I'll repeat my post from another thread:

'The research plant on the banks of the River Rhine, dubbed Energiepark Mainz and developed with Siemens AG, adds to two other significant fuel cell developments this year. Toyota Motor Corp., the car industry’s biggest manufacturer, is starting production of its hydrogen-fuelled car, the Mirai, and a group including Linde, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Daimler AG starts the roll-out of a standardized network of hydrogen-friendly refueling stations across Germany.

“The whole thing only works if we have three steps: the generation of the hydrogen, the refuelling, and the cars,” said Andreas Opfermann, Linde’s head of research and development. “We are in a better situation than battery cars where every country has its own plugs, its own level of voltage. We now have standard fueling stations.”

And:

' If extracted from natural gas, it can cost about 8 euros per kilogram, and some 10 euros per kilogram, when made by electrolyzing water with wind power, a reflection of the current higher cost of wind energy.
http://fuelcellsworks.com/news/2015/07/02/german-wind-to-hydrogen-plant-takes-car-fuel-battle-to-tesla/

At the efficiency of fuel cell cars, the ~60mpge of the Mirai for instance, that is a very doable cost in Europe, even for all renewable fuel.

The taxation is not equalised, of course, but it ain't bad for a start and costs will be going down.

The price of clean H2 could drop substantially with very cheap ($0.015 to $0.03/kWh off peak demand periods) surplus-excess Solar and Wind REs and future more efficient technologies.

In our region (95 Hydro + 5% Wind) the peak demand hours are for about 6 hrs/day for 30 very cold days/year = 180 hours/year or about 2% of the time. Clean excess, lower cost electricity could be available for about 98% of the time to produce clean H2.

On the other hand, clean H2 does not have to match the current subsidies price of polluting fossil and bio fuels. The real cost of non-subsidized + environmental damages fair price ($100+/tonne instead of current $0.0/tonne) for bio and fossil fuels would certainly be much higher than currently paid by USA's customers.

don't forget the macroeconomic difference between buying something abroad and making something yourself.
(for those who still doubt there is a difference, ask Greece).

Even if hydrogen "made in Germany" is a little bit more expensive than hydrogen "made from Russian natural gas" there are many reasons to prefer the former.
(in addition to obvious ecological concerns)

What has to be abandoned are CPPs and ICEVs NOT BEVs and FCEVs.

There are many other clean alternatives to CPPs and ICEVs.

Most other transportation types (including small planes and drones) could also be electrified by 2030/2040 or so.

Resistance is futile.

We need the collective will to survive to do it!!

$11/kg. The Toyota Mirai holds 5 kg and has a 312 mile (EPA) range. That's $0.176 per mile. A 25 MPG ICEV burning $3/gallon fuel costs $0.12/mile. FCEVs won't gain market presence at those sorts of H2 prices (and that's a non-delivered, non-taxed price.)

"The price of clean H2 could drop substantially with very cheap ($0.015 to $0.03/kWh off peak demand periods) surplus-excess Solar and Wind REs and future more efficient technologies."

The availability of large quantities of very cheap off peak surplus-excess electricity is a fantasy. Adding EVs, storage and dispatchable loads to the grid will flatten out the price curve. And as coal and nuclear plants exit the grid there will be no one needing to sell at a loss due to the difficulty of shutting down and restarting.

"Electricity in the US currently comes 45% from coal, so by your reckoning BEVs should be abandoned."

There are only two sources for hydrogen. Reforming methane, which is a high CO2 output process. Or using grid power, like we would use to charge EVs. Big thing is, extracting and compressing H2 would take 2x to 3x more electricity per mile than would charging EVs. And that would mean coal plants staying online far longer while additional renewable generation was installed.

"most cars in the world have nowhere convenient to plug in to, or any cost effective means of providing those plugs."

That's also a failed argument. At this time over 50% of US drivers have a place to plug in where they park. Workplace and apartment parking lots are adding charge outlets (30,000 in Southern California right now). Other countries may not have as many outlets at the moment but adding an accessible outlet is small work.

"You also completely ignore that renewables are not available 24/7 all the year around in Germany"

That is true of Germany and true of everywhere. Building a reliable grid based around mainly wind and solar is simply an engineering task. It does not require magic. Widely connected grids minimize the need for storage and dispatchable generation. They also allow storage and dispatchable generation sharing.

BW...the beauty of H2 generation is that you do NOT have to generate it 24/7. You can generate it during surplus low cost REs (Hydro (8% of the time in our region), Solar (6 tp 8 hours/day), Wind (variable but well known) hours and STORE it for future multiple uses.

H2 transport can be reduced by installing many smaller H2 generation facilities and distribution centers.

H2 powered locomotives could share many nearby cars/trucks H2 stations.

The same could be said for H2 powered ships, cargo handling equipment etc.

Clean H2 made with surplus-excess REs is a worthwhile (not necessarily cheaper) alternative to dirty electricity from CPPs, NGPPs, bio and fossil fuels etc.

eci:

You should check out your actual behaviour, instead of the glossed over version you like to think is what you do.

You habitually evade giving anything like a straight answer, but simply change the subject.

So that in this instance, when I asked you a couple of simple, straigtforward questions, ie that in the terms you have chosen BEVs come off as badly as fuel cell cars, and why you ignored PHEV FCEV's you switched the subject to me 'being nasty to you'

Instead of whining, you could try simply answering simple questions.

