Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dragdeler]

It's mystifying that they aren't being forced to go with lifepo, it's also in their best obsolescent interest, guess they need that extra energy density so they can sell bigger boats at higher margins, yet there is still people that laugh off hydrogen as too dangerous, idk man at least it burns quick    (and conventionally not a metal fire)

[martinuzz]

Yeah, I do believe that going full electric cars is betting on the wrong horse. We should go full hydrogen.

[dragdeler]

Today it's a boat, what happens if it's a whole parking house filled with electric that's adjacent to abunch of other buildings.


I do think electric mobility has it's place: but at preferably 500kg at the very most 800kg... driving 150kmh should also be a thing of the past, we could hoist trucks and cars onto highspeed trains... It wouldnt look like a car as we know it, more like a mix between a smart and a beach buggy... But that ain't never going to happen. If you're allready guilty, why wouldnt you also opt for the thing that provides more safety at the detriment of others safety.

[McTraveller]

So this is sensationalism - EV fires are dramatic, but they occur far less often than ICE fires - not just in absolute numbers but when normalized per vehicle.  ICEs catch on fire all the time.

Hydrogen seems nice but it actually has all the problems of both EV and ICE, combined.  Hydrogen takes a lot of nonexistent infrastructure to produce and distribute in quantities necessary for personal ground transportation. Fuel cells require expensive materials. Range of hydrogen vehicles is limited because storing the smallest element in the universe is Challenging^TM. Hydrogen ICEs still have to deal with NOx emissions because they burn so hot.  The only things hydrogen has over current battery tech is refueling time and vehicle weight.

Battery EVs are not perfect, but they are substantially better than hydrocarbon combustion engines, even with their present drawbacks.

[MaxTheFox]

I have a little conspiracy theory that a lot of EV rumors are actually started by oil companies.

[dragdeler]

I do not underatand the fancy hydrogen stuff (energy cells?) but I'm pretty sure all the supermarkets in switzerland invested together to buy a fleet of trucks that run on that, so feasibilty is definitly there.


The problem with hydrogen is that we insist on running the comparison "as a fuel"... Yes the whole energy infrastructure needs to be reformed, but the centralised energy distribution model was allways a total abheration forget about the practical aspects just in terms of resiliency in face of a crisis. If you think about hydrogen as a battery, if everybody minmaxed the space they own to produce their own energy, yes the energy infrastructure gets more complex, but we also maximize freedom and resiliency. So then, in a world we everybody produces too much energy for themselves because it's not lost but saved, what is the likely outcome? The price of hydrogen would plummet energy would be abundant.

Just one acronym: OPEC.

[delphonso]

I have a little conspiracy theory that a lot of EV rumors are actually started by oil companies.

I think this has been proven in many situations. If not EVs, definitely non-oil power sources.

[Eric Blank]

Oil and coal companies are the source and sponsor for most all the fear mongering propaganda about renewables, nuclear energy and ev's, yeah.

[martinuzz]

It was either in the 1920s or 1930s that Shell bought the patent for a hydrogen combustion engine and put it in a safe so that no one would use it and threaten their oil profits.

[dragdeler]

Hell Rudy Diesel doped his tractors with ionised water steam, took them about a century to be able to monetize that in form of adblue.

[Maximum Spin]

It was either in the 1920s or 1930s that Shell bought the patent for a hydrogen combustion engine and put it in a safe so that no one would use it and threaten their oil profits.

That's... not how patents work.

If that were the case, the engine's design would be public information at the moment the patent is filed, anyone could have used that engine during the term of patent with only the threat of civil liabilities forcing them to pay royalties (which should be no problem if the engine is such a threat to oil profits!), and it would have been out of patent and public domain by the 1950s.

[Criptfeind]

X to doubt about the patent thing.

We don't burn oil because it's uniquely good at storing energy (although it is very good at that there are alternatives) we burn it because we have piles of it laying around that have accumulated over the history of life on earth. In 1930 I doubt any oil baron would be afraid of hydrogen replacing gas in cars because the issues with it would be storing it and making it. It's super hard to store because it's an asshole of a little atom and there's not just giant piles of it laying around to burn (on earth...) so fundamentally hydrogen can only be used as a storage of energy, a battery, and thus you need to physically make any hydrogen you want to burn which takes more energy then you get out of burning it. If we had hydrogen cars in the 1930s they'd be powered ultimately by... probably oil or coal power plants.

