@bunnyknight
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-current-technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
They have gone way past the need for cryogenic or high pressure storage. Metal hydrides are only one way among many other ideas in this area.
@sonhouse saidWow! They found about a hundred ways to store H. I hope they narrow it down to 1 or 2 best ways, and then we can have a serious competition between batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.
@bunnyknight
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-current-technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
They have gone way past the need for cryogenic or high pressure storage. Metal hydrides are only one way among many other ideas in this area.
@bunnyknight
Some folks here protest even the idea of H2 as a fuel but at least the infrastructure is already there by just replacing today's gas stations or diesel fuel stations with H2. One promising lead is Mettalo organic frameworks, not sure if I spelled that one correctly but it uses tech similar to metal hydrides to store gaseous H2 in a framework that can release the gas easily but stores efficiently as a gas but bound up in a framework.
The think I like about H2 as fuel is the fact that to refill a tank is like getting fossil fuel, shove in a hose and fire away as opposed to batteries which takes hours to recharge or the other tech talked about, going to a station and just sliding out the old battery and replace it with a fully charged one, seems a bit contrived to me, those batteries weigh on the order of a half ton so it would be a somewhat ponderous issue to replace every three hundred miles or so.
What I DO like is the coming tech of solar PAINT where you coat the whole car with this stuff, some of it even transparent so it can cover windows as well and the whole car becomes a charging station when sunny. Obviously it would not fully charge a battery but it would extend the range maybe 20 % and if parked in the sun when you go to work, could be fully charged by solar power alone 8 hours later, depending on how efficient the resultant paint would be as far as generating solar power.
That kind of tech could also be used to generate power on downtown buildings also, paint the walls and the windows and generate power, maybe even paint roadways to generate power, imagine how many square miles of roadway there is if they could pull off something like that.
@sonhouse
Long ago I wondered why they don't cover car roofs with solar cells, which at the very least would keep the battery nicely topped up all the time. With an all-electric car I would insist on this.
As for the main power storage, perhaps someone may invent an ultra-super capacitor with a range of 600 miles and a 6 minute charge time.
@bunnyknight
If solar cells were 90% efficient that might happen but right now they clock in at around 20 ish % and BTW, there is a solar car race across the desert in Australia where they have little battery power, almost totally solar and the race is around 2000 miles of grueling desert temps.
I think for regular transport, cars, we have to depend on solar paint which makes the whole car into one big solar cell.
But the word on the street is at most it would add maybe 20% to the unaided battery life, so 200 miles to maybe 240 miles or so.
But it might allow self charging over an 8 hour workday so your car doesn't need to be plugged into a charger.
The thing about faster charges is this:
Suppose you have a 10 kwhr battery. Now if you want to charge it in one hour you need to provide it with 10kw for that whole hour. But suppose you want to charge it in 1/10th hour, 6 minutes, you have to shove in energy at a 100,000 watt rate, which is 1000 volts at 100 amps for 6 minutes.
If you have ten such cars charging, you need to provide one MEGAWATT of power to the charging station. and then you could do 10 cars at once.
You still end up in this case with 10 Kwhr's of energy, 100,000 watts for 6 minutes is the same amount of energy as 10,000 watts running for 60 minutes.
Not saying that can't be done but it requires a large charging cable if you are going to shove 100,000 watts at a battery which has to be designed to take the heat that would be generated inside the battery with that much power applied, even if only for 6 minutes.
If you have a 30 Kwhr battery, you need 3X the energy to charge, 30,000 watts for one hour charge time or 300,000 watts going for 6 minutes to charge up that 30 Kwhr battery.
And if the charging station can do 10 cars it would have to have access to 3 MEGAWATTS of energy for those 6 minutes. It can be done of course but the transformers needed for that much energy are large and expensive so don't hold your breath about a 6 minute charge station any time soon.
@sonhouse
That is true; we would need lots of power and lots of amps. So until we build a viable superconducting power network, hydrogen may be a better alternative for now.
@bunnyknight
Some folks hate the idea of using H2 but at least it gets us off the tit of fossil fuels. H2 now can be made efficiently using solar energy so it would be a variation of solar power.
@sonhouse saidEven newer work showing new cheap catalyst to split H2 and O2 from water, using iron and nickle as catalyst instead of platinum and iridium and the like. Thousands of times cheaper to make those new catalysts.
@bunnyknight
Some folks hate the idea of using H2 but at least it gets us off the tit of fossil fuels. H2 now can be made efficiently using solar energy so it would be a variation of solar power.
https://scitechdaily.com/new-way-to-make-hydrogen-energy-out-of-water-much-more-cheaply/