Comments by "Engineering the weird guy" (@engineeringtheweirdguy2103) on "Two Bit da Vinci" channel.

@seanhardman1964 Economic costs are one of the most important factors when people buy a prius or a BEV. Multiple studies have shown thing. The only way Toyota could make the Mirai competitive with the price of fuel, was to give $15,000 worth of free fuel away when you buy the car. Thats insane. Range doesn't not make as big a difference as you think. Sure most people are weary of range getting a new technology but how many people go into a dealership with their number one question/criteria being "how far on a tank?" almost never. Further to that almost nobody drives more than 100-200 miles yet alone 400 miles in a single day 99% of the year. If you're buying a car to suit the needs of something you might do once a year or less. Then you're not very smart with your money. And im not arguing that a frunk is the be all and end all of vehicle desires. Far from it. But it IS a competitive advantage. If you had two identical cars for identical prices, one had a storage space in the front while the other did, rear space, cabin space and every other aspect of the cars were the same. You'd go for the car with the frunk. The frunk also offers better crumple zones in an accident increasing survivability. which is another thing not to forget but something most people wouldn't think about.
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@seanhardman1964 but there aren't any overall benefits. Hydrogen is already mass produced. As i stated before there are VERY few use cases for hydrogen overall, but for consumers buying domestic vehicles there really isnt a reason to buy a hydrogen vehicle. Buying a hydrogen car in the hopes that hydrogen will be more usefull in areas that it's not is a fools gambit. And not one consumers would care about.
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@seanhardman1964 Toyota are giving away $15,000 and the incentives in place to make them cheaper are as good and in some cases better than BEV’s in some states in the US. Incentives aren’t the problem
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@seanhardman1964 I’ve explained this in great depth. It won’t ever be cheaper than BEV’s in terms of operational costs. And even at a purchase price better than EV’s it would take making them substantially cheaper to compensate consumers for all the benefits they miss out on with a BEV. It won’t happen for the domestic vehicle market. As I’ve stated before hydrogen has its use cases. But it’s not as broad and sweeping as you think it is. The truth is hydrogen energy is ill suited for a lot of tasks. There are very niche application where hydrogen is idea. For almost all other application, other technologies are better suited.
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@seanhardman1964 It wont go down in price much due to the energy requires to collect it and store it and use it. As i've said, I have no doubt hydrogen will find its place in the future economies of the world. But not as broadly as you are thinking. As i've stated before, for most application there are better alternatives that work better, are more efficient, safer and frankly cheaper. That isnt to say that hydrogen doesnt have its uses, which ive pointed out multiple times. trying to suggest the world should shoehorn technology that doesnt work as well into applications that could be done better by something else in the hopes that some of the off feeding water will make it to agriculture or more arid areas is naïve. If it was that much of a problem they would just build the desalination plants like they did in Victoria Australia during the millennium drought.
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@seanhardman1964 I’ve already told you why hydrogen plants won’t fuel citites, energy loss from hydrogen conversion is higher than transmission losses from wind or solar across entire continents.
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@seanhardman1964 sure, some infrastructure like freight and agriculture will just hydrogen. There won’t be hydrogen powerplants
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@seanhardman1964 there are significantly more efficient ways to store Englert to capacitate renewables. Which means you have to build less renewables which means less land used, less materials manufactured and most importantly, less cost.
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@seanhardman1964 for renewables capacitation I would use grid scale lithium as is currently being used to great success. The use of this battery does not result in greater losses than the line losses transporting the energy. If i was where they are planning the neom, I would use geothermal base load and renewables capacitated by lithium batteries as peakers and boosters.
