Why use electricity to produce hydrogen that needs to be transported, stored and then turned back into electricity in a fuel-cell in the car when electricity can be supplied straight to the car's battery via the grid?

For the simple reason that you can store it. At present, wind farmers are paid not to produce electricity when there is too much of it about, e.g. north sea gales during summer nights. This is absurd, and hopefully temporary. It makes sense to store it in hydrogen rather than piles of batteries weighing ten times as much for the same amount of usable energy, and costing far more in polluting manufacture than a hydrogen tank, which should last indefinitely.

Why use electricity to produce hydrogen that needs to be transported, stored and then turned back into electricity in a fuel-cell in the car when electricity can be supplied straight to the car's battery via the grid?

While it's possible to burn hydrogen in a spark-ignition engines, it's less efficient than electric, whether battery or fuel-cell or a combination of the two.

I think the future of motoring is electric but I'm not so sure about the current fad for converting classic cars to electrics. Maybe they could be the perfect niche for hydrogen combustion engines.

Converting classic cars to electric is sacrilige. They are no longer classic cars. Our history and heritage is being thrown away by fools

I suspect moving the deadline back to 2030 is to give a time that looks close enough to actually drive change and also to give some wiggle room before 2040 if, by 2027/8 that looks difficult.

There might be no need for a deadline. Steam cars were not outlawed, they just gradually disappeared during a decade or two as the big firms stopped making them and the little ones went bust.

The current (pardon the pun) level of charging infrastructure is nothing compared to that needed to support a mjority of road users, bearing in mins that the precentage of cars on the road that are EVs is around the 0.5% mark as of today (I checked and it was roughly 140k out of 40M) . When they have similar levels to that of ICE filling stations that can charge a car in 5 minutes, maybe.

Besides, who's going to pay for all the new chargers and, once it gets to a significant level, digging up tens of thousands of miles of road, car parks, etc etc to lay all the new cables?

Whilst the grid may (not certain by any means, given the electricity consumed by fuel refineries are in specific areas only [mainly coastal]) be able to cope, local upgrades will almost certainly be needed.

But as others have said, the huge extra amount of raw materials needed for the batteries is not just as easy to find as regards ramping up existing supplies or finding new sources - in well under 10 years, given they all have to be found, surveyed to confirm quantity and quality of reserves, mines dug, product refined, then made into components and then fitted to the vehicles and sold.

And that's assuming we'll have the necessary electricity generation capacity when it's needed to fullfill the charging systems, noting that gas is rapidly running out and is neede far more to heat homes and buildings generally than to generate electricity for car batteries.

Solar panels are not viable for the amount of power this would need locally at charging points (huge arrays would be needed plus more underground cabling) or taking out yet more arable land needed for us to be as self-sufficient food wise as possible and for leisure use.

And most of us don't want a huge wind turbine within earshot or sight near our homes (never mind they are suited to most of the UK - mainly remote and northern areas).

I have no issue with going EV - I just think that the current crisis and lots of powerful vested interests are pushing them towards this, as well as those who want to virtue signal their supposed 'green' credentials.

Besides - we've just spent how many hundred £Bns on essentially treading water for 8 months and counting. Presumably that's more debt we're going to have to pay to certain already vastly wealthy billionairres and their companies/banks/China who are the very same people wanting this all to happen in return for more control over our lives, governments and economies.

Coincidence? I think not.

But only when the wind blows - is that a credible plan?

Not on its own, maybe, but grid scale battery storage completes the jigsaw. Such battery units are already in operation - here's one:

www.edie.net/news/8/UK-s-largest-battery-storage-f.../

We all know the wind doesn't blow all the time but with the number of onshore and offshore wind farms in existence around our island, on most days the wind is blowing somewhere.

At the moment wind and solar exist in symbiosis with combined cycle gas-fired power stations, which can be started up or run down at short notice, unlike nuclear or coal-fired.

So the more renewable capacity we have, the less we need to use the gas-fired power stations and eventually they will just become stand-by,needed a few times a year.

Perhaps we are thinking about this in the wrong way.

Instead of saying how are we going to provide enough electricity, batteries, infrastructure to support millions of cars maybe we just need fewer cars ?

Maybe the age of mass personal transport should end with the internal combustion engine, it would certainly be better for the planet and future generations ?

How would the hydrogen be used to drive the cars?

Hydrogen is consumed in a fuel cell that produces electricity to drive the car. So a hydrogen powered car is essentially an electric car with exhaust pipe that emits water vapour.

There have been experimental cars that burn hydrogen in an adapted petrol engine but that's much less efficient. As I say, a possible niche market for hydrogen would be adapting existing cars to run on it - particularly classic cars.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 18/11/2020 at 09:36

I'm sorry to digress away from motoring a little. Others have made very good points in this and other threads. I suspect that hydrogen is a much better long term power source for road transport than electricity.

I think it is as well - but do think it is too far off to be the solution at the moment as electric cars are a lot further ahead with the amount to research and development on them especially into larger capacity batteries.

More likely to meet in the middle. The cars that need to come down in price are the small ones like the Mini Electric, E-Up and Honda E, and hopefully they will if dmeand increases.

The E-Niro I've ordered, assuming the Government grant is still there next spring - fingers crossed - will only be £1,000 more than the cost of the petrol Q2 in early 2018, and the PCP payments will be about the same if I put the same deposit in.

The issue with electricity generation in the UK is a lack of surplus capacity to be used in times of increased demand due to weather, equipment failures and demand surges.

Private sector, driven by the profit motive, do not want to invest in more capacity than they can reliably sell. When nationalised the government could play safe and build in excess capacity for which we all paid (even if we were not aware of it)

I do not think renationalisation would be a good idea, but much better regulation of the industry is needed to to ensure additional capacity is built in advance (not after) demand has increased.

Capacity building should not be a barrier to EV rollout - whether the government are up to the task is a different question.

So the UK wants to adopt californication by 2030?

In a remarkable moment of candor, Governor Gavin Newsom of California said in mid-August 2020 that the state’s transition away from fossil fuels is a contributing factor to the state’s rolling blackouts. The elimination of fossil fuel products and the shift to solar power, windmills and other forms of green energy has led to what Newsom called “gaps” in the energy grid’s reliability. To top it off, the Governor signed an executive order on September 23 banning the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles within 15 years to cut down on air pollution and reach the state’s goals for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) delivered this common sense verdict to Governor Newsom: “California’s record of rolling blackouts – unprecedented in size and scope – coupled with recent requests to neighboring states for power begs the question of how you expect to run an electric car fleet that will come with significant increases in electricity demand, when you can’t even keep the lights on today?.”

All that shows is that if you want to bring this change then you need to invest in the electricity generation as well - which is kind of obvious.