H2 Light Duty Vehicles - Necessary and Inevitable in a Clean Economy
Most climate change and clean energy legislation ignores the lower income half of society. Some clean energy policy supports projects with taxpayer dollars until the industry can run on its own. And some clean energy policy significantly damages lower income citizens for long term. Our current BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) policy is this – it’s regressive and harms lower income people.
Big picture: BEVs are great, but they have issues and won’t work for most people. They are great for the wealthy- BEV use characteristics require owning a garage to charge cost-effectively. BEVs also won’t work for widespread adoption in cities, in the cold, or for low income people, and the power grid is absolutely not ready for BEVs.
This article takes a first look at why Hydrogen vehicles will start to move from a niche to a minor majority of light duty vehicles post 2030. I touch on the major points only - deep dives will follow in the coming weeks. Today is 3000 words, about 3x longer than I usually aim for.
I originally started writing this as a chapter for a book in 2020. It hit 10,000 words (about 1/10 a novel), so buckle up.
The recent update of a Toyota Mirai Hydrogen Electric Vehicle based on the Lexus LX
While I am focused on the US here, most of the issues here are exacerbated in much of the rest of the world.
Note: Please do not reproduce anything in this without explicit permission. Linking directly to the article is appreciated.
First, for whom BEVs work? Mostly for the top half of incomes in the US
BEVs work best for someone wealthy enough to own a garage where they can do level 2 charging (~25 miles per hour added to battery) vs level 1 charging at a standard outlet (4 miles per hour added to battery) 63% of US houses have garages or carports, and 37% of these are rented, meaning 40%, or less than half, of the US owns a garage or carport they could do L2 charging in.
Level 2 charging in a home requires a power upgrade because it draws 4x the average power draw of a family of four. Landlords aren’t going to pay for the upgrades in most cases, complexes aren’t capable of doing that many upgrades without upgrading the entire local power grid.
Without owning a garage, you are relegated to fast-charging all the time, which kills batteries and is a massive waste of time.
Middle and upper income families can afford two cars – and one is always combustion
4% of BEV owners have only a BEV, the rest own a gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicle (ICE) because BEVs just don’t do the trick. That tells you everything you need to know about the viability of BEVs as the sole vehicle of the future.
Back when I was at Shell and for the brief time that H2 actually was available at fueling stations, ~80% of H2 vehicle owners used an H2 vehicles as their sole vehicle because it fully replaces an ICE if you have fuel.
The worst part – BEVs are a massive regressive tax – one that won’t go away
BEV infrastructure is a forever regressive tax
Utilities are rate-basing the grid build-out required to charge BEVs - which means that they charge the cost of grid expansion for EVs to everyone, not just the people with EVs. This in turn makes people who don’t own BEVs pay for the grid upgrades for wealthy people to charge their BEVs. To be more clear: the cost to power refrigerators, hot water, electric heat, and AC will go up for low income people who can’t afford electric cars, just so that high income people can have their BEVs.
Utilities love rate-basing, because it means they get to charge customers more and increase their profits. This rate basing lasts for decades meaning it will never go away. Once it is baked in, everyone pays it, regardless of whether they own a BEV, for decades.
Typically upgrades for niche uses like this are handled by the end user. The end user pays demand charges. These charges pay for grid upgrades, resiliency, and the promising to deliver power when it is demanded. These demand charges for BEVs are largely waived, especially at home. IE the end users themselves don’t pay extra, it is rate-based to everyone, and the cost of electricity for everyone rises. This is a very regressive tax that leaves low income people footing a disproportionate share of the bill.
When industries are growing, it is sometimes necessary to briefly support them like this. The BEV industry is large now. It’s time that the cost for grid upgrades for BEVs are handled by those buying and operating the BEVs.
Because H2 does not rely on a shared grid, H2 infrastructure upgrades can easily be entirely passed onto the end users, not operated as a regressive tax. Right now H2 needs tax payer support, much like BEVs needed heavy taxpayer support to get off the ground. The support to get H2 off the ground will be less and shorter than what BEVs required (more on this in a later post).
The bottom half – BEVs don’t work
BEVs are expensive and owning them is difficult and expensive for the 60% of Americans without garages.. People in the bottom half of US income generally buy used cars. The biggest risk of buying any used car is replacing the main drivetrain component. On an ICE that is the engine at $4k for a small sedan. With a BEV, the battery for a small sedan is $13k-$20k, an outlay that would render a dud car as irreparable.
It’s also much easier to tell when an ICE engine is bad, because it runs terribly. As a result, the risk of buying a used BEV remains far higher than a used ICE.
The plight of foisting BEVs on the bottom half gets worse from here.
Single car families – there are a lot
91.7% of US households own at least one vehicle and 43% of households are single-car families. It’s a safe assumption that a BEV doesn’t work for most single car families for a bevy of reasons. Let’s explore some.
How are low income people going to charge their BEVs?
In a saturated market, charging a BEV will be a 90 minute endeavor - leaving home to find a charger, waiting your turn for the charger, spending 60-90 minutes for full charge, and going home. This doesn’t work for dual-parent single-car households, much less the full quarter of families with a single parent.
