On 21 May 2014 at 17:26, Mike Nickerson via EV wrote: > If you start with fossil fuels, the efficiency is more balanced. You lose > quite a bit of the energy in the generation plant, or the hydrogen > production and fuel cell, but it is about the same in both cases.
You may be right, though my observation has been that the calculations for system efficiency are so complex that they're easily nudged to reach a particular desired conclusion. (I'm not saying that you're doing that here, just that in general I don't fully trust these numbers.) As I see it, one of an EV's major advantages is its ability to use electrical energy produced from many different sources, including renewable ones. Storing energy from PVs and dumping it into an EV is actually reasonably practical right now. You can do it by using the grid as a giant storage battery with grid-intertie PV. (A turnaround efficiency calculation for grid intertie will be left as an exercise for the reader. ;-) OTOH, it's much more of an enterprise to run an FCV (or even a modified ICEV) on sunlight you harvest with your own PVs. OK, you COULD make H2 at home through electrolysis and compress it. But you'd need a lot of PV real estate, and a substantial quantity of extra hardware. Now, if you're a fossil fuel extractor, this idea that vehicle users might be able to make their own fuel is not a good thing. Heck, you don't even want people charging their EVs from hydropower or even coal-generated electricity. You want them to buy YOUR fuel. So, FCVs are exactly what you want. They're ZEVs, so they satisfy the CA requirement (and any other legislative mandates in other lands). However, the users are effectively locked in to the same old model : go the the filling station, pay the filling station money, repeat. You keep transportation dependent on fuels that the users purchase from you. Their money keeps flowing to you and your stockholders. It doesn't take much to see why FCVs are being pushed so hard in the media, and I'm not even wearing a tinfoil hat. David Roden EVDL Administrator http://www.evdl.org/ _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
