Presenters at a cleantech conference predicted fuel-cell hybrids will ultimately lose to electric pluggables.
Forget hydrogen and fuel-cell cars, according a variety of speakers at an investor conference today. The future is clearly pure electric pluggable cars, they said.
“We saw a strong shift this year away from the focus on hydrogen and fuel cells as the car of the future to the electric or hybrid car. Small companies like Tesla, and even big companies like GM, with its Volt and flex fuel infrastructure, are just the beginning,” said Ira Ehrenpreis, general partner of venture firm Technology Partners. Ehrenpreis gave the opening address at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Palm Springs, California.
Not surprisingly, presenters representing electric car vendors were among the critics of fuel cell approaches.
“I think this hydrogen thing is nonsense,” said Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors.
“Hydrogen is not a fuel. You can’t go mine it anywhere, you have to make it. You’re typically making it with electricity and water, compressing it, putting it in a car and feeding it into a fuel cell. The efficiency of that system is about a quarter of the efficiency of an electric car today. So the same amount of electricity drives your car one quarter of the distance. And let’s not even talk about infrastructure, distribution and the dangers of a 10,000 PSI tank in your car.”
“As far as I can tell, automakers are only pursuing fuel cell cars because that’s the path they chose to meet the zero emissions mandate when it was rewritten in 2003”, said Eberhard.
“We explored making hydrogen cars, but they were expensive and complex,” said Jan-Olaf Willums, CEO of Think, another electric car company.
“There’s been very rapid development in battery technology and range. If you add quick charging capability in the future, there’d be little objection to electric, especially compared to the huge infrastructure you’d need for hydrogen.”
And it wasn’t just investors and electric car makers predicting the demise of hydrogen cars.
“Battery-driven cars would clearly have the lowest environmental costs once we bring more renewable electricity to the grid. You can’t capture carbon at the tailpipe,” said Bob Hemphill, EVP of global development for AES, an energy company serving several hundred million customers in the U.S. “And in terms of that high pressure hydrogen tank, I wouldn’t want it in my car, no thanks,” he said.
The electric-only stand flies in the face of many leading global carmakers, which have in recent weeks recently shown fuel cell concept vehicles or committed to producing them, touting their zero-emission benefits. (See Cleantech.com's coverage of fuel cell vehicles here.)
Electric car range is the big obstacle yet to be overcome, presenters agreed. “Today, we get 250 miles. Charging is done at night, like your cell phone. What we need to do to make electric cars attractive to everyone is extend the range,” said Eberhard.
Mary Nickerson of Toyota, responsible for the marketing of Toyota’s Prius hybrid and other advanced vehicles in the United States, told attendees her company considers hydrogen a long term possibility, but, “there’s still a lot of work to be done in infrastructure and packaging.”
“Companies like Toyota will benefit from advances in batteries, because our current implementation of hydrogen is in a hybrid context.”
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Hydrogen economy
Is there still not a considerable amount of money being spent trying to develop an automotive hydrogen ecosystem? And what about all the cheap or free hydrogen we gain to make in co-gen from other processes? We don't have to make it all with electricity, do we?
That said, am looking forward to battery breakthroughs, esp. in nanobatteries!
Hydrogen Economy - Follow The Money
Electric vehicles disrupt the conventional and enormously lucrative refining, distribution and internal combustion paradigm. Oil and gas companies make enormous profits not only drilling but also refining and distributing gasoline. These companies are therefore quite support of hydrogen since their existing business models will thrive. Auto companies closely allied with "Big Oil" also profit by making larger, fuel-hungry vehicles.
The "Hydrogen Economy" would extend this way of doing business, whereby plug-in hybrids have the potential to disrupt it.
It is critical to note that ethanol also continues this distribution and combustion paradigm. "Big Oil" will continue to profit from ethanol fuels, whereby they are effectively shut out in a plug-in hybrid world.
Of course, electric utilities will love plug-in hybrids. Substantial changes in electric rates -- specfically very cheap nighttime charge rates -- are necessary for the economics of plug-in hybrids to work. In many cases it's cheaper to burn gasoline than use expensive (at least in California) electricity.
Actual costs of fuel-cells.
Japan has some fuel cells installed at homes, but they don't say the cost. They are only about 2kw. Honda has a similarly performing home system but avoids the fuel cell and hydrogen producing step and uses a long life engine at far lower cost. A straight fuel cell car has to wait for minutes to start, and it costs too much for a fuel cell that has enough starting power for a car, so the car has to be hybrid anyway. Since you have paid for the electric system already, put a battery in the car and one at home or in the office that is charged with the cheapest electricity and you can dump the charge at a fairly high rate into the car battery. Flywheels could be used instead of the stationary batteries and give a very high charging rate. Nuclear power is very cheap once the power plant is paid for. The actual total fuel cost including fabrication of the fuel bundles for a kilowatt-hour is in the tenth of cent range or less. The actual uranium cost is not a significant fraction of this. The US could buy reactors from Canada that can reuse the old fuel rods waiting to be sent to Yucca Mountain without even reprocessing the contained fuel and get at least 40% of the energy that was originally obtained from the rods by the inefficient US reactors. US Reactor's don't have to be efficient because the uranium content of the fuel is very cheap. All the news promoting newer higher efficiency reactors has people ignore the fact that the fuel rods sitting in the pools are cheap and more than 90% of the energy in them is being wasted only because of political decisions based on no or false science. The plutonium left in such rods makes a cheap excellent reactor fuel, but it has the wrong plutonium isotope concentration to even attempt to make an effective nuclear explosion for war use.
