vehicles viable here, we need another hundred or so added to publicly accessible places like supermarket car parks, and that's assuming that everyone who can put a slow charger on their own driveway does so, and that the grid can take the strain.

The infrastructure needed for electric vehicles is massive, because lots of people *will* want to charge their cars at exactly the same time.

Quite a few of the tesla charge stations are now open to all users.

Whilst regulations don't *require* you to take a break in a smaller vehicle... it's still sensible to do so.

Taking regular short breaks is a mechanism to reduce fatigue and increase safety, failure to do so should be considered careless driving.

BEVs are far more effective than you (who I assume is talking from a place of not having one) realise.

I have an MGZS, it (just about) fits my wheelchair and family, and is pre facelift - so "only" has a range of 174mi range (WLTP), which I normally consider to be about 140, though I have done a trip to my in-laws and back without recharging - that's a touch over 160 (I normally take a five minute "volt and bolt" to leave a little extra wiggle room, but didn't on this occasion).

But the number of times in a year we use a public charger is so small it can be counted without even resorting to toes - and a couple of those have been destination chargers, so taking exactly zero time out of our day. It makes the six hour journey to my parents about one hour longer, but *much* easier and more relaxing.

There will be a few travelling salespeople who do silly miles each and every day, but they really are very rare - and that's where something less difficult to handle (like an Al/Air pack) could really come into its own. It's not particularly efficient, but neither is H2. Compared with H2 it's trivial to handle and transport.

Or of course battery swap stations for those users - who are probably either leasing or fleet users anyway.

"Practical, ubiquitous battery-EV HGVs are within touching distance."

Practical, maybe. Ubiquitous? Do we have the raw materials to make them ubiquitous? In this context "materials" includes copper and that's going to be a problem for hydrogen/fuel cell/electric motor systems as well.

A lot of metal - Just for the UK, moving to an all electric road fleet (some 30 million vehicles) will require well north of 15,000,000 tonnes of vehicle batteries and I'm erring on the light side with only half a tonne (of much better batteries) per vehicle.

HGVs may have several tonnes each.

That rapid growth is driven by government favouritism and subsidy. BEV is a technological dead-end, excusing poor efficiencies and low energy density today against the promise of mythical future battery developments that are unlikely to pan out.

Hydrogen fuel cells, by comparison, use only a fraction of the resources required by BEV, whilst providing comparable energy density to conventional fuels. Were the state not tipping the scales so heavily towards BEV, hydrogen would already be winning. But that's always the case, isn't it? The government picks a winner, then we're saddled with the results for years and decades afterwards.

Fuel cells have a lot of upsides for sure. Battery is a relatively quick fix, because it "works" on the existing infrastructure to a fashion, at least in small numbers.

Scaling up infrastucture to make batteries work for mass consumption, and/or deploying fuel cells meaningfully means lots of new infrastructure; cue usual problems of who pays for it, cost of living crisis, etc.

As has been pointed out on ample occasions, batteries for everyone in vehicles is problematic for the supply chain to manage because rare-earth mineral use. Fuel cells avoid a lot of that kind of problem.

But you can bet top dollar that were fuel cells the horse being backed, other sectors would look for ways to attack it.

I don't see it as an or answer though. Some things BEVs will be better suited for, some FCEVs,

Why does it always have to be a 1 winner situation?

One winner would be nice. As things are at present they all have problems scaling up.

Agree - there isn't a single solution for everything... I don't see the risks and complications of an H2EV being worth the limited benefits for cars/vans - the arithmetic changes for HGVs, they can afford the complexities of storage, and could store *so* much that they'd be able to deal with a relatively weak supply chain.

For basically any car the issue isn't max single stop range, it's either speed of charge *or* continuous charging for those rare long journeys (maybe a handful each year).

I'd like to see some battery standardisation, so that you can rent an additional battery occasionally, whether that's Li based, AlAir based, or something else, plug it in and boost range for that trip.

Maybe have it "spare wheel" sized, since so many cars are doing away with the spare wheel... yes I know that's a variety of sizes, but it's not that many really.

