Toyota develops new fuel cell hybrid

Fuel cell vehicles produce no pollution by running on the power of the chemical reaction when hydrogen stored in a tank combines with oxygen in the air to produce water.

Misleading for several reasons:

Producing large quantities of hydrogen is still inefficient. By the time you count heat wastes and other wastes, it takes far more energy to produce hydrogen than the amount of energy you get back out of it. In short, when the entire process is considered, hydrogen fuel cells are actually at least as dirty as the power that is used in the electrolosis process.

Simply dropping a couple million hydrogen based vehicles into the world market will not generally decrease carbon production, because the majority of the world's electricity is being produced by carbon based power plants. In general, this means that given the current power grid, dropping hydrogen fuel cells into the world market will actually increase carbon output, because burning coal or natural gas to produce electrolosis to create hydrogen to burn in cars is less efficient than burning hydrocarbons in the cars themselves. You have to consider all the forms of heat wastes and other loss of energy in various transfers. This means more coal/natural gas must be burned to produce the same amount of net work.

Now if governments and businesses would convert to nuclear, wind, solar and hydroelectric, then hydrogen based fuel cells would be a relatively clean way of STORING energy.

Still, much of the energy is lost in "Heat Waste" during the electrolosis process, even if the energy source is "clean".

Here in Quebec, we produce our electricity mostly with hydro power, so our grid is supplied quite cleanly. But I'd hate to be at the utility company's mercy to charge batteries, or at some other company's mercy for the Hydrogen when it can be produced so easily (albeit inefficiently).

What we really need is this type of vehicle, plus the ability to produce the hydrogen and electricity ourselves, to no longer be reliant upon big multi-nationals just to get to and from work...but I have a feeling THAT will never happen.

Quantum: Opinion needs re-evaluating. Cycling electricity into aluminum metal powder (minor alloying of a non-oxidizer such as galium or etc.), then using the aluminum as energy carrier to generate hydrogen onboard a vehicle solves a lot of problems. a) the aluminum smelter pots are a lot cheaper than hydrogen electrolysers, so can be oversized to exploit peaks of unusable renewables or off-peak baseload nuclear. b) no costly high-pressure or cryogenic tanks for delivering and storing the energy carrier. c) generates pure hydrogen at normal temperatures and pressures on demand, unlimited storage, no safety issues. AlO2 is simply captured and re-cycled back to the smelters via re-fueling stations. d) cheap to store in bulk until needed. e) many other advantages.

DGBeach: Actually what's needed is a smart grid with smart meters so individuals can participate in the electricity market as both buyers and sellers on an equal footing with the big boys, like my IMEUC proposal papers here. My gas-fired CHP and your PV Solar, the next neighbours grid-wise PHEV and the windfarm next door would get to compete evenly with the 20 gigawatt hydro station in an open and fair market. The smart meters take care of all the market interactions, debits and credits and since we'd all be buying in the wholesale market with no retailers in between, we'd all save significant money even after paying the cost of having our government/regulators set up the market systems and install the meters.

Independent Market for Every Utility Customer - Preliminary Business Case http://www.energy..._id=1176

Independent Market for Every Utility Customer - Part 2 - Market Operation http://www.energy..._id=1181

Energy Central Blogs - IMEUC - Independent Market for Every Utility Customer http://www.energy...oduction

Inefficent or not, this would give your whole solar array something to do if the powergrid doesn't need your energy. You could have a hydrogen generator in every basement to produce fuel from the solar panels on the roof.

Now if you take your monthly gas expendatures and convert them to solar panels they will pay off a lot faster than 10 years won't they?

Each of these fuel cell vehicles is around a million dollars, right?

How many battery electrics could you build for that? (with range extending ICE generators, ala the PML Mini - (1500km autonomy - 4 hrs electric - 80mpg thereafter - no need to recharge, but you can if you want...

http://www.pmlfli...ini.html

))..... how many of these could you build for a million dollars? 20?... 40?... 50?...

There is next to no infrastructure for Hydrogen as a fuel, right?

But there is an electricity grid, and gasoline delivery system in place, right?

I don't know guys, this looks like a no-brainer to me...

I sometimes disagree with quantum conundrum, but I don't see that he got anything wrong here. In order to eventually come to an environmentally friendly improvement over our current vehicles, we need both the engine that runs off of hydrogen fuel, and a means to cleanly produce large quantities of hydrogen fuel. Hopefully we can make the necessary improvements in producing the hydrogen fuel (which requires a lot of energy). This is the more difficult part of the problem, both practically/politically and in scale. That said, it's still always nice when improvements are made on the engine side of the problem.

What do they do to contain the hydrogen?

Here is misleading part of the article:
"The FCHV-adv from the world's second biggest automaker also comes with an electric motor and works as a hybrid by switching between that motor and the hydrogen-powered fuel cell. Toyota's Prius hybrid switches between an electric motor and a standard gasoline engine. "

I think this makes more sense when it is written:
"The FCHV-adv from the world's second biggest automaker also comes with a a battery and works as a hybrid by switching between that battery and the hydrogen-powered fuel cell."

Every FuelCell vehicle has electric motor that converts the fuelcell generated electricity to mechanical energy ie movement. This hybrid function is also told between the lines elsewhere:
"Fuel efficiency in the FCHV-adv was improved 25 percent with better braking and other changes, "

I assume this better braking mean that they can better store the energy by using their electric motor as generator to charge the battery during braking. This leads to lesser hydrogen demand and therefore to better mileage.

--Petri

I like the "Pnumatic" cars being made in India. I would buy one now if available. We stored 3000 air in our WW2 submarines, no sweat!

OOOOOK!,
I have a dummy question:
- so the FuelCell generates hydrogen and then electricity or the hydrogen is fueling the IC motor?

I am just kidding. The way in which the article is written makes me wonder about many possible combinations.

Generating H2 at 80% efficiency, then compressing it at 85% efficiency, then feeding it to a million-dollar fuel cell to generate electricity at 60% efficiency then feeding the electricity to a drive system at 80% efficiency = a net efficiency from electrical meter to wheels of 80% x 85% x 60% x 80% = 33% efficiency.

Charging an $8,000 onboard battery pack at 85% efficiency, then feeding the electricity to a drive system at 80% efficiency = a net efficiency from electrical meter to wheels of 85% x 80% = 68% efficiency.

Hydrogen makes absolutely no sense. Spend the research on developing battery technology.

If we all switched to battery vehicles powered by reasonably sustainable electricity sources, we can easily count on at least a hundred years of available petroleum fuels to do extended trips, eg. beyond the reasonable battery limit of 100 miles between charges, affordably using cheap efficient replaceable or towable ICE generators, for at least 100 years, or forever with synthetic hydrocarbon / ethanol etc. from bio-mass.

I have a question. In how many ways is a LION battery actually just a fuel cell which stores it reagents internally as solids, and cannot use external sources? What's so magic about hydrogen?