Prices of the electricity we use to charge

Ghost1951

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Not so Tony , HICE engines are internal combustion engines with H fuel cells as well as generator type systems with H fuel cells.
Have you looked at the dreadful efficiency of hydrogen ICE vehicles? It is truly appalling and a huge waste of electrical energy if produced by electrolysis and worse if produced from cracking methane gas.

It takes 50 kwhrs of electrical energy to produce 1kg of so called 'green hydrogen' gas - perhaps produced partly by wind turbines and solar, but in this country over the last year consisting on average of 27% methane gas turbines.

That 1kg of hydrogen contains between 33 kilowatt hours of heat if you burn it. So immediately we have a substantial loss 15 kilowatt hours.

However - burning the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine will at best produce about 35% efficiency in shaft horse power - ballpark and generous figure there. So if we take the over-generous estimate of how much shaft horse power we get out of it we might see 10 or 11 shaft kilowatt hours produced by a hydrogen engine which took 50 kilowatt hours of electricity to make. Overall - about 20% efficiency or about a quarter of what we would have got if we had put the electricity into an electric motor.

Factor in that at the present time, most hydrogen - about 98% is made by cracking methane in another very inefficient process, the so called hydrogen economy is a grotesque fantasy in every way.

Hydrogen has a host of problems in storing it. It takes more energy to compress it and it escapes like Houdini from any vessel you try to keep it in.

It is almost certain that those hydrogen busses are a total gimmic using hydrogen that is made out of methane gas. It wold be a FAR FAR better thing ti just run those busses on methane. There would be far less co2 produced if you did that. 98% of hydrogen available today is made out of methane in an inefficient carbon wasting process. The hydrogen is cracked from methane with super heated steam at very high pressures. The pressure and the steam use power extracted from the methane and the carbon left over from the whole process escapes to the atmosphere.

Burning compressed methane would have a far lower carbon footprint. Methane gas has 4 hydrogen atoms and one carbon one. Burn it directly in your bus engine.

Steam methane reforming plant producing hydrogen. Guess what comes out of those chimneys.....

61487
 
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Nealh

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Efficiency I don't know , it is the cost currently that would make any ones eyes water. Then again EV's make my eyes water with their costs and to my eyes impraticle designs in a lot of cases.

The Wright H buses we have here can do 600 miles on a fill up which takes about 8- 10 minutes far better then the equivalent EV bus with only a 200 mile range.

Tbh no one has got on board (car wise) with major production of them , only two H cars are offered in the UK . One a Toyota and the other a Hunday, filling stations are equally as scarce.
The other issue is cost of producing green H as compared to dirty grey H.
Mean while industry is happy to cause enviromental destruction every where to ine the precious minerals.
 

Woosh

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In China, and I guess also in some other countries, buses are recharged by induction loops buried under their parking slot at the end of the line. It only takes a few (about 10) minutes. They stop for their drivers to have a rest while being recharged so they don't seem to be interrupted.
 
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flecc

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The Wright H buses we have here can do 600 miles on a fill up which takes about 8- 10 minutes far better then the equivalent EV bus with only a 200 mile range.
In London we restrict our use of hydrogen fuel cell buses to the very few unavoidable longer routes. Re-planning routes had enabled our battery buses to cope with almost any need.

The hydrogen for London's buses is produced at Air Liquide's plant in Runcorn, which uses waste hydrogen as a by-product from an industrial chlor-alkali plant.
.
 

soundwave

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ill have the psu out of one of those :p
 
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lenny

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MikelBikel

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Nuclear power doesn't have the same ROI compared to wind, solar and batteries so it's not a priority. If you look at the way wind and solar can be integrated over 1000 miles-1500 miles East West such as Western China (Xian province, sparsely populated, sunny and windy) producing electricity fot Eastern China (Shanghai, Bejing, densely populated), when the sun sets in Shanghai, electricity is still abundantly produced in Xian. The same happens in Australia and if the UK grid is integrated with the EU grid, the same can happen here too. All we need is ultra high voltage DC connectors. We wouldn't need so much gas and nuclear.
Probable these proposed solar flaps will all be blown away and washed down the river? :)
 

saneagle

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Have you looked at the dreadful efficiency of hydrogen ICE vehicles? It is truly appalling and a huge waste of electrical energy if produced by electrolysis and worse if produced from cracking methane gas.

