Toyota aims to cut hydrogen car prices by 95% in ten years

$50,000 ten years from now aint too bad really. a hummer 2 bought today costs more than that

 

toyota and GM.. cool.. gm has the resources since they own hydrogen plants.. and Toyota definetly hast he money... i guess that's what that 20+ billion is set aside for in part. they did say it's all for R+D. i wouldn't dought for them to put several billion into these projects.

 

Re: Toyota aims to cut hydrogen car prices by 95% in ten yea

I think they probably could get the price of the fuel cell car down to every day prices. But they can't escape the fact that an EV goes 4 times further than a fuel cell vehicle on the same amount of energy, so would cost at least 4 times less in fuel costs.

So you arrive at the dealership in 2015, looking at the fuel cell Corrolla and the 300 mile range Corrolla EV - priced the same.

"So what's the range of the fuel cell?"

"300 miles sir"

"And the plug-in?"

"Also 300 miles"

"OK. How much does it cost to fill up each?"

"The fuel cell vehicle - 300 miles is about 5 kg of H2 which costs about $30. The EV about $4.20."


GM crow on about making all their decisions on future automotive directions based on viable business strategies, but ignoring this is quite remarkable.

 

Re: Toyota aims to cut hydrogen car prices by 95% in ten yea

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"100402)</div>

And how long does it take to charge up each? The EV vehicle is going to be quite useless if ya have to go visit the parents in the middle of PA.

 

Re: Toyota aims to cut hydrogen car prices by 95% in ten yea

Hydrogen fuel is pointless. If you want to use electricity to make hydrogen, then use hydrogen to propel an fuel-cell electric car, then it's MUCH more efficient to use LiIon batteries.

If you want to use Hydrocarbons to make hydrogen to power an ICE, then the energy used to make the hydrogen is lost. The H2 to H2O reaction has a lot less energy than the CxHx to CO2 to H2O reaction. If you don't use that energy to power the ICE, then it is lost, and the whole process is inefficient. Also, ICE's produce a lot less power burning only hydrogen, so they would have to be bigger (and heavier).

So, hydrogen from electric to a fuel cell to electric is inefficient.
And, hydrocarbon to hydrogen to an ICE is inefficient.
What about hydrogen from electric to an ICE? Clean, cheap, politically correct? Hardly. Existing cars can't be retrofitted and still have reasonable power or range, and new ICE designs would still be heavier, less powerful, and lower range than gasoline.

The only way around this is the plug-in hydrocarbon ICE + batteries for electric. You get the everything, clean when driven most of the time, and range when you need it. Oh, and we can have this without a new hydrogen infrastructure.

Nate

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jonnycat26\";p=\"100425)</div>

About 1 minute. Please see this link for details.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"100641)</div>

Sure, if you have a three megawatt power supply.

If you assume an EV car would have a 50 kWh battery. The you would have to supply it with 50 kilowatts of energy for an hour inorder to charge it (assumming 100% charging efficiency). To charge that battery in 1 minute would require 60 times more energy to be applied to the battery for a duration of one minute. 60*50KW is 3000KW, or 3 megawatts.

That's not going to happen. You would need very high voltage and thick cables to accomplish that, and it wouldn't be safe to stand within 20 feet of your car while you are doing it. In addition to that, you would probably spot-weld together any connectors you used to attach the cable to your car.

Even over 5 minutes, you would need over half a megawatt of power.

 

Re: Toyota aims to cut hydrogen car prices by 95% in ten yea

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(naterprius\";p=\"100441)</div>

You're being way too short sighted. First off, hydrogen will be initially produce not through electrolysis, but through steam reformation of Natural Gas, as it is currently produced. This is still not good, as it consumes a fossil fuel, but by replacing gas-consuming cars with hydrogen-consuming cars, we open the door to other sources of hydrogen. Even if we initially uses fossil fuels to produce the hydrogen, we still break the link of putting fossil fuels directly into our tanks.

