japan has this problem as all of its automobile companies decided to invest down the path of hydrogen (as it fit their home country/interests better) over the rest of the worlds EVs. because of it, japanese fully EVs tend to be kind of lackluster, because theyre usually second thought.
I don’t understand how anyone anyone thought or thinks it could be better to use electricity to pull hydrogen from water, then turn it back into water to get electricity again, with energy losses of 40-60%. Not while you could just keep the whole chain as electricity, with losses of ~10%.
Japan’s electrical grid is pretty outdated and has been pushed to it’s limit. It simply cannot support an influx of EVs. That’s why the government has been pushing hydrogen, which can be produced from electricity like you said, but is “better” produced from natural gas or coal, which they have easy access to. It’s a terrible solution to the problem.
Hydrogen also solves the range anxiety issue by being incredibly energy dense, with the minor downside of occasionally exploding.
Also degraded batteries can be reprocessed into fresh batteries again, we will only need to mine a lot of them when growing, once the batteries are made we don’t need to mine as much.
It still means every gram of the materials are yielding essentially 10x of use. And when we make these huge batteries it’s easier to get them back to the recycling stream since we can easily make that the only way you dispose of them.
its automobile companies decided to invest down the path of hydrogen
The Japanese government invested in hydrogen, with R&D grants. It was a huge fail.
Then, Toyota stockholders kicked out Toyoda because he said there was no market in EVs. He was right, Toyota is ruling sales with hybrids and PHEVs. Unlike Tesla, Toyoda needed Toyota to make money selling cars, not conning an investor cult.
japan has this problem as all of its automobile companies decided to invest down the path of hydrogen (as it fit their home country/interests better) over the rest of the worlds EVs. because of it, japanese fully EVs tend to be kind of lackluster, because theyre usually second thought.
I don’t understand how anyone anyone thought or thinks it could be better to use electricity to pull hydrogen from water, then turn it back into water to get electricity again, with energy losses of 40-60%. Not while you could just keep the whole chain as electricity, with losses of ~10%.
Japan’s electrical grid is pretty outdated and has been pushed to it’s limit. It simply cannot support an influx of EVs. That’s why the government has been pushing hydrogen, which can be produced from electricity like you said, but is “better” produced from natural gas or coal, which they have easy access to. It’s a terrible solution to the problem.
Hydrogen also solves the range anxiety issue by being incredibly energy dense, with the minor downside of occasionally exploding.
Japan has the best mass transit infrastructure in the world.
There is the theoretical advantage of storage.
You loose ~50% of electricity in transport.
Hydrogen isn’t great, but synthetic methane is much more efficient to store and transport
Wrong. Oil and gas “fact”.
1-2% of energy is lost during the step-up transformer from when the electricity is generated to when it is transmitted.
2-4% of energy is lost in the transmission lines
1-2% of energy is lost during the step-down of the transform from the transmission line to distribution.
4-6% of energy is lost during the distribution
https://www.chintglobal.com/sa/en/about-us/news-center/blog/how-much-power-loss-in-transmission-lines.html
Batteries used to kinda suck, and there are still issues Like weight and scarce minerals
Rare earths are not actually rare. No one mined these metals until recently.
Also degraded batteries can be reprocessed into fresh batteries again, we will only need to mine a lot of them when growing, once the batteries are made we don’t need to mine as much.
Given inefficiency you need 10% of virgin materials to make a new one, and there are batteries that don’t end up in the recycling stream
It still means every gram of the materials are yielding essentially 10x of use. And when we make these huge batteries it’s easier to get them back to the recycling stream since we can easily make that the only way you dispose of them.
Fundamentally as long ad the atoms still exist they should be theoritically recoverable but the last percent is gonna be harder than the first 99%
Materials Recycling needs to be a major research focus
We need a fuck ton of the minerals, not just rare earths but nickel and sometimes cobalt
I don’t think I’ve seen a single hydrogen station or vehicle here in Japan.
Apparently there’s ~150, for a country of 125m.
The Japanese government invested in hydrogen, with R&D grants. It was a huge fail.
Then, Toyota stockholders kicked out Toyoda because he said there was no market in EVs. He was right, Toyota is ruling sales with hybrids and PHEVs. Unlike Tesla, Toyoda needed Toyota to make money selling cars, not conning an investor cult.