It takes 50 kwhrs of electrical energy to produce 1kg of so called 'green hydrogen' gas - perhaps produced partly by wind turbines and solar, but in this country over the last year consisting on average of 27% methane gas turbines.

That 1kg of hydrogen contains between 33 kilowatt hours of heat if you burn it. So immediately we have a substantial loss 15 kilowatt hours.

However - burning the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine will at best produce about 35% efficiency in shaft horse power - ballpark and generous figure there. So if we take the over-generous estimate of how much shaft horse power we get out of it we might see 10 or 11 shaft kilowatt hours produced by a hydrogen engine which took 50 kilowatt hours of electricity to make. Overall - about 20% efficiency or about a quarter of what we would have got if we had put the electricity into an electric motor.

Factor in that at the present time, most hydrogen - about 98% is made by cracking methane in another very inefficient process, the so called hydrogen economy is a grotesque fantasy in every way.

Hydrogen has a host of problems in storing it. It takes more energy to compress it and it escapes like Houdini from any vessel you try to keep it in.

It is almost certain that those hydrogen busses are a total gimmic using hydrogen that is made out of methane gas. It wold be a FAR FAR better thing ti just run those busses on methane. There would be far less co2 produced if you did that. 98% of hydrogen available today is made out of methane in an inefficient carbon wasting process. The hydrogen is cracked from methane with super heated steam at very high pressures. The pressure and the steam use power extracted from the methane and the carbon left over from the whole process escapes to the atmosphere.

Burning compressed methane would have a far lower carbon footprint. Methane gas has 4 hydrogen atoms and one carbon one. Burn it directly in your bus engine.

Steam methane reforming plant producing hydrogen. Guess what comes out of those chimneys.....

View attachment 61487
While the gist of what you posted may be true, what you wrote is a bit disingenuous because you didn't mention the losses from the alternative.

When you get your electricity from a wind generator or solar system (national, not domestic), you have to convert it to high voltage in order to transmit it, for which there are conversion losses, then there are transmission losses, then there are further conversion losses when you convert to a lower voltage, for the local grid, then more conversion losses to get it into the EV charger, then charger losses, then battery losses both when charging and discharging. When you add up all those losses, it comes to quite a lot.
 
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lenny

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lenny

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Ghost1951

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While the gist of what you posted may be true, what you wrote is a bit disingenuous because you didn't mention the losses from the alternative.

When you get your electricity from a wind generator or solar system (national, not domestic), you have to convert it to high voltage in order to transmit it, for which there are conversion losses, then there are transmission losses, then there are further conversion losses when you convert to a lower voltage, for the local grid, then more conversion losses to get it into the EV charger, then charger losses, then battery losses both when charging and discharging. When you add up all those losses, it comes to quite a lot.
Yes - I omitted the transportation loss of the electricity grid, which are ball-park around 10% to 15% and the battery charging loss.

That said - the response I made was about using hydrogen generated from the grid in hydrogen powered ICE engines, and that is a grotesque waste of good electricity, given the inefficiencies of making the hydrogen by electrolysis and then burning it in an inefficient internal combustion engine. and don't forget - the electric power used in electrolysis is subject to exactly the same losses in transport and conversion.

It was certainly not the complete story to use the 80% efficiency of the electric motor, but even when you add - say 10% for transport and voltage conversion and 5% for battery charging losses, the electric motor efficiency, as a transport solution, you are still looking at around 55% to 65% efficiency rather than maybe 20% for the wonderful hydrogen economy - and that does not take account of transporting and storing the hydrogen to fill up stations. It is notorious for escaping almost any kind of containment.

