this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Toyota, and Japan as a whole, are in a tricky situation with their electric grid. It's been developed separately by nine different companies in each region; the southern regions use 60 Hz supply cycles, where-as the northern regions (including Tokyo Electric) use 50 Hz. Add to this the populations reluctance for nuclear power after Fukushima, and you get a very fragile supply grid with limited capacity. Toyota is gunning hard for Hydrogen because Japan itself can't support EVs and for some reason it doesn't want to/can't manufacture both.
Okay, but if they don't have the electricity for EVs they definitely don't have enough electricity to waste 2/3 of it turning it into hydrogen and back.
Over 75% of Japanese energy is imported under current circumstances and they have a reluctance to use geothermal for social and economic reasons. Wind is another good choice but they're restricted in where they can deploy it by social and economic concerns
And this is the same country that wanted to mine cobalt off the nearby ocean floor a decade ago. What a strange world.
I mean yeah, but on the other hand with hydrogen you have much more control over when and where you use the electricity as you can choose to manufacture most of it during off-peak periods and when renewables create excess energy. Then you can transport it by pipes or by trucks/ships without overwhelming the electric grid.
You can do off-peak charging with EVs too, that's not a magical hydrogen thing. My hot water system is on its own circuit which can be turned off by the power company whenever they need to cut demand, providers have been doing that sort of thing for decades.
So providers just prevent people from using what is potentially their only transportation option as it suits the power company?
Hot water isn't usually a survival need as long as you have liquid water available. Means of movement can be.
They don't just... leave it off. They turn it off for like 15 minutes in the middle of an 8 hour charging session. Nobody notices or cares.
No? Thats effectively the same thing as a gas station closing. You can go elsewhere to charge it.
You can't store the power in EVs for weeks and weeks and also you can't move it around on a whim, without loosing that stored energy.
What? Of course you can store power for weeks. It doesn't just dribble out onto the floor. Go away for a month and come home, your EV is still sitting there with the battery charge whatever you left it on.
Yes, EVs use their stored energy for driving... I'm not sure what your point was there. Do you think transporting hydrogen is free and doesn't cost energy?
No, it doesn't dribble on the floored, but to keep the battery conditioned takes a lot of energy. There are countless post around all sorts of forums where the battery was empty after 2 weeks, because cooking the battery in the summer heat took a lot of energy. And you can't leave an EV plugged in at the Airport.
Transporting hydrogen is cheaper than having to rebuild a whole power grid.
You don't need to rebuild the whole grid. The power over night goes up, but that's OK because night is currently very low usage. Sometimes that has meant turning off renewables as there is no where to put the power. In fact, this can cause negative power costs were they will pay you to take power! So next is where you need it, say a charging forecourt. But that is only during the day, so put in some huge batteries you charge over night. Top up with day time renewables if you can. All this already happens.
That's the case for Germany or the UK, not Japan. Bit different there.
I know nothing about Japan's grid. How it different?
I've parked mine outside in the Australian summer. It didn't magically lose energy. The battery is a dense insulated brick on the bottom of the vehicle, so it doesn't really get hot enough to need cooling even when it's 40C / 104F and you park in the sun.
You can drain the battery in a few weeks, but you need something running like Sentry Mode consuming power.
So, let's say I leave an EV at the airport, with 60% charge, battery in reasonable health, and return 2 months later and head home, having lost maybe 3%. You are telling me that's....not doing exactly what you're saying I can't and didn't just do?
You don't also immediately lose all the stored energy either. In a (hypothetical, future tyme) properly kitted out scenario, I leave my EV plugged in at the airport and it's battery contributes to local grid storage while I'm away. So the 60% I arrived with might drop down during high load, but since my utility company has a handy app I can schedule when I need to unplug and ask for the charge percentage to be topped up in time.
I might even not have to pay to park my car in that scenario, or potentially even earn credits back...
You will not have lost 3%. You will have lost 30-40% - because no Airport has (and probably never will have) Parking, where you can leave your EV plugged in.
Explain to me what hypothetical means to you. Then re read my post and note where I point out the hypotheticals.
And you definitely would not lose 30-40%. I'd meet at 8-10% but you are either inexperienced with the tech or shilling an agenda with that 30-40%.
But what would me and my actual lived experience know right?
That's more an issue with hydrogen than it is with EVs. Hydrogen is very leaky.
No it isn't. Toyota and Hyundai have had tanks for years now that are not leaking anything. Same goes for Linde.