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@seanhardman1964 actually the materials shortages are caused by covid. It’s actually a really complex situation. It’s hard to get ahold of any new car atm, not just EV’s in terms of lithium. There is plenty. Enough for centuries. Especially with clay extraction. Degradation is also pretty minimal these days and battery technology continues to develop in that field especially as Toyota release their solid state batteries which will do away with almost all battery degradation and phantom drain. Also the scale at which you need grid scale lithium batteries is actually very small. Geographically most places could use pumped hydro or tidal storage systems to greater effect. Most grid are heavily dependent of geopolitical circumstances. You asked what I would suggest for Neom. That’s my suggestion for that part of the world. Other places would be different. If you want to see the effects of geopolitical terrain on grid infrastructure, put some research into the EU super grid proposal.
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@seanhardman1964 bp would. For 2 reason. 1.) hydrogen at current is most commonly and most cheaply produced using fossil fuels. 2.) bp, like most oil companies, has a monopoly on fuel stations. If hydrogen vehicles are the norm, bp keeps its second largest income investment as fuel stations would still be needed to distribute hydrogen, while BEV’s can be charged at home. Bp has no intention on letting its investments go to waste. Of course they’re going to try to double down the capital they already have. That’s the smart business move
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@seanhardman1964 its not unheard of for fossil fuel companies to make investments in green technologies and make statements about going green to achieve emissions offset regulations. Much low how car manufacturers make "compliance" cars before Tesla started challenging the market. as it stands, the cheapest way produce hydrogen is with fossil fuels. and hydrogen also has to be supplied though their fuel stations. meaning they can keep their fuel monopoly. If you think that doesnt generate a bias you need to reconsider your view of the world. Lavo, as i've previously discussed, isnt suitable for EV's. This is because their volumetric energy density is much lower than that of a lithium battery, Current EV batteries have around 730 Wh/L volume, Metallic Hydride batteries like the Lavo has as best 420 Wh/L. So a 100kWh batter in an EV using current lithium batteries would take up approximately 138L of space. However if it used Lavo type batteries it would need 238L of space. in addition, they are also heavier, with EV's current lithium batteries at around 260 Wh/kg, whilst the Lavo has around 100 Wh/kg. So you would need something almost twice a large and twice as heavy for the same energy. further to that Lavo type metallic hydride batteries have other drawbacks. one being that they have low power output. meaning the car would be slower, they also have whats called chemical memory. Which means they would be horrendously bad for EV's especially with irregular use cases, such as regenerative breaking, changes in traffic on the way to and and the way home, etc. lastly they also have high phantom drain. with as much as 80% loss of power per month Lavo are not suited for EV's.
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@seanhardman1964 Australia doesnt have the highest lithium reserves. It has the largest lithium PRODUCTION meaning most of the worlds lithium currently comes out of Australia, which is what I said. if you're still struggling with that, here is an analogy that might help. Lets say you and your brother are both selling lemons. Your bother has 5 x more lemons than you do because he has more tree's. Your brother is disinterested in selling lemons and only sells around 5 lemons per day. You however really don't want your lemons rotting around the house so you sell more lemons at a cheaper price and you sell 10 lemons per day. Who is the largest supplier of lemons to the market, and who has the largest reserve of lemons? similarly, Australia is you in this situation, and a host of other places are your brother. also something to realise is that those are KNOWN accessible lithium mines. Just like with oil, as more demand increases, more stakes are claimed and more lithium mines are established to access lithium. in addition, this does not yet include clay extracted lithium, which if counted would mean Nevada would have the largest known lithium reserves in the world. it doesn't include this because clay extraction is a very new method, the first ever plants to extract lithium form clay haven't even finished being built yet.
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@seanhardman1964 I’ll get to your full comment later but no, governments and companies don’t nessisarily look for a one shoe fits all solution. Hell, even in the military where that would be highly desirable most of their equipment have technologies and components from dozen manufacturers for the one piece of kit. It’s less about finding a one size fits all. More about value for money and cost effectiveness. Hell you see this in the real world all the time. There isn’t one kind of power generation. There isn’t one kind of power transmission there isn’t one kind of fuel, there isn’t one kind bolt thread or even screw head, Phillips, flat head, hex key, star key, square, etc etc etc. All have their application and are chosen accordingly.