That is a bit difficult though, as what you are on about doesn't actually make any sense at all.

That is the way it goes when you have an ill considered hobby horse instead of a logical position.

So, if you were prepared to answer not evade questions, then you would be treated better.

Sly and evasive behaviour makes me grumpy.

If the market was supporting your thesis, Davemart, I might be more sympathetic to your views. But given the current annual BEV and PHEV sales, and the number and capability of recent BEV and PHEV announced production vehicles, it seems highly improbably that the technical and financial challenges of H2 as a light duty vehicle fuel are going to be competitive any time before 2030, and probably not then given the head start that batteries have. 15 more years and we'll have 4x the current density. Who is going to want to pay the Hydrogen efficiency penalty then?

As I said, you're entitled to your opinion, even if you are wholly intolerant of others. But the tantrums are really not doing you any favors mate.

They are not building nuclear in the west in volume, or I would be right on board with EP as if they were they can produce power when needed, and so it is much more energetically efficient not to transform the power to and fro to hydrogen or anything else but to use it in a BEV or an electric highway.

That applies to renewables too.
If you have the power when it is needed, you use that.

What critics attempt to elide is that it is not, certainly in Germany in the winter, so they are comparing something which there is no way at all of doing, running cars on renewably produced electricity, with something which can, albeit at considerable difficulty and cost, which is to use renewables when they are available to produce hydrogen to use as and when.

If the difficulty is real about the higher cost, and to a certain extent it is, then overall costs can be held down by PHEV configurations.

Using renewables via electrolysis should not be imagined as the only pathway though, as for instance new enzymes to reduce biomass can make a considerable contribution, and their cost in the US is making great progress towards the DOE target of $4kg.

So critics are comparing fuel cells and hydrogen to supposed alternatives which there is no way at all of doing.

eci;

Your habitual policy of evasion does not do you any favours.
That is what gets up my nose, not differences of opinion.

Once again, you avoid giving a straight answer to simple questions.

So again, on what grounds do you simply ignore FCEV PHEVs?

And why do you persist in giving costs for BEVs per mile in Europe as though they could somehow avoid paying their share of tax forever?

You are not a straight shooter, for all your pretensions to be the really nice guy being asked awful questions merely on the grounds that what you say makes no sense at all.

They call that being smarmy, not nice, where I come from.

eci:

You accuse me of being nasty.

It is perfectly clear that you bull your way through, evading any serious discussion, whilst posing as the rational one, and having a grossly inflated self image.

Look up 'troll' eci, that is what you are.

You would not recognise an honest argument if you tripped over it, and you have the cheek to claim integrity for your site.

You don't know what integrity consists of, plainly.

If you fancy yourself a pleasant person, as you claim, you are very deeply mistaken.

I've already stated several times on GCC that I have no financial interest in Tesla or any other automaker, Davemart, including again within the last few days here. I won't keep repeating myself so this will be the last time I respond to that canard. I will link to the numerous times you've made the accusation and my answers so that new readers can quickly figure out what you're all about.

Name calling and casting aspersions are not going to win you any adherents among the intelligent people who read this blog. It does make it obvious who has run out of any arguments on the merit of the topic at hand.

I'm not here to answer your questions Davemart. I'm here to comment on the discussions at hand. You can go ahead and continue to whinge on about me, but it just makes you look increasingly desperate and obsessive.

@Engineer-Poet

There is no significant cost advantage anticipated for small module nuclear reactors over large scale ones.

"In mid-2013 NuScale ... demonstration and deployment of a multi-module NuScale Small Modular Reactor (SMR) plant... ...comprise a 540-600 MWe power plant (12 modules), costing $5000/kW on overnight basis..."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Small-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/

Actually the cost is expected to be 20% more than a pair of large nuclear power plants (page 4)

http://www.uaf.edu/files/acep/Craig-Welling---SMR-Financing-Alaska-December1010-v2.pdf

So you're looking at 16.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for a 540 MWe NuScale installation on the first try.

You must be expecting some huge savings from a learning curve - but that cannot happen. Half of what goes into a nuclear power plant is in any other thermal plant, and further a containment structure is required. That's 65% of the cost right there. These costs cannot be "learned" away, or they already would have with 10x the number of coal plants built vs nuclear power plants, and thousands of large concrete structures built.

So you're expecting to optimize that to what, 75% of the capital cost of a pair of large nuclear power plants in the *best* case scenario, saving 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour (down to 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour)?

It is still exceptionally uneconomic for SMR nuclear, no matter what the learning curve ends up being, because you can only do a learning curve on 35% of the capital cost.

As to using a 10 year amortization on batteries, they last much longer than that.

A Tesla Model S is expected to be at 94% after 50,000 miles, dropping 1% per 30,000 miles after (that's a 85kWh pack using only 75 kWh of the total).

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1096801_tesla-model-s-battery-life-how-much-range-loss-for-electric-car-over-time

So after 2600 cycles on a Tesla S it would have 73% of its energy capacity left. And of course, grid scale batteries are likely to be built to favor cycle life over weight, beating that. Further you're missing that batteries can be cycled more than once per day on a weekday (excess soalar pv for the early evening peak and excess wind at night for pre-solar noon peak) for a quicker payback.