A german company is testing what I think is a very good idea. They are putting a windmill on a tanker ship so they can sail it out into the open ocean and use the strong ocean winds to generate electricity which is then used to produce hydrogen. When the ship is full of hydrogen, they sail back into port. A ship is mobile, so it can move to where the winds are strongest, unlike a land-based windmill.

Wind energy in the open ocean is plentiful and free. In addition, it can't be put to practical use unless you have a storage carrier for the energy. Hydrogen is that storage carrier.

Imaging a fleet of such ships off the east and west coast of the US. They sail out a 100 miles or so with their tanks empty and sail back in a week or so later with full tanks. We get most of our oil by ship anyway, so there is already a energy industry concentrated at ports.

Other companies are researching, and have prototypes, of solar panels that directly convert water into hydrogen without first generating electricity. In other words, these solar panels are not producing electricity that is then used for electrolysis of water.

Other companies are researching biological means of hydrogen production, using bacteria and algae.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Marlin\";p=\"100650)</div>

Agreed! This very issue was discussed in a previous thread a couple of days ago:

http://www.priuschat.com/forums/2-vt9480.h...r=asc&&start=20

But remember that 50kW chargers were available 7 years ago (nice article on 12 minute recharging here), so 100kW chargers would be pretty easy to make and could charge your vehicle in only half an hour. But as discussed in the previous thread, charging will most likely occur more slowly while parked in work and supermarket carparks.



(Edited to add a picture to show what GM's 1998 50kW EV charger looked like)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"100693)</div>

I think you missed the "h" in 50 kWh.

The charger you reference and show a picture of is a "50 kW" charger, notice that the "h" is missing. Watts is an instantaneous measurement and does not measure the total quantity of energy over time. "kWh" is a quantity measurement over time, and 50 kWh is equivalant to 50 kW delivered continuously for an hour. The electricty usage of your home on your power bill is specified in kWh.

So, a 50 kWh battery is capable of supplying 50 kW of power continuously for an hour. (In reality, that's a normalized unit, so a given battery may not be able to physically supply 50 kW continously for an hour, but may instead be capable of say 25 kW continously for 2 hours, or 5 kW continously for 10 hours.) Therefore, it would take that 50 kW charger an hour to charge a 50 kWh battery.

The article you quoted stated that the charger could charge a Chevy S-10 electric pickup truck from empty to almost full in 12 minutes. That means that the truck had a battery slightly larger than 10 kWh. (50 kW delivered for 12 minutes is equivalent to 10 kW delivered for 60 minutes).

Now the Chevy truck had a range of only 60 miles. A general purpose car needs a range of around 300 miles. So, if the Chevy truck had a 10 kWh battery to go 60 miles, it would need a 5 times larger battery to go 300 miles. Hence the 50 kWh battery assumption for a general purpose EV car.

So, your 50 kW charger would charge a 50 kWh EV car in one hour (way too long). To charge one in 12 minutes (still too long in my opinion), it would need to be a 250 kW charger. To charge it in 5 minutes (probably reasonable) it would need to be a 600 kW charger (0.6 megawatts). To charge it in 1 minute as you implied in your original post, it would need to be a 3000 kW charger (3 megawatts).

 

No I didn't - I was refering to power, not energy. The charger shown is capable of dishing out 50 kW (kilowatts). Plug it into your car for 1 hour and it would provide, as you say, 50 kWh (kilowatt-hours). Agreed a 1 hour charge for 300 miles is probably too much of an annoyance for most people. But a 100 kW charger would only take half an hour and any problems of heat etc could be overcome. A half hour rest stop every 5 hours driving (300 miles) would probably make sense and allow filling-stations to make a little extra cash from the refreshment side of things.

I will concede (as I explained in the previous thread on this subject) that the 1 minute charge would not be practical due to the extremely high voltages that would be required to keep the currents low enough and the problem of venting the excess heat. But 100kW is easily achievable and I think 30 minutes recharge seems a reasonable compromise. Remember that at this rate stopping to plug-in for only 2 minutes would give you 20 miles range - likely enough to get you home or to the shops where it can charge to full.

