>The thing is, it’s highly unlikely that hydrogen will ever become a mainstream alternative to battery power – at least when it comes to on-road transportation
The author concluding this, doesn't make it so. And his conclusions are linking to another article, claiming current h2 cost and production means the future will be the same.
Which is the same as claiming we'd never have solar now, because solar was expensive years ago.
The article also says South Korea is full bore on h2, so this will have a market, and thrive there.
BEV doesn't have the capacity to do this. These units cannot be charged for 1hr 4 times a day. H2 is an instant recharge.
In practice, hydrogen cars take significantly longer than gas cars to fill, and the filling station can’t have a high duty cycle because the nozzle will freeze to the car. (Ideal gas law means the hydrogen cools as it goes from high pressure to low pressure.)
Synthesizing fuels from CO2, water, and electricity seems like a better solution. It works with existing infrastructure and doesn’t have the storage or safety issues of hydrogen.
H2 is not instant, it is a pressurised gas. Recharging h2 vehichles is as fast as the pressure difference between the intermediate tank and the vehichle tank.
Try 10 to 12 hours as most construction jobs are waiting on weather and run overtime when they can.
Second, where is the charge point when you are building a new highway? Roads are usually the first to go in, so if you have to spend an hour driving to a charge point, that's an hour of productive lost
If it's out in the boonies, yeah, power usually follows the roads. If it's existing infrastructure being upgraded, just tap in to what is already there
You may laugh, but running an optimized diesel generator to charge battery-powered heavy vehicles can be much more energy efficient than running the vehicles directly on diesel engines. Check out Edison Motors, who are in the process of developing a mass-market diesel-electric hybrid truck: https://www.youtube.com/@EdisonMotors
Diesel generators running at a fixed duty cycle and optimized for efficiency can be way more efficient than a mobile diesel engine operating at a wide range of workloads.
"Diesel" can run on a variety of fuels (diesel, natural gas, propane, etc) so you could probably start synthesizing the fuels if you've somehow got a bunch of energy that'd otherwise be wasted; methane's still a bit of a pain to deal with but not nearly as nasty as H2; for feeding remote generators you'd just compress it not liquefy it, and that's something that's already commonplace today.
I like electric vehicles, they make sense. I think most construction workers would like electric equipment as well, not as loud, less fumes, less heat. Overall better but it has to make sense.
Large mine trucks are either electric or hybrid. They recharge as they go into the pit.
Well, the guy in the YT video is clearly not logical. One diesel genny feeding all of those trucks vs all of those trucks being ICE powered. Some people just can't connect the dots.
Modern train engines are just diesel powered generators pushing electric motors. That's how they can claim 100mpg. They could do similar to the construction equipment, and still improve vs just powered by diesel engines directly.
I agree that the guy re-posting is not logical but I would also say that having a gen-set charge the delivery van when they could run power from the mains is rather crazy.
Endurance is a relatively simple problem to solve: just add more batteries. It's already a 14-ton vehicle, adding another ton or two of batteries probably won't be a dealbreaker. Worst-case scenario you put them in a trailer for long-endurance scenarios - they often already need one to bring a variety of buckets to the work site.
There's a more interesting question, in my opinion: what happens when it inevitably runs out?
Diesel is of course absolutely trivial. It can be refueled from any petrol station, you can bring your own barrel with a small pump, or even use a jerrycan. Easy to use both in urban areas and out in the boonies. Battery is a bit trickier. Worksite electric hookups and superchargers are viable urban options, and in remote areas you could use some kind of generator.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a bit of a nightmare. Demand for hydrogen is unlikely to be high enough to warrant a very dense network of fueling stations, so even in urban areas it's going to take a significant amount of time to refuel. And in rural areas you're screwed: a fueling station could be hundreds of miles / kilometers away, and you're not exactly going to fill up a jerrycan with hydrogen either! There's no way you are refueling it on-site, having a regular worker messing around with hundreds or thousands of liters of hydrogen at 600x atmospheric pressure or cryogenic temperatures is just waiting for an accident to happen.
Hydrogen work vehicles require hydrogen storage and delivery. PEV work vehicles can also use hydrogen powered generators on site but they can also use anything from an on-site solar to a standard grid connection.
As long as 98% of our hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels it’s only a net negative here.
Whatever, good luck hauling electricity on a truck. We’re talking in the context of „you’re building a new highway, good luck getting enough electricity to charge those machines in that place”. What, you gonna haul your solar farm as the construction moves on for dozens of miles?
Why exactly would you want to haul electricity using a truck a rather than wires exactly?
PEV’s are often more convenient and cheaper to use on a work site than diesel and are actually being adopted for that reason, it’s hydrogen that’s lacking distribution infrastructure.
Are you seriously showing me a mining truck and some micro machines you can use to dig a trench in your garden as an example of EV machines being „adopted”?
Do you even know what makes those mining trucks functional for this use case? The deeper the mine, the more effective they are!
Yes, people buying EV work vehicles are examples of EV work vehicles being adopted, which is pushing manufacturers to make ever more diversified product lines.
A work crew putting in a trench really benefits from the equipment being quit. What you think of as “digging in your garden” is just one of plentiful examples of home construction scale equipment. There’s a lot of equipment that fits such purposes like rollers for people’s driveways etc.
Here’s a preproduction equivalent to the hydrogen prototype mentioned in the article:
We started this thread from someone asking „will it do 8 hours of work on a single charge”. The little 301.9 digger from cat proudly says „ Run time: up to 8 hours on a single charge”, the big one says „Long single charge run time allows for ability to perform intended work with minimal disruption”. Will it do 8 hours? Otherwise I root for a hydrogen digger.
Looking at that battery pack 320KWh vs typical fuel consumption on similar machines and its battery is oversized for 8 hours of work when new and could still handle that with significant degradation.
That said, people don’t work 8 hours without taking a break so arguably a smaller battery might be a good tradeoff.
Looking forward to BEV versions.