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by _hypx 1108 days ago
You’re using a gish gallop style list of random claims. There is not one science article that pushes back on every one of your points.

The main thing to note is that fuel cell cars already exist. They already are cars that can be bought now and already drive like real cars. That alone debunks a vast number of supposedly unsolved problems.

Meanwhile, electrolysis approaches 100% efficiency: https://www.inceptivemind.com/hysatas-record-breaking-electr...

The most you can say is that BEVs are a solution for right now. Even then it's a pretty bad one since PHEVs exist and arguably far more practical. But hydrogen will displace it in the future.

1 comments

> You’re using a gish gallop style list of random claims.

Am I? Looking back at my posts above it seems my main claims are:

- Hydrogen storage isn't a solved problem, unless there's some recent breakthrough I'm not aware of.

- Fuel cells remain expensive, and don't have particularly high efficiency.

- Electrolyzers still need to come down in cost and increase in efficiency.

AFAIU this is largely the consensus position of people who research the energy transition professionally. You're the one with outrageous claims, thus you're the one who needs to provide evidence for those claims in order to be taken seriously.

> There is not one science article that pushes back on every one of your points.

If you read my posts above you'll see that I never demanded everything should be published in one single articles. Multiple articles are fine, you're free to provide references to multiple articles corroborating your claims!

> The main thing to note is that fuel cell cars already exist.

So far it seems they are outrageously expensive. Not a very convincing alternative to BEV's so far. Which might be why several orders of magnitudes more BEV's are taken into use every year than the total number of FCEV's on the planet (I vaguelly remember figures like 70k FCEV's globally vs. 1.4M BEV's sold per year, but I'm too lazy to dig up the exact numbers).

> That alone debunks a vast number of supposedly unsolved problems.

I don't think anyone has claimed that FCEV's would be impossible to make. Just that they're much inferior to BEV's, barring some major breakthroughs that you claim have been done but for some reason refuse to share with us.

> Meanwhile, electrolysis approaches 100% efficiency:

Awesome. And better, in that press release there's even a link to the actual article, which, even better, is open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28953-x

Of course, this is a lab result. Hope they manage to scale it up. And one might note that even if FCEV's are a failure, there's certainly a lot of use for low cost green hydrogen in decarbonizing ammonia and steel production as well as other industrial processes.

Then here is a quick rebuttal to that:

1) Hydrogen storage is a solved problem. We have no issue storing it in pressurized tanks, or cryo tanks if necessary. We already have cars that work on both ideas, especially cars that you can buy and drive like normal cars. There are no serious issues found. No one is aware of any unsolved problems.

2) No. They are rapidly falling in price and are quickly become a cost effective solution. Fuel cells are not expensive anymore.

3) Same story as above. Also, we are seeing nearly 100% efficient electrolyzers now. This is also a solved problem for the most part.

That consensus is not real; it contains many people who have a vested interest in not seeing hydrogen succeed. This is analogue to the rise of wind and solar power, where many "analysts" systemically demonized the technology. This continue even after they reached large-scale production and low cost.

You can come up with a list of rebuttals to most of that. The reader needs to be able to parse the data and recognize how it debunks most of the gish-gallop style attacks, although not every single thing can be refuted:

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/ac-transits-fuel-cell-program-br...

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2022/03/20220321-hysata.htm...

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/42448/bmw-is-stress-testing-it...

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge...

The fundamental advantage with fuel cell cars is that they do not have the huge raw material needs of BEVs. As a result, they should be much cheaper. In fact, they should cost no more than ICE cars. In reality, hydrogen is the much cheaper and more practical solution. And since it refuels so fast, it is inevitable that millions of people will have to buy a hydrogen car and not a BEV.

That last part should be self-evident. But we live in a world of BEV propaganda, and people regularly show up with their brains filled with gish-gallop style nonsense arguments. It is simpler to just point out that they were lied to and have a total misunderstanding of the situation, rather than debunk multiple and sometimes dozens of ridiculous unfounded assertions. People do not have infinite time to do this.