 

A large part of the problem with half hour or hour long charging is not the fact that the customer has to sit around and wait, but is instead the throughput of the station.

A regular car can fill up at a gas station in around 3 minutes and then drive away from the pump. (unless they are rude enough to go shopping for snacks or use the bathroom while their car is sitting at the pump) So, a busy gas station could service about 10 to 15 cars per pump per hour.

However, if every car spent an hour sitting at the pump then the throughput of the gas station drops to a quarter or a sixth of the current typical throughput. Therefore, either the cars line up around the block and wait 4 to 6 hours to fill up, or the station adds 4 to 6 times as many pumps.

Certainly not insurmountable, but it's something to consider. If charging at a charging station takes an hour, expect the charging stations lots to be 6 times or more bigger than current gas stations. That might be problematic in urban areas.

One thing I found very interesting about the article you posted was that they were using induction to transfer the electricity to the car's battery. Basically, the paddle on the charger has wire coil in it, and the receiver in the car also has a coil. The charger's paddle creates a magnetic field and the car's coil converts the magnetic field back into electricity. Just like the way a transformer works.

That would certainly solve the issue I had with spot-welding the connectors together, as there would be no metal-to-metal contacts between the charger and the car for the electricity to arc across. It would also be safer because everything would be insulated and the high-voltage electricity would be unable to arc through the air to something else, like the customer. I wouldn't want to go near one if I had a pace-maker for my heart, but other than that, it's a pretty cool idea.

The downside of it, however, is that there would be a significant efficiency loss if you use induction to transfer the electricity. More electricity will pass through the charger's coil than will flow from the car's coil to the battery. Transformers typically use a ferrous core to magnetically couple the two coils to increase the efficiency of the transformer. The induction paddle charger would effectivly be using air (and plastic) to couple the two coils, which would be fairly inefficient.

I have no idea how inefficient it would be, but it might even approach the effiency loss of using electricity to extract hydrogen from water and then using a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back into electricity. Particularly if you add the 10% or so efficiency loss you get during the transmission of electricity from the power plant to the charging station and charging efficiency of the battery (???? 10%? 5%?).

 

I fear you underestimate the problem of heat dissapation. As batteries get "denser" i.e., more power per cubic volume the problem of getting rid of the waste heat becomes a tougher and costlier problem to resolve. And heat is a battery's second worse enemy; cold being the first.

Static battery charging can make use of large surface area heat sinks and cooling fans; for a mobile application this isn't practical.

 

This is why in the previous thread on this issue, I suggested that there would be much less of a role for the forecourts in the future. Instead, supermarket car-parks and the like will be only too happy to sell you electricity at a favourable rate while you shop - as the longer you shop the more charge you get when back at the car. Shop once a week and that's all your recharging taken care of.

This potential lack of a role for the filling station is a great fear of the oil giants, and this is the major reason for the current pursuit of horribly inefficient hydrogen over highly efficient electric.

As for the inductive-charging issues, it's really rather efficient. A transformer is typically >97% efficient, and the paddle isn't much different from a transformer. It would be pretty easy to insert a ferrous core into the centre as the paddle is inserted too (maybe it does already - never seen one!).

 

Once a week?

Surely you jest!

I think the average NJ resident commutes around 30-50 miles a day. That's cutting it a bit close on a 300 mile range for a car. And that leaves no room for errands, the frequent NJ gridlock, etc.

 

Re: Toyota aims to cut hydrogen car prices by 95% in ten yea

The main problem with a plug-in EV is how and where the electricity comes from. Today it is most likely from coal - strip-mined, air quality control problems, or nuke - what about the waste, or hydro - OK except for everything living at what will become the bottom of a lake. Then you have transmission problems, who wants to live under a super-hightension line coupled with the line loss. H2 on the other hand can be made locally with tanker based wind power as mentioned earlier, or solar, local wind power, (do I hear co-generation?), tidal powered hydroelectric, and even from methane (natural gas) thats now a waste product from landfills and animal farming operations.
H2 can be transported with little or no loss then used however you wanted, ICE or fuel cell.

Regards Terry