• Frub@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The same infrastructure argument could go for electric though. It’s difficult to build infrastructure for these vehicles yes I agree but why would electric be any easier?

    Also don’t quote me on this but i think there are ways to collect hydrogen at a home, which would reduce the need for these stations, at least in the city

    • beefcat@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It’s easier to build charging stations when we already have a massive grid for distributing electricity. We have no such infrastructure in place for distributing hydrogen. Producing hydrogen cleanly and efficiently is still a hard problem we haven’t really solved.

    • zurohki
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      1 year ago

      DC fast chargers cost something like $70k each. Hydrogen filling stations cost around a million each.

      Also, with battery EVs home charging does most of the heavy lifting, you only use fast chargers for long trips. So just a handful of fast chargers on the main roads between cities makes battery EVs viable for a lot of people.

      It’s not enough to collect hydrogen, a filling station also needs to compress it to 10,000 PSI to actually get it into a vehicle’s tank. So there’s no home filling for fuel cell EVs, you need a similar footprint to gas stations. Nobody’s interested in spending hundreds of billions of dollars building all those filling stations.

      • Frub@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The difference with hydrogen stations is that the vehicle turnover would be incredibly higher despite the larger cost, similar to a regular gas station

        • zurohki
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          1 year ago

          It actually isn’t. Hydrogen filling stations can only fill a couple of cars in a row before they need time to pump hydrogen from the storage tank to the buffer tank and compress and cool it to -40 degrees. So the number of cars they can handle in a day is not massively higher than a DC fast charger.

          If it doesn’t have time to prepare between vehicles, it starts taking 20 minutes to fill each vehicle.