this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Looking forward to the upcoming Toyota announcement that they believe in the future of hydrogen more than ever
Toyota, and Japan as a whole, are in a tricky situation with their electric grid. It's been developed separately by nine different companies in each region; the southern regions use 60 Hz supply cycles, where-as the northern regions (including Tokyo Electric) use 50 Hz. Add to this the populations reluctance for nuclear power after Fukushima, and you get a very fragile supply grid with limited capacity. Toyota is gunning hard for Hydrogen because Japan itself can't support EVs and for some reason it doesn't want to/can't manufacture both.
Okay, but if they don't have the electricity for EVs they definitely don't have enough electricity to waste 2/3 of it turning it into hydrogen and back.
Over 75% of Japanese energy is imported under current circumstances and they have a reluctance to use geothermal for social and economic reasons. Wind is another good choice but they're restricted in where they can deploy it by social and economic concerns
And this is the same country that wanted to mine cobalt off the nearby ocean floor a decade ago. What a strange world.
Transporting energy isn't possible with grid power? Really? That's what grids are for.
Yes, they have the issue of separate incompatible grids, but building complicated interconnects is still going to be easier than building and operating a hydrogen trucking industry.
Spoken like someone who's never seen a land remediation project at a former gas station site.
It's only simple on paper.
Ok but now you're moving the goalposts. Before you just said it was a simple conversion. It's just not, full stop.
And now suddenly it's moot because they have to do it anyway, cost and difficulty notwithstanding.
I remain, regrettably, firmly unconvinced that the average service station franchisee is going to be incentivized to undertake this.
Trucks and trailers aren't new, it's the filling and emptying facilities combined with the sheer number of trucks.
Trucks can't hold very much hydrogen gas - you need a lot of trucks to transport a useful amount of hydrogen. One truck only carries enough hydrogen to fill 75 cars, so you're looking at needing fourteen times as many hydrogen trucks as we have fuel trucks. If filling stations were actually busy, you'd be looking at multiple deliveries per day.
All that infrastructure, trucks and drivers costs a lot of money.
It's from the 380kg listed here and the Mirai's 5kg hydrogen capacity.
Sure, there's also the 'super-insulated, cryogenic tanker trucks' with super cooled liquid hydrogen, but you were claiming nothing special needed to be built?
It's actually a lot more work than "add more electricity". It's a load demand issue in areas, and if there's a bunch of high load electric cars trying to charge that needs all the extra equipment and transformers and larger gauge wiring and stuff to go with it.
Like, look at your house. You may just have a 100 amp breaker box on it. Now you couldn't handle a high-speed charger pulling 40 amps for your car, 30 for the hvac, 20 for lights/tv/computers etc, and then trying to get another 15 or so from and oven or vacuum cleaner. You'll need a bigger amp breaker box, only you can't just install that because the line running to your house also isn't big enough, so you have to have the electric company come out and install a bigger line. But if too many houses in the area need all that, then the main run of lines and equipment going to that neighborhood will also have to be built up.
Toyota doesn't like all electrics because they don't want to add a $15,000 battery to a vehicle and make it weigh 1,000 pounds more for a vehicle that will no longer be in working condition 15 to 20 years later. They'll fully change their tone once battery tech gets better than lithium based stuff made today. Until then hybrids are great. Cheaper lighter batteries with no range issues and easy to replace the batts when needed.
I'm not sure if you know this, but there are smart chargers that include a sensor to put on the feed going into your house. The charger can throttle up and down as you turn stuff on and off to keep the house's total power draw under the limit, so you run all your stuff and the car just gets whatever's left over. You can even have dozens of chargers in a parking garage and program the chargers to share a limited grid connection.
EVs aren't a fixed load, you can ramp them up or down or shut them off as needed, so they're pretty easy to accommodate.
I give simple examples of power load issues and some of y'all take it like a literal argument against just some examples and then the problem goes away. Good grief. Essentially your "easy to accomadate" is just everyone use less power and charge your cars longer".
The argument against your example scales, though. You can do demand management with EV chargers, either at the household level or grid scale. Unless your power supply is running so close to the edge it can't cope with existing normal usage, adding EV charging in the midnight to 6am period when power consumption is otherwise really low works just fine. And nobody cares if their car took 6 hours to charge instead of 5, because they sleep through it.
We've got enough excess supply coming online as people install solar that we're seeing the wholesale electricity price occasionally flip negative. We might not have enough power to satisfy 2035's demand today, but we can accommodate a lot more EVs than we've got on the road.
You know much about Tokyo? How many people there do you think live in houses with a garage compared to apartments? Your idea only works for the portion of people with a house and at least a driveway.
