Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.

https://frontierpowersystems.ca/hydrogen-village/

There's no "green revolution". Just different compromises and tradeoffs, and practical considerations for roll-out times (including for solar, wind, and batteries - no free lunch.

I don't have enough of an opinion to comment on anyone of them individually, but I notice a really striking pattern where every time the idea of alternative energy sources are brought up that are not wind or solar, whoever brings it up is accused of sabotaging the energy transition in some way or another.

I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.

Batteries are pretty messy for the environment. And carrying a ton (1000 kg) with your car, just to be able to move, is a bit too much.

Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the techies in here) helping bring forward guys like Musk, they did that by purchasing and aggressively marketing for his vehicles, they've actually empowered him and brought him into his actual position of power.

well NO, contrary to popular belief. there is no such things because

1. Oil is scarce resource that not every country have

2. since not every country has, they must import it with expensive trade deficit meaning that Oil alternative or replacement is very much needed

since country like china,south korea and japan that has massive economy dependant on oil for their survival, hydrogen tech would come out of necessity but they are not because its not feasible

Economics of hydrogen in CA are also complicated given our on-off approach to hydrogen infrastructure[2] for both personal and commercial vehicles but there is some progress on commercial side at least last year [1].

Hydrogen is not everyone but there are use cases for it.

The uptime (i.e. the refueling time) is an key factor [4]. Battery operated vehicles need a lot of downtime for charging thus you will need more vehicles for the same coverage. Fast charging can help but impacts battery life and thus TCO.

All green public transit are expensive. It is not a easy choice for administrators, should they improve coverage/ service frequency etc for their residents who need transit the the most or better air quality and less noise pollution for all of them.

Remember Fuel Cells are far cleaner for the air much more than BEV also, because it needs oxygen from the air FCs purify the air to do so. Kind of like having a big vacuum on the road in addition to not emitting direct pollutants[3]

[1] https://www.portofoakland.com/port-of-oakland-celebrates-hyd...

[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/zero-e...

[3] Ignoring tire dust, it is problem for all vehicles of course, that is independent of propulsion systems

[4] Even for personal vehicles it can be a decision factor when considering going green, as an owner of a Mirai with no easy access to EV charging stations I have benefited from being to refuel like a gar car.

On the other hand battery seems to be cracking along: "over 1,600 zero-emission buses currently in service, and TfL aims to have a fully zero-emission bus fleet by 2030, accelerating plans with increased government funding."

I’m only semi-joking.

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Allinol

BYD makes electric buses in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_K_series

Do the conventional bus manufacturers in the US not make electric buses? All of the electric buses here are made by the transport authority’s traditional manufacturers.

This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.

You can't drill for oil & refine it at a bus depot but for the case of hydrogen maybe the assumption that fuel has to come from a supplier can be challenged

I don't see any benefits from economies of scale for electrolysis

Do you think it could be useful for farm or construction vehicles?

Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/

Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem.

Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.

https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-b...

Established bus manufacturers make good electric buses now but we don't have the money to buy replacements.

I hope you're using "should" as in "that's what I'm accustomed to" rather than "that's how it ought to be"... right? :-D

Personally I feel like quieting buses would be a huge step toward making day-to-day city life more pleasant.

>Disadvantages

>Weight: a bus which can carry 20 persons and has a range of 2 km (1.2 mi) requires a flywheel weighing about 3 tons.

>The flywheel, which turns at 3000 revolutions per minute, requires special attachment and security—because the external speed of the disk is 900 km/h (560 mph).

It's truly a mystery why they never caught on

Flows > stocks, overhead wire for the win!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_139

I drive a Toyota hybrid and while it's a step up from a purely combustion propelled car, I still have to do oil changes and its fumes still smell bad when it's running rich for whatever reason.

The problem is hybrid drivetrains are complex. You don't save anything on the complexity of a combustion engine and exhaust train (over 1000 individual parts that have to be machined at extremely low tolerances), but add a more complex transmission (it needs to be able to work with two distinct inputs) and an electric drivetrain on top of that.

It is worth it in terms of energy efficiency and acceleration stats since even a small electric motor can supply a lot of torque at low speeds until the high-horsepower combustion engine catches up (virtually all modern cars have a turbocharger that needs time to spin up), but it's technically challenging to actually build into a modern car design - unlike 90s cars with ample space available to stuff components in, in a modern car every cubic centimeter is accounted for due to crash resistance.