The one thing that is absolutely clear to me is that direct combustion is a piss poor way to provide motive power - even moving to hydrogen you still generate various nox-ious gases, and the efficiency is substantially worse than fuel cells.

simply because of the size of an Hydrogen atom. H2 will find a leak. It is also very energy light. 1kg of H2 has far less energy in it than something like Ammonia which is IMHO a more viable alternative to H2.

Then there is the fact that most H2 at the current time comes from Fossil Fuels. The energy required to extract it is huge which makes your statement a tad dubious.

Most of my EV's energy at this time of the year comes from my Solar panels.

FCEVs are basically BEVs with added steps. They need enough battery buffer to keep the fuel cell ticking along because it's impossible to have a fuel cell deliver enough current for acceleration and then also throttle it far enough for normal cruising or start/stop traffic. FCEVs are not simpler or less resource intensive than BEVs. Their ONLY advantage is that they can charge independently of an external charger and be refueled faster.

Hydrogen is shit. It's energy density is shit, it's production efficiency (no matter the method) is shit, it's storage efficiency is shit (because it'll leak, no matter what you put it in, so you'll lose up to a few percent per day), it's conversion efficiency is shit and it's safety is shit. BEVs aren't winning just because of subsidies, they are winning because they are the better solution in most situations.

There might be niches or applications where FCEVs can work, but certainly consumer motor vehicles aren't it.

I realise that we're all going to have to change our ways and adapt to fit around EVs.

But I thought the whole point of personal transport was to make it convenient and effortless.

We seem to be doing the opposite to suit the EV.

Why should your transport be effortless but cost other's their life?

There is precious little adapting required to use an EV.

My current plan is to walk more or cycle more. If you care about the environment you should be doing the same (For me its more I need the exercise anyway).

Considering that their exhaust catalyst business is about to go totally tits up (TTU), finding another entry into the vehicle market makes a lot of sense.

My guess though is it will only be cost effective for heavy / commercial vehicles i.e. trucks, vans, rail locomotives

Getting backed by the UK government is not an indicator for potential profit. At least this is cheaper than OneWeb ... so far.

Our Westminster Clown Collective will swallow the 'alternative facts' about blue hydrogen being clean and go with that.

Grey/Blue hydrogen is such a farce. No green credentials whatsoever in either of those fields, and in fact, delivering the same quantity of useful work done probably needs more energy by that route.

Green hydrogen is one of those things that could work, but broadly requires an excess of wind and/or nuke to make sense.

Our friends in the pro-oil camp don't particularly want the competition so they will no doubt kick up a fuss about offshore wind being ineffective; yada yada heard it all before.

What it really boils down to is taxation and economics. Tax dirty areas and use the proceeds to fund the development work needed to get the alternatives up and running.

The bit people miss is that there are so many middlemen squabbling over the moolah, how much actually gets to the projects it's meant to support? A bit of central planning would go a long way. Rather than this farce of free-market illusion which is in reality an oligarchy playing games to print themselves cash.

In meantime we'll enjoy energy bills more or less tripling for the forseeable future, and unfortunately, digging one's self out of that hole either means supporting Poo-tin's "cheap" exports, borrowing a lot of money, or taxing a lot of money.

I am under no illusion that current leadership will basically do nothing that puts their own positions at further risk, so we can expect no real progress until we change the nappy that is well and truly full at this point.

Either on or offshore wind is ineffective.

Look at the existing output. [1]https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ You can see the past years worth of demand and generation in the bottom left corner.

We have over 25GW worth of wind turbines installed, and wind turbines have generate perhaps half that at their peak and have month long troughs where they generate <5GW.

As a strategy Wind turbines simply means that we rely upon gas as primary generation, with wind used as a load reduction measure when the wind is blowing. Even if you increased the number of wind turbines by a factor of ten at a ruinous cost to the people actually paying for the electricity then this is not going to change that, and any fool with a calculator can easily figure out the requirement for energy storage and do a rough ballpark as to the costs based on a UPS and come to the conclusion that grid scale battery storage would cost around 100 billion quid to be able to output 1GW for 24 hours; where the actual requirement is at least ten times that; ie ~2 trillion quid.

