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Back in the pre diesel-gate days the future of emission free vehicles looked like being hydrogen power. The advantages over electric cars are obvious, you don’t have to directly charge the batteries for hours instead you fill the car with compressed hydrogen and the batteries are charged by a chemical process mixing hydrogen with oxygen in situ.
The news today is that Scottish Power are producing green hydrogen from their wind farms and things seem to be moving quickly.
It’s an exciting prospect, the future could be a choice of zero emission vehicles to suit all requirements. This could be the news every petrol forecourt has been waiting for. Or perhaps it’s just hot air.
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I’m not so sure about V2G, the power from the batteries will be needed by the grid at peak times, just when people are about to leave for work in their EVs.
Perhaps with the new home working models it may work better, but the current state of home working maybe transitory.
EVs use expensive lithium batteries & I feel that static batteries may suit better, especially flow batteries that use much cheaper chemistries.
Not sure though, we’ll see how things evolve.
hydrogen is a BEV the difference is the Battery is a fuel cell, and the major difference is that it take 10 to 15 minutes max to fill back to brim, which means all the oil companies want this as it means you filling up still. all a fuel cell is is a form of a battery, it takes charged water (simple terms) and puts it into the fuel cell, the fuel cell is the charged, when its low, you just re top up with charged water. and yes the by product out the rear is pure h2o… they all want the hydrogen route as its still a way to make money for all, its just very very pricey at the moment to develop.
Rico I don’t see a major push for hydrogen from anyone, certainly not when compared to EV’s. Don’t get me wrong if the question is “do I want an ICE car or a hydrogen fuel cell” the HFC wins every time absolutely no doubt, but I do think the race has been won and BEVs are the clear winner.
Of course no one knows what the future holds and you can’t have too many clean energy solutions so I’m sure HFC will be an option in the future.
Julie I don’t see how the future of the grid can be sustained without V2G chargers. BEVs are great for soaking up surplus electricity, at night, when wind farms are producing loads of energy but there is little consumer demand, and also on sunny days when solar panels are doing their “thing”.
Having V2G chargers at home, work places and on the street allows the grid to be balanced by taking small amounts of energy from millions of BEVs when required.
Hydrogen is a massive waste of energy. You have to put a ton of energy thru water to split it, unless you’re talking wind or lots of solar then that’s going to come from burning gas. The current method means only a handful of cars can use the pump per day which is worse than BEV.
IMHO BEV is the way forward, hydrogen is a sinkhole. Samsung have solid state batteries due very soon with 3-5x higher energy density & after that the inventor of lithium ion batteries has a ceramic battery coming that’s over 10x current energy density.
There are also batteries that use sea water & lots more all behind the scenes.
The solid state batteries eliminate the risk of fire too