The radiation from power reactor plutonium, in the quantities needed, would destroy both the electronics of the bomb and the conventional explosives needed to ignite it and kill any people attempting to construct such a device as if they were using weapons grade Plutonium that cannot be left in a reactor for more than a week. The money spent to investigate the destruction of weapons plutonium from deactivated bombs is wasted; simply mixing it with used, even unreprocessed, reactor uranium fuel in sufficient quantitites allows the fuel to be reused as was the original fuel and makes it immediatly impossible to extract weapons plutonium ever again. But it is much more radioactive to begin with than new uranium fuel rod.
Natural Uranium remains radioactive for billions of years as does the potassium in our bodies and all animal and plant material. No great effort is taken by environmental groups to ensure that no natural uranium is everr leached into the water supply. There is probably enough uranium in seawater to make it useful to extract it from sea water if the price goes up by a factor of five. We do not have to worry about being exposed to nuclear radioactivity, but only high levels of radioactivity. We will always be exposed to the radio-activity of our bodies and that from outer space and the sun. We take simple precautions from being over exposed to sunlight, and simple precautions are all that is needed to protect ourselves from used nuclear fuel. Far simpler and fewer precautions need to be taken than when crossing a street. Propane and chlorine tankers are millions of times more likely to cause death or injury than spent fuel rods in their transport containers. This is also true if they were being transported in the center of a load of sand in a gravel truck.
Making hydrogen with nuclear reactors is a good idea, but not if the electricity could be used for charging car or house batteries. Fuel cells can be used in space or research submarines, but even submarines find them too expensive to buy and operate but use Stirling engines underwater instead with liquid 02 and diesel.
Service stations could also sell fast charging by having large batteries or flywheels ready to charge a car battery at the enormous rate needed for the proposed ten minute recharge, but the sporadic high demand without batteries would be too much for ordinary power service. Twenty-five kilowatt-hours in ten minutes requires a generator or system that can deliver 150 kilowatts or the average load of one hundred houses just for one car. The lights in the neighborhood would dim. The copper in the cables would have to carry about 500 amps at ordinary voltages and be a half inch copper in diameter to avoid overheating. The internal battery conductors would also have to be massive.
Manufacturers who sell full electric cars should be required by law and allowed by statute to have small built in generators for emergency use without the vehicle losing its zero emission status. Never should it ever again be mentioned that such an electric car has limited range. If there were automatic starting large toy airplane engines fitted with alternators and rectifiers available when the Baker electrics were being sold in the 1900's they would have been installed as infinite range extenders; the size required depends on how fast you need to go. RCV makes some large ones. More power requires an OPOC or motorcyle engine as used in the TZERO trailer. No car manufacturer would every install a horse-power dial on a cars dash-board; you pay for 300 but can't use more than an average of ten on the fastest city streets. Horse carriages can obviously do with less than one; as can small cars with good tires and roller bearings. An average of a hundred horsepower would cost you 10 gallons of fuel every hour or about $35 an hour minimum with a standard efficiency engine.
Henry Gibson's nuclear comment
I read somewhere that we would have had thorium-powered nuclear power plants if it hadn't been for the military wanting enriched uranium for bombs. True or False?
Hydrogen - Do Not Doubt It
It is, of course, in Mr Eberhard's self-interest to denigrate hydrogen - bearing in mind that his battery is no more a fuel than is hydrogen. The fact of the natter is that the problems with hydrogen - storage, distribution, release, recycling - are very close to being solved. The potential for ammonia borane (AB), in particular, is very interesting (see DOE analysis), and more so given the fact that the US has vast amounts of borax deposits in the California desert.
AB is a non-toxic, air-stable solid that is replete with hydrogen. There is no need for compressing hydrogen, no need for those massive tanks, and no need to build out an extensive hydrogen filling station network. The catalytic release of hydrogen under mild conditions and in large quantities is not to be doubted. It will be distributed in the form of a battery that can be sold at Walmart, KMart, 711 and anywhere else - the distribution power of the oil companies will not be allowed to frustrate this solution.
http://www.purdue.edu/dp/echi/Presentations/PNNL%20-%20T.%20Autrey.pdf
The electric car is no answer - where does the electricity come from?
Hydrogen - Doubt It
What an idiot! Where does the electricity come from? From the same place it would come to make hydrogen, except you'd need about twice as much to make hydrogen than to just simply recharge a battery. And by the way, an hydrogen powered car is still an electric car that uses hydrogen to store energy, the only difference is that it's a lot less efficient than one that uses batteries to store energy.
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