They're also made by more than Toyota and Honda. The American automakers have been offering vehicles with a similar hybrid powertrain for around two decades and the German automakers for only a little less than that. But they're generally not a separate model like the Prius is, so the only exterior difference is a hybrid badge on what is otherwise visually identical to the non-hybrid car/truck of the same model.

I bought and drove a 2005 Prius for about 10 years. Loved it. But I would never buy another hybrid. My family now owns 3 EVs. Hybrids are better than pure ICE vehicles. But EVs are much much better than both of them. I could tell you about all the benefits of EVs, but until you own one, it may not sink in.

Hybrids are good for some people. Apartment dwellers without a place to charge an EV.

It's possible to imagine a future where both fuel sources have found their place, depending on context. Doesn't have to be an either/or.

> Metro gets about one or two buses every week or so, and that it typically takes around four months of testing before they are put into service. The lengthy testing process is necessary because the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, one of the funders of the Metro’s initiative, requires the agency to destroy one of its existing buses before putting a new one on the road

This lets the producers "green wash" their production pipeline by stating in a lies-through-omission manner that their hydrogen is "clean burning". See no carbon out of the tailpipe! It's clean! It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production. It's just moving the tailpipe somewhere else rather than eliminating it entirely.

There's also "blue" hydrogen that's manufactured with fossil fuels but claims/intends to capture the carbon produced in the process. It can still feed into a hydrogen infrastructure so fossil fuel companies love it due to the same greenwashing.

The only carbon neutral hydrogen is "green" hydrogen which uses a renewable source and electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen. But even that is wildly less efficient on net than just using renewables to charge battery EVs. Electrons are far easier to move long distances than hydrogen or hydrogen feedstocks (including water).

I wish there were a common framework for this lose and hand-wavy accounting. For some people this is painfully wrong, while the rest are not even convincible about it.

Anyway winter or cold temperature is an advantage for hydrogen in hydrogen vs electric, precisely because heating is free. They get the reasoning wrong. I think "exceptionally expensive heat" is just made up to illustrate their point. Trash "article" either way.

IMHO hydrogen is the most foolproof way to store cheap solar energy.

I think it’s the opposite. Public money should be conservative spends on things we know work. Let the startups try the risky bets.

As this has been reversed a lot of cities have gotten taken for a ride. For example “self driving car lanes”.

Small aircraft are already there. I'm looking into starting my pilots license this year, the local flight school recently acquired an Elektra Trainer [1], that apparently has 2.5 hours worth of flight time [2].

Big transoceanic widebodies obviously will be fossil fuel based for a long time to come, but I think a lot of the GA market and bush pilot/island hoppers can and will be done by electric planes sooner than later - alone because the noise and lead emissions are all but gone, and I think that in a few years, when experiences on failure modes are a bit richer, electric planes will also be cheaper to maintain - similar to cars, there are less parts involved in the first place that can break down.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektra_Trainer

[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/elektrisch-fliegen-in-l...

Demonstrated range of over 300 nautical miles. Significantly higher reliability than helicopters previously used for the same task, and much cheaper.

It sounds ridiculous but I’ve been in aircraft that take off while attached to a cable thousands of feet in length — a winch launched glider!

Strong disagree. Short range eVTOL craft will blow open the market for all kinds of use cases.

Size the battery for takeoff/climbing/go-around/diversion use-cases. Size the fossil-fuel engine for cruising power, which should improve efficiency. During takeoff and climbing power, the two motors work together. During cruise and descent, the electric motor regenerates the battery. I imagine that for general aviation, you would maintain one propshaft and not even bother with a clutch pack, since the gas engine is needed in all phases of flight, and freewheeling an electric motor is simple. Perhaps have the fossil-fuel engine keyed to the shaft with a shearing pin, so that if the engine seizes, the electric motor still turns the prop.

This has the advantage that you now have two independent motors, which could eventually help with ETOPS rating, but would initially improve safety/reliability for general aviation.

Yes, you are still fossil-fuel dependent, but you burn much less of it, first by offsetting some takeoff energy to the electrical grid, and secondly by reducing reserve power in the fossil fuel engine to improve efficiency.

> There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon,

The planes and batteries are getting there.

VC will invest in snake oil if they think they'll get out at a profit.

/j

..practical to replace commercial airliners, sure. There have been plenty of slow electric planes.

