Just a bounce of this thread. It's tomorrow.
Who is definitely going then?
If you are going, I think the claims you need to prepare for are:
- Hydrogen is the answer. Probably claimed to be made through some algae/biological approach because people are waking up to electrolysis and gas reformation being too inefficient.
- Synthetic hydrocarbons.
- The grid can't handle X million EVs.
- Long tailpipe.
- Overall dust to dust emissions from EV manufacture are worse.
- That now debunked Norwegian study about EV resource use (with the 1 tonne electric motors!)
- EV's and PHEVs aren't selling.
I have done a first order comparison with the Honda FCX Clarity and the bigger Tesla Model S (attached). Guess what wins.
You need to tackle head on the infrastructure question. ITM Power are a well known hydrogen electrolyser company. Their £730k containerised in-situ electrolyser can only generate 100 kg/day, enough hydrogen for under 24 refills of the FCX Clarity, requiring 116 kW non-stop power. It even needs £36k of annual servicing. So that is over 10x the capital cost of an EV rapid charger install and the servicing alone would pay for a new rapid charger every year. Furthermore even with very favourable electricity costs the target pre-tax, net hydrogen cost price is comparable with diesel's retail price and they cannot compete with the cost of putting electricity directly into an EV.
http://www.itm-power.com/news-item/upda ... structure/
The reports below say hydrogen cannot be economically trucked in from off-site manufacture. It cannot be stored in a parked car for more than a couple of weeks without boil-off. It takes 25 minutes to pressurise a car to 10,000 PSI (the working pressure of modern H2 cars) which itself needs a lot of electricity and requires people to wait for as long as an EV rapid charge. In addition to electricity, it either takes large quantities of natural gas or large quantities of fresh water to make (see link below).
So hydrogen has some very difficult infrastructure problems to solve, whereas the infrastructure for EVs reaches every building in the developed world.
Since G W Bush put over $1bn into Hydrogen R&D a decade ago, we have been promised hydrogen vehicles in 2010, 2012, 2015 and recently the head of GM said it can't happen before the 2020s. Well, as the saying goes "hydrogen - the fuel of the future and always will be".
Fuel cells require an as-yet undiscovered breakthrough to get their cost down by an order of magnitude to market prices - whereas I can go and buy a car that reduces my emissions by more for £29,999 now - and I have.
This is a great paper on why hydrogen is a mirage - from fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel:
http://www.fuelcellforum.com/reports/E21.pdf
And another article on the fundamental problems from Robert Zubrin who is an expert on in-situ hydrogen and methanol manufacturing for space missions:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati ... rogen-hoax
They also may bring up synthesised hydrogencarbons, such as the "petrol from air" crowd like Air Fuel Synthesis who were all over the press at the end of last year. Well, they require hydrogen first, before they add the carbons, so they make pure hydrogen manufacture look efficient. (Note, this technology may have use for aeroplanes and rockets which cannot readily go electric...)
From what limited data I could get out of them, it was possible to say this synthetic petrol requires around 2000 Wh/mile to fuel a Prius - 6x that of an EV and 2x hydrogen.
I have attached some of my boilerplate "fact sheets" that I send to anyone who parrots out the usual anti-EV stuff.
Also worth remembering typical trip and daily driving distances.
From
http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php
So an ER-EV really only needs it's engine for a small percentage of trips at the top of that curve, and this is why fitting a fuel cell can never be economic for such infrequent use, all the other problems notwithstanding.
For what it's worth, I usually charge my Ampera overnight at 6 Amps (1.4kW), the minimum setting, and that is more than enough to cover over 300 miles a week. It's also very close to my calculation for all that is needed on the attached sheets. Nevertheless 6 Amps is far less than the daytime load of the house, so of course the local transformer can handle it. Even if 40 houses were charging 2 EVs at this rate, it would not be a problem for a 100 kVA pole-mount transformer (which normally serve fewer than 40 houses). I have reduced my petrol use by over 90% since getting this car. I like refilling at home and having a full charge every morning and I would not go back to the hydrogen filling station model where I am at the mercy of their pricing and availability.
The BMW i3 is likely to be even more efficient, with it's 90 mile EV range and small four stroke motorcycle-derived engine, which has more than enough power for 80 mph (see attached horsepower-velocity graph), it will be able to do close to 100% of trips on electricity.
The head of Renault predicted 10% of new car sales would be EV by 2020. That would mean that close to 2% of cars on the road in that year would be EV assuming stead growth between now and then. There is plenty of time to "smart" enable the grid to manage charging rates with this sort of growth.
There was a 2008 study published by BERR (now BIS) showing that dust-to-dust emissions from an EV were under 2/3s that of an ICE car:
http://www.bis.gov.uk/files/file48653.pdf
Even the attached chart on PHEV and BEV emissions from a German study shows they are better on the coal-heavy German grid.
Regarding sales, worldwide sales of the Volt/Ampera were 4x higher in 2012 than in 2011. Both the Volt, Ampera and Leaf outsell many more lauded models. The Volt is in the top half of GM's sales table. The Leaf sells twice as many cars as the Nissan GT-R, for example.
http://bestsellingcarsblog.com/2012/11/ ... s-ranking/