this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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It’s not just what I’ve been told. I’ve personally experienced the issues, as have thousands of others dealing with EV extreme cold problems the past couple of weeks in the eastern US.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-vehicles-arent-ready-for-extreme-heat-and-cold-heres-how-to-fix-them/
If anyone has any further info, I’d love to find out what Norway could possibly be doing to address a fundamental issue with the technology. All I’ve been able to find is some workarounds to keep the cars still running, and just accepting worse performance in extreme weather.
I don’t understand why anti-hydrogen prejudice is so prevalent that we’ll put up with EV limitations before considering alternatives. Smells like EV investor propaganda & sunk cost fallacy to me.
My own prejudice against hydrogen is around manufacturing.
Most of the world current hydrogen made isn't green at all, and the message is "we'll figure it out once demand is up"
And the companies pushing the most for hydrogen are petrol companies.
I'm not a chemist, but it doesn't seem to add up to me.
I say that as an EV owner living in Canada. I need to use a fast charge station about 4 times a year due to cold related battery issues, and all of those time are because of extended road trips.
It’s not impossible to produce hydrogen in an environmentally friendly way. We just need to further increase efficiency, and move the energy source to renewables and nuclear to power the electrolysis. The EV charging stations have the same issue, often being powered fossil fuel plants.
But it is impossible to manufacture EV batteries in an environmentally friendly way. We’re just expected to accept it.
Plus the performance of EV’s vs hydrogen always uses data gathered in ideal conditions, but hydrogen is leaps and bounds more efficient in extreme weather. We need to be highlighting that, as climate change begins to make extreme conditions the norm and ideal conditions disappear.
As far as I'm aware, the most impact around EV batteries is obtaining lithium and other componenets.
Components that can and are already being recycled from older EV batteries.
I'm curious to learn if there is other things I'm not aware of though!
I dont think making a parallel between ev charging and hydrogen manifacturing is valid though: my understanding is that electrolysis is an option, but that most of the current creation is a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement, like plastics (which explains why petrol campanies push it).
We can probably improve on electrolysis efficiency, but my hunch is that it simply won't happen if petrol company can meet demand. Which I'm sure they will for just a bit cheaper than electrolysis costs to keep controlling the market.
If we can produce green electricity, as long as electrolysis efficiency is not as good as the average battery efficiency whatever efficiency of the hydrogen engine itself doesn't matter: it's still less efficient than a battery because of the extra manufacturing step. And then there's transport and all on top of it.