The one place where ice / hydrogen power might be a viable option is in air transport. The power density of hydrogen is way also about three times that of kerosene for air travel, so you would score there - except, I'm guessing you'd need much much heavier tanks to hold it in.

IF we ever ended up with massive amounts of virtually free energy - say from large scale solar thermal made in the Sahara - the price of the electricity would mean that hydrogen generation even inefficiently made would be a goer, but we are nowhere near that now or in the near future.

One pretty exciting development in electric power transportation is the increasing use of HVDC lines with inverters to match the power to the grid. They have really very small losses by comparison to HVAC - especially in under sea cables where AC is pretty poor.
 
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Woosh

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Hydrogen has transportation and storage losses too. The fair comparison is how many grams of CO2/KWH for hydrogen buses versus battery buses.
 

saneagle

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Yes - I omitted the transportation loss of the electricity grid, which are ball-park around 10% to 15% and the battery charging loss.

That said - the response I made was about using hydrogen generated from the grid in hydrogen powered ICE engines, and that is a grotesque waste of good electricity, given the inefficiencies of making the hydrogen by electrolysis and then burning it in an inefficient internal combustion engine. and don't forget - the electric power used in electrolysis is subject to exactly the same losses in transport and conversion.

It was certainly not the complete story to use the 80% efficiency of the electric motor, but even when you add - say 10% for transport and voltage conversion and 5% for battery charging losses, the electric motor efficiency, as a transport solution, you are still looking at around 55% to 65% efficiency rather than maybe 20% for the wonderful hydrogen economy - and that does not take account of transporting and storing the hydrogen to fill up stations. It is notorious for escaping almost any kind of containment.

The one place where ice / hydrogen power might be a viable option is in air transport. The power density of hydrogen is way also about three times that of kerosene for air travel, so you would score there - except, I'm guessing you'd need much much heavier tanks to hold it in.

IF we ever ended up with massive amounts of virtually free energy - say from large scale solar thermal made in the Sahara - the price of the electricity would mean that hydrogen generation even inefficiently made would be a goer, but we are nowhere near that now or in the near future.

One pretty exciting development in electric power transportation is the increasing use of HVDC lines with inverters to match the power to the grid. They have really very small losses by comparison to HVAC - especially in under sea cables where AC is pretty poor.
The idea is that you use waste energy to make hydrogen, then it doesn't matter how efficient the process is because it's free. In Australia, they're charging guys with solar panels to put their spare electricity into the grid. They used to pay them, but so many people have solar panels now, that they have more electricity than what they can deal with during peak times. That's the electricity that could be used for hydrogen. production.

In the summer, I produce 6 times as much electricity as I use, and get virtually nothing for it when I put it into the grid. If I could use it to make and store hydrogen, I'd have enough energy to heat my house in the winter, but there's no domestic process for that at the moment. I can make hydrogen, but I can't keep nor use it.
 

Woosh

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The idea is that you use waste energy to make hydrogen, then it doesn't matter how efficient the process is because it's free. In Australia, they're charging guys with solar panels to put their spare electricity into the grid. They used to pay them, but so many people have solar panels now, that they have more electricity than what they can deal with during peak times. That's the electricity that could be used for hydrogen. production.

In the summer, I produce 6 times as much electricity as I use, and get virtually nothing for it when I put it into the grid. If I could use it to make and store hydrogen, I'd have enough energy to heat my house in the winter, but there's no domestic process for that at the moment. I can make hydrogen, but I can't keep nor use it.
I watched a yt video about how charging networks charge electric lorries for recharging in Germany. The cost is basic kwh, about 15 cents, plus grid charge which varies with demand and supply. There is a proposal to fit a smart meter in the lorry which will tell the driver when and where to charge.
 

MikelBikel

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17yrs is better than never. Design changes cited re "EPR2" as reason for European Pressurised Water reactor delay..Hinckley similar, hopes it doesn't take that long, hehe. :)
 
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