Original text too short.
For a policy briefing today, I had to prepare a comparison of H2 and battery in light-duty vehicles. It sums up the challenge of broad H2 deployment and adoption pretty well.
4 thoughts on “For a policy briefing today, I had to prepare a comparison of H2 and battery in light-duty vehicles. It sums up the challenge of broad H2 deployment and adoption pretty well.”
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This is pretty cool. Any chance you could share the sources you used for this? Would love to have some data when I share it with my Hydrogen obsessed mates
I am not sure about it, but i’ve seen in many videos and articles that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are VERY in-efficient compared to BEVs, the tech is too expensive, and being able to charge your EV is just more comfortable in my opinion. But for heavy-duty vehicles, it might be better to use Hydrogen, but again Tesla Semi “might” prove wrong. But i’m sure hydrogen could be used on planes. The infrastructure and making green hydrogen is also expensive and hard to achieve compared to the BEV infrastructure.
But it would be really wise to use hydrogen on vehicles like planes and rockets, that’s a very green option, you don’t need a whole infrastructure built like for cars.
That’s better than I expected. But raw energy isn’t the metric that will decide hydrogen’s fate: it’s cost.
And there’s is a lot of room for improvement. We’ll see how much over the next few years.
I think your numbers are a bit off because you’re missing a compression step (there’s two compression steps in the chain. One at the factory before transport and one at the pump from low to high pressure storage) and a cooling step at the pump (where the stuff needs to be cooled from 90 degrees celsius to -40 degrees.)
Also transportation losses are quite a bit higher since you need about ten times the tanker trucks to supply the same “mobility” (i.e. the same miles that cars can get out of the fuel) to a gas station than with a diesel tanker truck. Presumably these tanker trucks are also then fueled with hydrogen and should count as ‘transmission losses’.
According to the study done by Volkswagen the amount of power needed by a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle to get the same mileage for the entire chain should be 7600kWh (when taking the 3000kWh as a baseline for EVs).
https://www.volkswagenag.com/de/news/stories/2019/08/hydrogen-or-battery–that-is-the-question.html
The number on the charging losses for EVs also seem a bit iffy. If you’re comparing with public hydrogen ‘gas stations’ then you should compare to public DC chargers or at the very least wall chargers (level 2) which have significantly lower losses. If you account for transmission losses in the grid (about 5%) you come out to roughly 10-12% losses overall (DC on the lower end, Level 2 on the higher end). The 17% is something you might reach with grid losses and a 120V outlet, but that is not the norm.