I'm going to bet the real story is that a engine was invented in 1930 that can burn hydrogen but wasn't commercially viable because of the requirements for creating and storing hydrogen. It only sorta is starting to make any sort of sense nowadays with advances in material science to hold the stuff and because renewable energy is making it at least plausibly more green then gas.

[Lord Shonus]

Engines that could run on hydrogen date back to the 1880s, same as electric motors. Gasoline took over not because of absurd conspiracy nonsense, but because it was cheap and had a ton of technical advantages. Every "oil company bought the patent for/assassinated the inventor of <x> to suppress it" story is bogus. This includes the oft-told Streetcar Conspiracy. While it is true that a lot of the early streetcar companies did get bought by automakers, it wasn't some sort of hostile takeover - every private streetcar company was bankrupt and failing by then, because non-subsidized public transit has never been economically viable.

[dragdeler]

I have gotten a lot more openminded to say, economical engineering reasoning... You know, like with the lightbulb cartel, but also basically if you value energy efficiency turns out the bulbs fall within those specs they were imposing one themselves which is still hella sus (yeah yeah we all love technologyconnections). Then again to just assume that if a product managed to push another off the market it must have been inherently better is going one if not several bridges too far. There is so much foul play, foul play in every "felt-as-unobserved" place the eye stumbles.



So I must say statements as these are conjecture. And will respond with conjecture in kind

In 1930 I doubt any oil baron would be afraid of hydrogen replacing gas in cars because the issues with it would be storing it and making it.

For one if you have a near monopoly and enjoy the success of such practices, why take the chance? In that era science had much more of a can do attitude. Then also as a titan of the industry, immersed in a titan of the industry social strata, you probably have a little more sense of scale, of what kind of volumes the others churn, and where you could save money in your own factories, and they in theirs... It might not be profitable to bring to the endconsumer, but maybe they have a lot of waste energy they could recycle and increase their own margins, and you might loose a valuable business partner in the process... Why go on a modernisation spree that's so disruptive much nicer to have a gentlemen's cartel, lalala can't hear you over the short terms profits kinda deal.


Ok enough of that. Back to hydrogen. I realize my utopic visions allways lean towards costly solutions. But to me not economically viable is such a non-argument. You think the pyramids were fucking economically viable, no, but we are still enjoying that shit. Ultimatively as long as the economy turns debt is just a number on a paper somewhere. You know if 50 years down the line most of the landmass is desert people sure as shit aren't going to say: "but look at the bright side: our national debts could be much more excessive".

[Criptfeind]

The pyramids were economically viable to fulfill the goal of creating a monument to whatever that would last for a very long time and do whatever mythological things they are suppose to do.

But they weren't made via, I don't know, pushing the blocks across the desert on a bed of fine silks, and 10,000 men spending 100 years digging though dunes or whatever, they were probably made in fairly economical ways via things like boats and log rolling systems.

Similarly, we don't as a society have a goal to use hydrogen, we just have a goal to move stuff around. Which is why we use fossil fuels instead of hydrogen.

I think society can* choose and pursue goals that are not necessarily perfectly aligned with the basic idea of "living" but how society goes about those goals will pretty much always gravitate towards cost effective methods. If that means that you're not actually fulfilling your real goal, then you need to change the goal your working towards to more closely align with whatever it is you want to do.

*Although admittedly in a modern enlightened democracy I think it can be hard since the goal that society goes for is generally more towards "improve peoples quality of life" and less "make a giant semi-phallic monument to the dictator" and quality of life is fairly unending and difficult as  goals goes, maybe if we eventually reach some post scarcity society and everyone in the world is living a comfortable and dignified existence we can go back to megaprojects more.

Edit: That's all just about the pyramid comment which in retrospect probably wasn't the important part of your post. I think obviously society needs to move away from fossil fuels, and further more, I don't think they are cost efficient (at this point) but rather just put the costs off and onto the rest of society in the future. Hydrogen might be an answer to personal transportation if turns out that electrical batteries can't scale to the amount needed for personal transportation. But I suspect that ultimately what's more important is a reduction in consumption of transportation and I'm mildly doubtful that hydrogen will fill a big role.