Buy A Hydrogen Fuel Cell To Power Your Electric Car (You’d Probably Be Better Off With A Diesel Generator Though!)

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t Ian

 

 

 

What a tangled web they weave!

From the Telegraph:

 

 

The BMW i8 plugged in to the first ever hydrogen fuel cell EV charging station

British firm AFC Energy has launched the first ever hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle charger, a system it describes as a "breakthrough" in clean mobility.

By using hydrogen fuel cells to recharge battery-electric vehicles in car parks and service stations, the system will help bridge the growing gap between electricity need and generation capacity caused by a projected rise in EV uptake. The modular, low-cost charger also solves some of the logistical issues currently associated with electric car charging, and can even operate entirely off-grid. It's a completely different model to our current use of hydrogen in mobility, in that the vehicles themselves are BEVs rather than FCEVs, and could be deployed extremely rapidly.

"The UK government has targets for electric vehicle uptake, aiming for 100 percent of new cars to be zero-emission by 2040," says Adam Bond, CEO of AFC Energy.

"The additional power required is somewhere around 27 gigawatts. That's 17,000 wind turbines; one hundred London Arrays. It is enormous power that hasn't been considered within the context of the policy on EV charging.

"It is one thing to stick a couple of EV charger points on the motorway, but that is not going to deliver the policy. What we are trying to do is take from government or industry the need to create another 20 gigawatts of power, and displace that with localised, decentralised, standalone clean energy solutions that will operate 24/7, as and when you need them."

The 'CH2ARGE' system developed by AFC Energy is beguilingly straightforward. An alkaline fuel cell (or set of fuel cells) is connected to an inverter and a battery, via which it can charge electric vehicles using a CHAdeMO DC fast charger. It can switch on and off as required, putting any 'spare' electricity into its battery for later use, or exporting it to the grid.

It's a clean, efficient, scalable and practical solution to an expanding set of challenges. What's more, it can be built into a shipping container for quick and cheap deployment almost anywhere. The system is designed to operate on-grid, off-grid, or "near-grid", opening up the benefits of hydrogen power to a completely new range of consumers. But where does the actual hydrogen come from?

"You could take it in from an industrial gas company in cylinders," said Bond. "The infrastructure and logistics are already in place, so you could have that tomorrow. You can look at green ammonia;  you can crack ammonia in to hydrogen and use that hydrogen to run your fuel cell. Or you can look at using surplus renewable energy using an electrolyser, which is the Scottish model.

"But they are the mainstream options. The hydrogen generation market is exponentially bigger than that in terms of the tech that is coming through, and we are positioning ourselves to access some of these upstream hydrogen generation techniques that will remove a lot of the cost from the conventional methods. Fundamentally you can create hydrogen in ways that are not currently done commercially, at costs that are lower than what is on the market today."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/uk-firm-launches-fuel-cell-charge-point-electric-cars-will/

 

I suppose we ought to be grateful that they are honest about the huge problems of deploying grid power to charge EVs. 20 GW of extra capacity is much more than official projections suggest, and the problems only start there.

But having dug a dirty big hole, you don't try to make it even deeper!

Buy a hydrogen fuel cell charger, and then go and find your own hydrogen!

All you need is an industrial gas company down the road, or go and find some green ammonia to make your own. Oh, and a shipping container would also come in handy.

If these hydrogen fuel cells really were a cheaper way of providing electricity, we would already be using them in our homes.

 

EVs are an expensive and impractical answer to a non-existent problem. So, to get around that problem, we find an even more expensive and impractical answer.

And they call that progress.

You could not make it up.

from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2FPinEi