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@seanhardman1964 also worth pointing out that metallic hydride storage such as the lavo battery is not the same a fuel cells. Sorry. Very very different. Look into it. Metallic hydride batteries are twice and large and half an energy dense. Along with the rest of the issues I mentioned.
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@seanhardman1964 and just to nail home the point. Let’s say you went shopping for kitchen appliances. Let’s say you get a sunbeam blender because it’s the cheapest for the features you want. But sunbeam make a miserable toaster. It’s expensive, is shoddy, won’t last, has none of the features you want. Or you could get a cheaper Brevil toaster which has the timer features you want, well built etc etc. are you going to stick with sunbeam so you have your one shoe to fit all? Or will you spend less and get more and buy a brevil?
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@seanhardman1964 that is an incredibly naive way to look at things. That’s like saying bio oil is the next big revolution. Does everything regular oil does but it’s carbon neutral! Except when you dig into the details you realise it has to be taken from crops. You have to sacrifice huge swaths of farmable land in order to use it at scale which would cause famine. There is a huge swath of applications which hydrogen isn’t well suited for. Domestic passenger cars being one. Grid scale storage for renewables shoring being another. Power plants being a big one. We have better technologies to handle those application. They yield better results for cheaper. Why do you want to shoe horn one technology into applications it doesn’t do well at. That’s like saying “oh, well in the future we’ll need rockets to go to other planets when we have colonies so let’s just use rockets instead of planes for all domestic international air travel. Sure it’s 1,000 times the cost, significantly more dangerous and completely impractical for almost every current application of air travel today. But think about how good we’ll be at rockets by the time we colonise other planets!” There isn’t going to be one solution for everything everywhere. It’s going to a mix of what works best for the best cost. That’s the way it’s always been, because economics and practicality drive the world. We don’t put all out eggs in the one basket and go, “welp, everything may be shit but at least it’s simple with a select few companies having a monopoly on… magic oil” You see it today, just because we have touch screens doesn’t mean computer keyboards are gonna become a sheet of smooth glass. Just because we have car airbags doesn’t mean they’re going to start making pillows out of them. Just because we have wifi doesn’t mean book manufacturers are going to shut up shops and the library’s are going to be demolished. It’s a naive idea.
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@seanhardman1964 you’re looking at this wrong. Hydrogen isn’t a fuel source. It’s an energy medium. Like water in a nuclear power plant being used to capture heat in the form of steam to run a turbine. That’s not steam power, or water power, it’s nuclear power. Lithium isn’t a one size fits all. There are hundreds of types of batteries, and dozens of types of lithium batteries. They have their application. But you won’t see “lithium power plants” or battery run agricultural equipment, or plants or ships or trains. There will always be a range of technologies no one technology is applicable or desirable for all applications. Could you make battery powered trains or agricultural or industrial machinery? Sure, but they’d be shit to deal with and expensive. Hydrogen is better suited to that. Just like batteries are better suited to domestic passenger cars. Can you use hydrogen? Sure but they’ll be shit to deal with and expensive. You need to move away from this one ring to rule them all mentality. It’s never happened in human history, and likely never will. Hell if that’s how the world worked, we’d be on 100% diesel. Diesel cars, trucks, planes, train. There’d be no gas, coal, nuclear, geothermal or hydro powerplants. There’d only be diesel generators. But that’s not what we see. We see petrol cars dominating domestic vehicle markets, we see power grid with mixes of power sources depending on their geopolitical circumstances, the worlds never worked that way. And for a good reason. It’s called optimisation. Using the best thing for the job to get the best outcomes, be it output, safety, economic or a combination of factors. Hell there isn’t even one kind of crop. There never will be.
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@seanhardman1964 and that shouldn’t be a contentious topic. It’s on everyones best interest to use the best thing for the job. For example, BEV’s are significantly safer than hydrogen vehicles. Forcing people to go hydrogen because you want everything to be hydrogen arbitrarily, would be forcing people to put their lives at greater risk and inevitably incur a higher road death toll.