In the future, net-zero air travel can only be done by producing jet fuel in a carbon neutral way.

Anecdotally, the town I live in invested in probably around 100 buses. They did build a new depot with charging stations.

Batteries are coming down in price, so if getting a good grid connection is a problem, you can put in a buffering battery.

The comfort of the BEV buses is much better than the old diesel buses, by the way, and they are much less noisy in the city.

On average and excluding the minority of routes with dedicated lanes (which may be best run on diesel), the Boston metro buses are in use for 6.6 hours per day, covering on average 53 miles.

A full size electric bus uses electricity at a rate of approx 2 kWhr/mile.

So, on average the bus would have around 17 hours to charge up with 106 kWhrs of juice, and this averages out to about 6.2 kW. On average.

However, the smart thing to do would be to charge the buses when the power costs the least, say between 10 pm and 8 am, so you'd need ~10 kW/bus, maybe ~1MW for the 100 bus fleet. Not difficult.

https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/avoided_emissions.svg

Also in 2011, the government introduced fuel-tax on to LPG, which it had been exempt/discounted on previously. So the price went up, and all of a sudden it wasn't as economical. So that put it in to a death-spiral, especially when many servo's started getting rid of it due to low demand. Now people with LPG cars have "range anxiety" [4]. Where I live (Perth, Western Australia), you are basically stuck in the metro area if you are LPG only. It also means there's a ton of ~2008-2012 LPG Falcons for sale second-hand at good price, but no one wants to buy them.

Out of curiosity, I just went and looked up some data for where I live - the Perth metro (source [5]);

  Year  Month  Fuel  c/L avg  Servos  $cost / 100km for Ford Falcon sedan (UNO)
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
  2010  Dec    LPG     69.4   216     @ 15L = $10.4  (gas model)
               ULP    128.0   298     @ 10L = $12.8  (petrol model)
  2019  Dec    LPG     89.0   147     @ 15L = $13.4  (gas model)
               LPG     89.0   147     @ 12L = $10.7  (LPi model)
               ULP    144.9   387     @ 10L = $14.5  (petrol model)
  2024  Dec    LPG    133.9    46     @ 12L = $16.1  (LPi model)
               ULP    172.7   436     @ 10L = $17.3  (petrol model)
               ULP    172.7   436     @  6L = $10.4  (Falcon Ecoboost 4cyl 2L turbo)
               Dsl    178.5   437     @  9L = $16.1  (Ford Territory SUV 2.7L TD)

Like all ICE engines, it still emits NOx pollution that cities want to get rid of.

It is even less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells. It combines energy-inefficiency of ICE with the energy-inefficiency of hydrogen generation and distribution.

Hydrogen is a worse fuel than gasoline, so these engines are more complex and deliver less power.

Such engines in busses would be more expensive to run, more expensive to maintain, and still have tail-pipe emissions.

2) There is a huge existing logistics network which conveys diesel to all corners of the world. The same, in a sense for electricity. For Hydrogen this doesn't exist.

5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.

In Europe at least, battery powered trains and commercial vehicles have been in use for decades simply because they were the best solution for certain use cases, before anyone thought about the climate or subsidies related to it. Hydrogen only came along once subsidies did.

In every single case I am aware in my country Hydrogen vehicles were only purchased because politicians insisted that Hydrogen MUST be used, and these projects have pretty much all been disastrous.

Recent in my city a number of diesel trains were replaced with battery and hydrogen. The Hydrogen trains lasted two weeks before they gave up and went back to Diesel. The battery ones are running perfectly.

Fuel cells are presumably more expensive than battery packs. The former are barely produced, while the latter are made in gigafactories. You can't just fill up the gas tank with hydrogen, it will leak out and/or cause a violent reaction with oxygen.

> somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot

You can't just store hydrogen in a tank and call it a day. Again, it leaks through everything and is rather reactive. Maybe it could be stored on site, but even then it'll still need to get there.

> it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle

Not intrinsically. Buses could be built with swappable battery packs.

> allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.

How many solar panels and how much water you need to power those 100 buses you mention? Hydrolysis isn't very efficient.

> hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy

In theory, maybe. In practice, it is difficult to store at scale.

Toyota FC stack costs ~$11k, about the same if not cheaper than a 100kWh worth of Li-ion cells.

Considering current CCS and future MCS charging ports and their speed I think the hydrogen lost another advantage if it ever had a refuelling time advantage.