The average driver in the US covers 42 miles per day, so a 200 mile range car will need to be charged every four days in order to not run the battery to the ground and need a tow. Do we really expect a parent, especially a single one, to be able to leave their family to charge the car two nights a week for 90 minutes at a time?
This doesn’t work, full stop. Because H2 fueling is the same as ICE fueling H2 fueling and vehicles solves this problem.
Low cost BEVs will be short range – making them useless as a primary vehicle
Long range BEVs are too expensive for most middle-income-and-below households to afford and there are no price reductions in site. A long-range BEV is and will remain a luxury purchase. The only way to get a low-cost BEV is to drastically lower the range – making our frequency-to-charge problem above even worse when the driver will have to charge it every night – but can’t charge at home.
H2 makes this easy. Increasing the range of an FCEV means putting more fuel tanks in.
It will be much more affordable to buy a long-range H2 vehicle than a long-range BEV
Issues for everyone – not just the lower half
If you have a lithium ion battery, your BEV has child labor in the supply chain
The cobalt in lithium ion batteries largely comes from the Congo where child labor is rife. You should eschew lithium ion for the lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) batteries found in lower cost and lower range cars to avoid this problem.
“But they can charge at work” or “we can have chargers in every parking spot”
Neither of these are feasible or cost effective. Commercial chargers have to be built to withstand the public, making them much more expensive. Installing anything on public grounds also requires digging up sidewalks, upgrading transformers, laying new distribution lines, and substation upgrades. It’s about 10x the cost of a home charger. More on this in a future article.
An H2 refueling station can fully fuel 10 cars an hour. A fast-charger can 100% charge a BEV in one hour. At scale H2 infrastructure is more cost effective than BEV.
BEVs are terrible for the grid – H2 helps the grid
BEVs draw an immense amount of power from the grid. A BEV on a standard Level 2 home charger draws 4x the average power of a family of four. So we need to 5x our current residential power grid to make this work, presuming every family has only one car. Worse, most people plug in their cars at night when solar doesn’t happen, so we are using natural gas power plants to charge. Lovely for the environment, that.
Virtual Power Plants aren’t going to happen. Most people won’t be plugging in their car every night to be drained and charged again – clean power is less available at night (no sun, you see) and they will get up in the morning to a battery that has been drained, not charged, OR that has been charged by fossil plants operating at night. Moreover, frequent battery charging and discharging will degrade the battery faster. The economics don’t work out.
Hydrogen can be produced and used asynchronously, and H2 production can ramp down during demand times, so H2 production actually helps the grid. Plants that do grid services like this are already in operation.
BEVs are not as environmentally friendly as you think
Fast-charging a BEV can draw 80-300x as much power as a family of four uses on average - so it needs power plants that can spin up fast. This means natural gas.
Renewables also need to be used when they are produced, unless there are massive and massively expensive grid-scale batteries. It is impossible to charge BEVs only when renewables are available. This means that BEV charging is largely powered by natural gas or other fossil sources, and often by natural gas peakers which emit more CO2 and criteria air pollutants. In the worst case scenario, a BEV emits more than a Prius hybrid by 4x.
By producing H2 when power is available and using H2 whenever the customer pulls up, only H2 can be true-zero.
To have true zero BEVs, we need battery storage for every kwh of power that goes to a BEV.
“But 95-99% of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels”
I’ve written about this. 99% of hydrogen is used in chemicals, agriculture, the oil and gas sector, and other heavy industry. Conflating H2 use in these sectors with the relatively negligible demand for mobility is at best grossly uninformed and at worst slanderously misleading. Most of the hydrogen for mobility in the US meets Low Carbon Fuel Standards, whereas BEVs are charged by grid mix, which in the US is majority fossil fuels. H2 mobility is demonstrably cleaner than BEV, and doesn’t have the child labor in the BEV metals supply chain.
Fast charging – not that fast, damages battery, hard for infrastructure
Fast charging is not that fast – taking about an hour or more for most brands to fully charge
Fast charging damages batteries - Even with the brand-new batteries that are more resilient, fast-charging only three times per month reduced vehicle range by 20% in just four years.
Remember above how the average driver does 42 miles per day and needs to fast-charge 8x per month if they only own a BEV? Now we’re talking 25% range reduction in four years. This isn’t acceptable.
A single fast charger will require a substation upgrade. A 350kW fast charger in most locations will require a substation upgrade to the tune of $1-$2M per MW. They will also need more peaking plants or large-scale battery storage.
Fast charging is not 95%+ efficient
Fast chargers need to cool the charger and the charging cable, batteries need to self-cool while fast-charging, and power electronics to do all the power conversions are inefficient. Overall fast-charging loses 15-30% of the power that goes into the battery. This means that whatever costs it takes to get the power to the charger, add 15%-30% immediately.
To be fair, fuel cells have efficiency losses. But the efficiency loss is less of a concern compared to the total cost, and how much is passed onto others.