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@seanhardman1964 if you try to shoe in hydrogen for shoring renewables, you’ll lose a lot of that energy. That makes the price of energy and thus the price of living a lot higher. Similarly for buying hydrogen fuel vs charging an EV. You’d dive more people into poverty so you can have your “one magic oil solution”
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@seanhardman1964 cool about the nexo. Not sure what the point of that is?
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@seanhardman1964 no. It’s like you don’t even read my comments. I’m not worried about fuel tanks exploding. Although it is a concern for critical failures not punctures, I’m worried about the protection and volume required for the tanks. This drastically reduces the crumple area for sized, rear and front, which in turn has a huge reduction in survivability. In addition they are also more prone to roll overs than BEV’s. And yes you would need 1,500 MW of power. But that’s exactly why hydrogen is ill suited for power plants. Because it’s literally wasting electricity for no reason. You need around 70% more energy supplied to produce electricity from a hydrogen power plant than you get out. So if you had 1,500 MW of hydrogen power plants, that would need 5,000 MW worth of non hydrogen power plants just to produce that hydrogen. Which is enormously wasteful. You could put that energy directly into the grid, have other methods of storage which are more efficient to top up peaks which may only need 5MW-10MW to top up the grid. This idea about using hydrogen power plants is absurd. The only situation that makes sense is if you are so far away from the initial power source that you’d lose more than 70% of your original energy through transmission losses which you won’t do unless you’re trying to feed energy from Norway to California. It’s ridiculously stupid. Battery prices have been coming down. In Victoria Australia they are building not 1 but 2 300MWh grid scale batteries. One being built by a private company. Germany’s goals with hydrogen is for industry. Covering steel forged to run on hydrogen, converting gas and propane applications to be hydrogen burners. Not for grid scale electricity.
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@seanhardman1964 like I said. Lithium, like everything, is a one shoe fits all solution. You won’t use lithium for everything. Only some applications. That’s what I’ve been saying
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@seanhardman1964 efficiency is important and desalination would drive costs up. Cost of water from desalination is high. You have to cover the costs of the plants maintenance and overheads, then transpiration. It makes it all more expensive.
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@seanhardman1964 hydrogen can handle heavier loads than what? And what is the advantage of that? I am an engineer.
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@seanhardman1964 hydrogen does have multiple use cases. But few it excels at. And I’m hardly the only engineer who agrees with me. Most studies on balance have agreed with me. Hell I’ve been apart of several.
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@seanhardman1964 domestic passenger vehicles are better served by BEV’s and that isn’t to say new battery technology will advance in the future. There are constantly expanding technologies in the realm of batteries. For example Toyota’s development of solid state batteries. As for recyclability, it’s not optimistic, already with current technology battery recycling is around 95%. As in, 95% of current EV batteries can be recycled. I’m not saying agriculture and large equipment shouldn’t be powered by hydrogen. I’m not saying lithium is better in those areas. I’m saying not all areas are suited to hydrogen. Some are but certainly not to the degree you’re suggesting. For example hydrogen power plants. It’s a huge waste of resources and energy and capital expenditure to use hydrogen power-plants.
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@seanhardman1964 recycling profit depends entirely on the demand for lithium. Which is continually increasing.
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@seanhardman1964 and I don’t think I know it all. But I know enough. Especially having written papers on similar subjects.
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@seanhardman1964 it’s also because batteries can respond to frequency changes in grid demand in nano seconds, instead of tens of seconds for conventional power, inclusive of hydrogen. This significantly reduces waste and also significantly increases grid stability as frequency shifts which would otherwise result in power generators being kicked out of phase (not able to respond fast enough to meet the change before it goes too far) causing a blackout are controlled within nanoseconds of an irregular shift instead of tens of seconds. The further the shift is allowed to continue the further out of phase power draw and production becomes and the more energy is required to bring it back into phase. Often called grid inertia.