Battery storage is around a thousand times more expensive than it needs to be to be economically viable; and if we plan on meeting targets then we need to be deploying things that exist now, not hoping for magical technology that doesn't even work in the lab will save us.

Wind turbines only exist as power generation because they get [2]~£9 billion quid a year subsidies and if these subsidies ceased so would the wind generation industry in the UK.

[1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-renewables-costs-idUKKBN12H2M3

The upside of green hydrogen is that it can be produced at the edge of the grid, close to your offshore wind farms when the weather is right for renewables but grid demand is low, and then shipped to where it is needed. It isn't tremendously efficient to produce this way, but when the energy is basically free and there's not a pressing need for it elsewhere, inefficiently producing hydrogen lets you keep a significant amount of the energy you have produced stored up for when and where it is needed.

Invest in the South, hit the North!

"But to create hydrogen without releasing CO2 at all, you need renewable electricity and electrolysis"

You also need a water supply. The state of the reservoirs round here today is a reminder that that can be easily overlooked.

"The state of the reservoirs round here today is a reminder that that can be easily overlooked."

You seem to have forgotten we live on an island surrounded by the fucking sea!.

To electrolyse water you need to stick a couple of electrodes in it. Sea water is corrosive stuff. What does it do to the electrodes. I don't think sea water is a useable raw material.

Of course, we could just use naturally occurring low CO2 gas which is mostly hydrogen at the moment; CH4 is one carbon atom bonded to 4 hydrogen atoms.

It's commonly known as "natural gas", which is our majority power generation at the moment, as well as home cooking and home heating so there is a plentiful supply of it, and burning hydrogen atoms isin't going to be any cleaner if we have to separate salt from sea water and then crack the water to hydrogen as it's quite energy intensive.

"then crack the water to hydrogen as it's quite energy intensive"

You're right about the sea water. But the energy going into splitting the hydrogen out of water is the energy you're looking to get back (allowing for losses) by recombining hydrogen with oxygen. The hydrogen is a storage and distribution medium for that energy.

Having said that I don't actually like hydrogen on safety grounds.

A factory for creating highly aggressive extremely large dinosaurs?

My first secondary school chemistry lesson involved making hydrogen. You expose it to the air, it goes pop and water is made. When it comes to having tanks of a highly explosive gas in the car that I drive around at 70 mph, it makes me a little nervous.

Yes, I've seen videos of EV batteries on fire, but that's when really damaged. Diesel barely burns at all, and petrol isn't actually all that explosive either - you have to actually set fire to it, where as hydrogen + oxygen = boom. So these tanks, they're never going to leak? None of the hoses or fittings or seals are going to leak?

NCAP gave 5* safely for the Toyota that is currently available in the UK

https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/crash-tested-are-hydrogen-and-electric-cars-safe-to-drive-agonV3I9JJCn

And Toyota take.

https://www.toyota-europe.com/world-of-toyota/electrified/fuel-cell/are-hydrogen-cars-safe

Only marginally different to LPG and I was happy to drive one of them for years.

It may be interesting to read between the lines and say that electric will be fine for cars but, when the NG can't cope with all the charging requirement, commercial vehicles can still run on hydrogen from whatever source ...

LPG is a lot safer and easier to store than hydrogen, which needs to be kept at much higher pressure to keep it liquid and keep the energy per unit volume usable. Speaking as an engineer, I'd far rather have a Lithium Ferrite battery than hydrogen.

There is an even more increasing urgency to decarbonize energy production but, funnily enough, nobody is talking about that.

An EV or even a hydrogen vehicle is all very nice, to be sure, but if the electricity is generated in a coal plant, all you're doing is displacing the pollution, not eliminating it.

Quite. And you're never going to get the Greens to admit that they're the reason we didn't do it years ago.

I believe many Greens have already moved on to decrying all forms of personal transport whether hydrocarbo, BEV or Hydrogen on the grounds that the particulate matter from brake dust and tyre wear is equal or worse than the NOx or Co2.

i.e. They've changed the goal posts

If you look at the records then you will find that 1.7% of UK electricity was generated by burning coal in the past year.

https://grid.iamkate.com/

The energy mix is different in other countries.