Boil off from liquid hydrogen is still an issue as of 6 months ago:
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/innovation/solving-the-liquid-hydrogen-boil-off-problem-us-awards-48m-towards-h2-research-and-development/2-1-1522238
Rio Tinto's scientist puts the boil off of hydrogen at about 1% per day in storage tanks.
The electricity for Hydrogen isn't bound to any place. If they put up 10 offshore wind turbines exclusively for Hydrogen, that hydrogen can be shipped around the country as needed and wanted. That's not possible with Grid power and especially not when they have different systems in place.
Transporting energy isn't possible with grid power? Really? That's what grids are for.
Yes, they have the issue of separate incompatible grids, but building complicated interconnects is still going to be easier than building and operating a hydrogen trucking industry.
Why would you have to build anything? We already truck gas everywhere. It's a simple conversion.
Trucks and trailers aren't new, it's the filling and emptying facilities combined with the sheer number of trucks.
Trucks can't hold very much hydrogen gas - you need a lot of trucks to transport a useful amount of hydrogen. One truck only carries enough hydrogen to fill 75 cars, so you're looking at needing fourteen times as many hydrogen trucks as we have fuel trucks. If filling stations were actually busy, you'd be looking at multiple deliveries per day.
All that infrastructure, trucks and drivers costs a lot of money.
You don't transport it or store it in gas form.
Since you got the above fact wrong, this MUST be wrong. I'd like to see where you got this figure from if you'd care to share.
It's from the 380kg listed here and the Mirai's 5kg hydrogen capacity.
Sure, there's also the 'super-insulated, cryogenic tanker trucks' with super cooled liquid hydrogen, but you were claiming nothing special needed to be built?
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-delivery (choosing this source SPECIFICALLY because it's a government entity to prove a point, not because it's the most instructive source)
Yes. I meant what I said. We already do it. Just because you recognize one option of transfer, and have a link that outlines basic details of it, doesn't mean that what I'm talking about doesn't exist...
Considering that gasoline tankers are Liquid trucks, I'm not sure why you'd jump straight to a conversion to gas and then make the an argument that I'm talking about gaseous tube trailers.
Spoken like someone who's never seen a land remediation project at a former gas station site.
It's only simple on paper.
Considering that they need to go under land remediation anyway... I fail to see how it's a problem to do it just a little earlier and keep the land/infrastructure in use.
Ok but now you're moving the goalposts. Before you just said it was a simple conversion. It's just not, full stop.
And now suddenly it's moot because they have to do it anyway, cost and difficulty notwithstanding.
I remain, regrettably, firmly unconvinced that the average service station franchisee is going to be incentivized to undertake this.
I didn't move any goalpost. Any gas station that being decommission in favor of electric vehicles... or being decommissioned in general will have to undergo that process. This will happen REGARDLESS of the hydrogen station being put in place.
Maybe easier, but not cheaper. Transporting hydrogen around is already being done as well - you don't have to develop the wheel again.
I’m not sure I buy that. Yes, their electrical grid is a mismatched nightmare, that they should have taken the hit on decades ago. However I see that small chargers for things like phones can adjust to pretty much any electrical grid: why shouldn’t we expect the charger in the car to be equally flexible? Either way, it’s converting to DC
Edit: the article didn’t talk about the differences, except frequency: if the only difference is 50Hz vs 60Hz, most analog electrical stuff probably also works on both. The real problem is they don’t have interconnects nor do they have a regulatory structure allowing separate generating oroviders
My main point was about capacity, and how the separate grid(s?) hinder attempts to add the capacity needed for EVs. I wasn't really clear on that though. mb
I thought auto ranging power supplies were typically for voltage but not frequency.
Every one I’ve seen gives ranges like 100-240v ac, at 50-60 Hz.
Then electrical grids are large complex systems defined in analog days and subject to variances for weather, usage, distances, etc, so they also need to support that variability
Even larger appliances like refrigerators, ovens/ranges, etc? Some of these might be 10+ years old.
Digital power supplies usually support most electrical grids
Analog electrical stuff must handle the allowed variability in the grid and may be able to adjust from 60Hz to 50 Hz: for example a clock probably uses a crystal to establish a reliable frequency instead of relying on the grid frequency. Some labels may include this info, especially since everything has been globalized. However it’s going to depend. Some will. Some won’t.
However analog electrical can’t usually adjust between 120v and 240v, or similar, depending on where you are. This is the part where things can fail spectacularly