Quote:
Originally Posted by Witchfinder
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Link here -
http://electrek.co/2016/05/23/tesla-...scam/?pushup=1 , text below
Not likely - according to Marc Tarpenning, who's calling hydrogen fuel cells a “scam”. He also said out loud what many in the industry are thinking – that energy companies are supporting the technology for its inefficiency.
Tarpenning is not with Tesla anymore, but he is one of the original co-founders with his long-time friend and business partner, Martin Eberhard. He was on the Internet History Podcast last week to talk about his ventures and he explained in great details the foundings of his two companies; NuvoMedia and Tesla Motors.
"If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you" want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don’t want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad.
There’s a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It’s a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. It’s just terrible.
People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it’s abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive – it’s bound up into everything. It’s bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds.
Electrolysis is the most commen method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas – and natural gas is not that easy.
And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you’ll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues – and that’s only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.
Hydrogen is an energy carrier and not a primary fuel source on this planet. Maybe out somewhere in the universe, but not on a terrestrial planet.
When you add that all up, it turns out that the amount of energy per kilometer driven is just terrible. It’s way worse than almost anything else you can come up with – which I always suspected is one of the reasons why the energy companies have long been big proponents of it.
When we were raising money the first time, we had very carefully gone through the math to understand fuel cells because there was a bunch of money going into fuel cells at the time and we also looked at biofuels and ethanols – we sort of went down the whole list to figure out what the most energy efficient system was – which turned out to be battery electric cars"