This is really not a blocker - you don’t need that high a charger, you don’t need to run it full time, nor are you running everything else full time.
People forget about time of use metering and that this is a gradual phase in over a decade or more. A little bit of certainty in expectations should make this much easier to plan for.
My charger has a configurable limit, and can be programmed to be active at specific times. I don’t have incentive to do that because I have flat rate metering and sufficient electrical service but I could configure it to be much more friendly to limited service.
I mean yeah, but on the other hand with hydrogen you have much more control over when and where you use the electricity as you can choose to manufacture most of it during off-peak periods and when renewables create excess energy. Then you can transport it by pipes or by trucks/ships without overwhelming the electric grid.
You can do off-peak charging with EVs too, that's not a magical hydrogen thing. My hot water system is on its own circuit which can be turned off by the power company whenever they need to cut demand, providers have been doing that sort of thing for decades.
What? Of course you can store power for weeks. It doesn't just dribble out onto the floor. Go away for a month and come home, your EV is still sitting there with the battery charge whatever you left it on.
Yes, EVs use their stored energy for driving... I'm not sure what your point was there. Do you think transporting hydrogen is free and doesn't cost energy?
I've parked mine outside in the Australian summer. It didn't magically lose energy. The battery is a dense insulated brick on the bottom of the vehicle, so it doesn't really get hot enough to need cooling even when it's 40C / 104F and you park in the sun.
You can drain the battery in a few weeks, but you need something running like Sentry Mode consuming power.
So, let's say I leave an EV at the airport, with 60% charge, battery in reasonable health, and return 2 months later and head home, having lost maybe 3%. You are telling me that's....not doing exactly what you're saying I can't and didn't just do?
You don't also immediately lose all the stored energy either. In a (hypothetical, future tyme) properly kitted out scenario, I leave my EV plugged in at the airport and it's battery contributes to local grid storage while I'm away. So the 60% I arrived with might drop down during high load, but since my utility company has a handy app I can schedule when I need to unplug and ask for the charge percentage to be topped up in time.
I might even not have to pay to park my car in that scenario, or potentially even earn credits back...
Explain to me what hypothetical means to you. Then re read my post and note where I point out the hypotheticals.
And you definitely would not lose 30-40%. I'd meet at 8-10% but you are either inexperienced with the tech or shilling an agenda with that 30-40%.
But what would me and my actual lived experience know right?
That's more an issue with hydrogen than it is with EVs. Hydrogen is very leaky.
Boil off from liquid hydrogen is still an issue as of 6 months ago:
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/innovation/solving-the-liquid-hydrogen-boil-off-problem-us-awards-48m-towards-h2-research-and-development/2-1-1522238
Rio Tinto's scientist puts the boil off of hydrogen at about 1% per day in storage tanks.
So providers just prevent people from using what is potentially their only transportation option as it suits the power company?
Hot water isn't usually a survival need as long as you have liquid water available. Means of movement can be.
They don't just... leave it off. They turn it off for like 15 minutes in the middle of an 8 hour charging session. Nobody notices or cares.
No? Thats effectively the same thing as a gas station closing. You can go elsewhere to charge it.
I’m not sure I buy that. Yes, their electrical grid is a mismatched nightmare, that they should have taken the hit on decades ago. However I see that small chargers for things like phones can adjust to pretty much any electrical grid: why shouldn’t we expect the charger in the car to be equally flexible? Either way, it’s converting to DC
Edit: the article didn’t talk about the differences, except frequency: if the only difference is 50Hz vs 60Hz, most analog electrical stuff probably also works on both. The real problem is they don’t have interconnects nor do they have a regulatory structure allowing separate generating oroviders
My main point was about capacity, and how the separate grid(s?) hinder attempts to add the capacity needed for EVs. I wasn't really clear on that though. mb
I thought auto ranging power supplies were typically for voltage but not frequency.
Every one I’ve seen gives ranges like 100-240v ac, at 50-60 Hz.
Then electrical grids are large complex systems defined in analog days and subject to variances for weather, usage, distances, etc, so they also need to support that variability
They also recently announced an anhydrous ammonia engine.
They really really don’t want to do an electric car. Anhydrous ammonia is insanely toxic. You ever spill a like a few drops of gas at the pump and get it on your pants or shoe? Annoying but not a big deal. Do that with anhydrous ammonia and you’ll be in the hospital.
It can also be used to make methamphetamine.
Erm..so...the need to speed, for speed, by speed precursor?
Going to guess this will not change their goal of 200k hydrogen vehicles by 2030. They currently have about 14k out on roads.