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To: amorphous

Much prefer fuel cells via hydrogen to batteries.

The “we love batteries” folks never consider where and how is all the electricity for recharging the batteries coming from. It’s not going to be wind and solar.


6 posted on 07/31/2019 4:08:13 PM PDT by Wuli
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To: Wuli
The “we love batteries” folks never consider where and how is all the electricity for recharging the batteries coming from. It’s not going to be wind and solar.

Generating the hydrogen via water electrolysis takes a large amount of electrical energy as well. In fact the overall cycle for hydrogen fuel cell energy storage is considerably less efficient than that of modern lithium-ion batteries, so that for a given energy output it takes more energy to "recharge" a hydrogen fuel cell.

The advantage of the fuel cell is that the active material (hydrogen) that your vehicle has to carry is very lightweight compared to that of batteries, and one of the materials (oxygen) that you need you can just grab from ambient air, so you don't have to carry it at all. And the conversion unit, the actual fuel cell itself, is quite compact and doesn't weigh anywhere near as much as batteries with equivalent power.

18 posted on 07/31/2019 4:38:32 PM PDT by SFConservative
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