Public chargers take up a lot of space
Public L2 chargers can fuel one car in four hours or more. DC fast chargers can fully fuel one car an hour (or more if they only charge to 80%). In other words, this entire station with 98 spots can fully charge about 98 BEVs per hour. 10 H2 dispensers in 1/10th the space can service the same number of cars. Given the space requirements, BEV charging takes up about 10x the space per vehicle. We don’t have space in most places to do this.
Recharging stations take up a lot of space. These 98 chargers can service the same number of cars as a standard 4-8 dispenser highway gas refueling station or hydrogen station.
Source: Jalopnik
BEVs are heavy
A Tesla model 3 LR is nearly 4000 lbs and can drive 300 miles on a charge. A comparable hybrid ICE is 3600 lbs and can drive 400-600 miles. A regular cab Ford F150 is 4069 lbs. A Tesla weighs as much as a pickup truck. Parking garages would struggle to be filled with them, and the extra weight causes more damage to infrastructure.
Worse, the extra weight of EVs means tires wear out faster – resulting in considerably more particulate matter emissions than lighter cars.
H2 cars weigh less than its ICE counterpart – the Mirai is based on the Lexus LS (a super luxury large car) and is 500 lbs lighter - 4200 lbs for the Mirai compared to the 4700 for Lexus LS. In other words, a Tesla is 10-15% heavier than an ICE counterpart, and a H2 vehicle is 10% lighter.
BEVs fires hard to put out once they start
I’ve written an entire article on H2 safety. The chemicals in batteries hold a lot of energy – and once a fire starts, it doesn’t stop. A standard gasoline car takes 600-1000 gallons – or roughly one water tanker firetruck’s worth – to extinguish. A BEV takes at least 3000 gallons and best practice is to fully submerge it because it can catch back on fire after extinguishing. A more realistic number is the 36,000 gallons of water to extinguish a single Tesla. It took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish a Tesla semi when it caught fire.
Recently a BEV fire in a garage in Korea damaged and destroyed 140 other cars and forced residents into homeless shelters after it took 20 hours to contain the blaze.
Batteries carry a lot more energy and flammable material than can actually be used to power the car.
H2 has less energy than gasoline – it is much easier to put out an H2 fire. In fact, you just let it burn and it burns itself out very quickly[1].
This is the Tesla that took 36,000 gallons to extinguish.
Specific locations – NYC
Places like NYC have neither the space nor the power distribution to charge vehicles. The latter will soon be remedied by the incoming power lines from Canada, but the space constraints remain – most cities don’t have the space or local distribution lines to handle BEVs
Cold environments
In cold weather BEVs lose 30% of their range on long trips and 50% of their range for short trips (link).
Hydrogen electric cars are less efficient than BEVs in general and lose energy as heat. First, it turns out that H2 cars operate more efficiently in the cold compared to BEV. Second, that waste heat becomes usable heat to warm a vehicle cabin and range degradation in the cold is not a thing for fuel cells.
H2 cars have no range degradation in the cold
High use case environments
For capital assets, using the asset productively makes the average cost lower. Plug Power demonstrates that for round-the-clock forklifts, battery charging requires buying ~1.25-1.5 as many forklifts owing to charging times. Hydrogen ends up being more cost effective.
Any high-use asset will be more cost-effective owing to Hydrogen’s faster fueling time
Autonomous vehicles – H2 is a winner
I’m in the camp of “autonomous light duty vehicles are a pipe dream in the next decade or two.” If I’m wrong, H2 will have yet another advantage. Autonomous vehicles will be able to constantly work and make money. If this happens, a fast-fueling asset will be able to make more money.
H2 wins with high-utilization vehicles
“But H2 is less efficient than BEVs”
The largest BEV fast charging station in the US is powered by natural gas, and so is your BEV.
Your BEV is powered by natural gas. If you fast charge it, it’s powered by a 30% efficient natural gas peaker plant. You’re already less efficient than the current 30% round-trip efficiency of an H2 car, and that doesn’t account for BEV line losses and other losses.
More importantly, we care less about total efficiency and more about
1. Total emissions
2. Cost per mile
The all-in cost of BEV fast charging is higher than H2 fueling. This is going to be one of the most fun full posts for me to write.
The idea that we have limited deployment of renewables is a false argument, because -
H2 doesn’t need the grid
Once costs come down far enough, H2 can fully operate without the power grid. Islanded renewable production, currently held up by not having the grid to move those electrons, can be accessed by H2 systems that are never connected to the grid.
H2 can accelerate deployment of renewables by bypassing the grid interconnection queue.
Yes, the lack of H2 infra is an issue
That’s part of why I joined the DOE and helped run H2Hubs. I was the major push for open-access pipelines in the hubs. If any of those come to fruition, you can thank me.
Summary
BEVs serve their purpose. They are great for the upper half of our society that can afford them and own garages to charge them. The raft of issues with them for everyone else are impossible to address.
H2 vehicles resolve nearly all of these issues. For those that live in cold environments, only own one car, or don’t have high income, H2 is necessary if we are to replace fossil-powered cars.
[1] This is an oversimplification of H2 risks – but generally H2 cars are even more safe because it’s so hard to get a leak in them.