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@seanhardman1964 as for shifting to solid state. It would occur like shifting to a new phone. You keep the battery you have until you get a new car. In terms of materials, same materials more or less, production method is different which means the only obstacle is tooling. Which isn’t very difficult to overcome.
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@seanhardman1964 yes but it’s one of the rarest elements to occur natural in pure form. Efficiency is a problem and always will be. I believe they’re will be a mixed economy. As there always has been. Almost all the things holding hydrogen back in places like domestic vehicles or to shore renewables are fundamental problems. You can’t overcome them with Engineering. For example you will never get close to the efficiency of a BEV. Due to the requirements of expending energy to break bonds to get hydrogen, and sinking energy to create bonds to form it back into water. There is no getting around that. That will always be an issue. Or volume. Hydrogen takes up huge volumes. You can’t get around that. The only way around that is to store it in a carrier which just means you need to expend even more energy extracting it from the carrier. These are fundamental problems hydrogen has. No amount of engineering will get around this. That’s like saying you can engineer something that will expend less energy to lift an object than is described by the m x g x h equation for potential energy. You can’t. You will always need at least that much energy to lift that object. There is no way around that. That’s what I’m trying to drive at. And efficiency is important. There is absolutely 100% no point in hydrogen powerplants. When you need you just need 1.4 x more energy from another source just to create the hydrogen. 30% loss of energy is greater than transmission losses. You are pouring energy down the drain for *no reason*. And not a little bit of energy.
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Hydrogen vehicles will actually require more energy than Battery Electrics. This is because green hydrogen can only be made via electrolysis. which uses electricity. for this it uses electricity from the grid. Lets say you have 100 kWh from the grid. Electrolysis is around 70% efficient. so you now have 70kWh of hydrogen you've made with your 100 kWh. Then you have to liquify it by compressing it to 700 bar. This is only around 80% efficient. So now you have 56 kWh of electricity. You then have to transport it which requires around 15% of the energy. This means you now how 47 kWh. Then once in the hydrogen vehicle it goes through a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen into electricity, This process is only around 60% efficient at best. So now you only have supplied 28.5 kWh of electricity to run the car (I am excluding losses from inversion to AC and losses through the AC motor as it would also equally apply to a BEV). Then you can look at BEV's. Supply it with the same 100kWh from the grid. Charging is around 98% efficient. and the inverter to charge the battery is around 95% efficient. Discharging the battery is also around 98% efficient. So you end up with 91 kWh of electricity to run the car. So you would need just over 3 times more grid energy to drive a hydrogen vehicle than you would to drive a BEV. This doesnt calculate how much energy the grid needs to create if all cars were electric but it does point out that it isnt MORE its less than if you ran on hydrogen.
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additionally, Hydrogen vehicles also use batteries although not as much. Hydrogen also uses platinum in the fuel cell which is far more toxic than anything inside a battery. But mining for batteries is only one part of the story. The precious metals in a lithium batteries arent consumed by the battery and can be almost 100% recycled at end of life. speaking of end of life, current EV battery technology has a life cycle of 1500 cycles, which means nearly 500,000 miles (800,000 km) life span to 30% degradation. I.e. 70% of your original battery capacity remaining. That represents 30-40 years of driving for the average person. Hydrogen on the other hand comes off the production like with an expiration date. of about 10 years from manufacture. Meaning you'd have to make and dispose of many more hydrogen vehicles over you lifetime than if you had a BEV. which constitutes a significantly increased mining requirement for hydrogen.
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@minnesotajack1 due to the fact that Hydrogen vehicles dont last nearly as long as BEV's or ICE cars, mining in general required to keep up with vehicle demand would be alot higher than with BEV's. Whilst a renewables only grid would mean zero emissions hydrogen, unfortunatey it wastes alot of energy. and thats important. for example if you had 1 power plant which was enough to power the needs of 100 people driving BEV's like Teslas. You would need 3 power plants to power those same 100 people with hydrogen vehicles. So while it would be green it would mean that you need to pay for and build 3x as many renewables.
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