Clarity Fuel Cell

First full up? I thought they were paying for all the fill ups up to $10k.

 

This site is great for learning about all the features like ACC and LKAS. https://www.hondatechtutor.com/

 

Great to see optional technologies out there but don't fool yourself to think it is zero emissions. Given that the overall efficiency of hydrogen (amount of generated electricity to go a mile) at this point is at best 50% that of a BEV, I'd be interested in seeing the map of how Green hydrogen is compared to ICE and BEV. No patting yourself on the back yet for saving the planet. But glad you are liking it.

 

Are you talking about emissions required to make the hydrogen that goes in the car? That is a slippery slope to go down. As for actual emissions of the car, doesn't it just produce water?

 

You have to get the hydrogen from somewhere. It isn't just pumped out of the ground. No, it's not a slippery slope. With any car, you need to look at the entire production/delivery of the fuel. Until all electricity comes from renewable sources, you can't ignore the emissions of generating electricity, or hydrogen using electricity in this case. I understand it's a very complicated process to truly account for all energy required to generate/transport fuel, but that doesn't mean you can just ignore it. Otherwise you are just fooling yourself. Some day generating hydrogen might be more efficient than it is today, but so will generating the electricity and creating the batteries for BEV's.

 

Yes, the car is zero emission (just as BEVs are not zero emission if you count coal power and natural gas going to make electricity). In theory, hydrogen production can be much improved as well, high temp electrolysis could be greater than 100% electrically efficient if taking waste heat from a nuclear reactor or possibly geothermal.

 

Now I know how serious to take your opinion.

 

I'm probably contributing to a bit of thread derailment here, but as someone who spent many years working with fuel cells before the automakers made it cool, I kinda want to comment on a couple things.

One, fuel cells versus BEVs is not an either or, and I think realistically what we should be looking at eventually is a PHEV like the Clarity (or Volt) with a fuel cell instead of an ICE for the range extension. Leaving aside battery composition and future developments (which is nontrivial), assuming that H2 will eventually be produced from renewable energy sources there is a very large efficiency penalty to using it versus direct generation-to-battery. An electrolyzer is 70% efficient if you're lucky, and a PEM fuel cell isn't realistically going to get above 60%, meaning you're losing 60-70% of your produced energy to roundtrip inefficiencies versus around 15% to a battery.

But hydrogen fuel has storage capabilities that are hard to match, and the throughput rate for refueling is massive.

I, personally, see the logical result of this being a PHEVFC vehicle like the PHEV Clarity in which for regular commuting you're using battery energy that you charge relatively slowly (obviating the need for much in the way of grid upgrades), and use H2 for long-haul driving in which energy density and rapid fueling are at a premium.

Nobody is making a PHEVFC vehicle yet, but I rather hope to see them eventually.

My other comment is that it's cool to see how far fuel cell vehicles have come in the past 20 years. I happened to work peripherally on the first street-legal fuel cell vehicle in the US twenty years ago, which was a conversion of a dinky little European neighborhood electric vehicle with a top speed of about 25 mph. About a decade later, we got our hands on a prototype Toyota FCHV-adv, which was basically a Highlander that ran on a fuel cell. Even back then it was a nice car--no cruise control, but otherwise you wouldn't really notice you were driving a FC vehicle apart from how quiet it was, and it could theoretically get almost 400 miles on a full tank. (Something we put to the test--it was over 300 miles of middle-of-nowhere highway from our fueling station to the nearest one in the city, a drive I did a few times, and if you lead-footed it and ran out of gas you were in for a very long tow.)

Now here we are ten years after that, and you can go out and get a totally practical FCV for yourself and just drive it like a regular car. BEVs have improved drastically faster than we expected back in the day, and the hydrogen economy did not roll out anywhere near as quickly, but it's still a reality.

Also, I so want that HUD on my PHEV Clarity...

 

Thanks for the insight, M.M. I agree that FCEV will have a complementary role to BEV. But the Clarity FC is already a HEVFC (no P), with the only problem being the battery capacity is very low. It is very analogous to FC equivalent of Prius, but with an electric engine instead of an ICE. I think Clarity FC has a 1KWh(?) capacity battery, and I can see the battery capacity changing as I drive, similar to the old Prius hybrid display.

One may suggest that the battery size be increased and a plug added to match Clarity PHEV, but FC already takes care of ZEV commuting. I think this idea makes commercial sense only if Hydrogen cost stays very high and daily charging at home is a lot cheaper. Then one may make a commercial argument to add the cost of a bigger battery to current FC, or replace ICE with FC in current PHEV to make a FCPHEV as you suggested. If Hydrogen cost comes down to the price of gas, I don't think this make commercial sense and pure FC will replace ICE for both commuting and long range driving. Right now, assuming 65mpkg for FC and 35 mpg for gas (Accord is 30/38 city/hwy) with $17/kg and $3/gal respectively, H2 is 3x costlier than gas (3.82 miles/$ vs 11.7 miles/$). Expectation is that with FC approaching even the EV numbers, the price will drop to half. This should make it very competitive with ICE, imo, due to the obvious benefit of being ZEV.

Regarding energy efficiencies, I have 2 questions:

• Is the creation of Hydrogen the same cost whether it is made from water, methane or other source? If it is overall cheaper to make from biomass, natural gas, etc. than say, water, then that is one consideration based on local resources.
• Is the inherent energy stored in H2 pretty much zero? In other words, is the energy needed to create H2 (electricity) merely being stored and there is no inherent chemical energy of H2 (as in the case of gas)? What this means is that the Electricity->H2->Electricity is purely a storage of energy conversion with significant losses. This storage development may still benefit other industries such as energy grids where too much power may be generated by solar/wind at some times and instead of wasting it, may be stored with a recovered efficiency of ~50%, which is still better than 0%, if FC costs are less than the benefit of recovered energy, smoother power grid, etc.

 

I really like the idea of a PHEVFC (or perhaps PFCEV for Plug-in Fuel Cell Vehicle?) as it addresses some of the current issues with a lack of hydrogen infrastructure. For many (and even then I'm speaking only for regions that have any H2 stations at all) fueling up at an H2 station is not very convenient as it is out of the way of my normal driving route, but being able to plug in the car at home (or any public EVSE) and getting enough range for daily driving needs would make the inconvenience less of a concern. The H2 could be saved for when extended range is needed. It would also make the periods of time when H2 supply is low a more minor inconvenience rather than something that will impact your daily drive.

However, I doubt that an actual PFCEV will be made due to practical reasons. The cost of a FCV Clarity is already high, and if you add the cost for the larger battery to achieve a range similar to the PHEV Clarity it may be too high to stomach (I imagine at least a $450+ monthly lease). In addition, you would probably have to completely sacrifice any trunk space to fit both the larger battery and the H2 tanks.

So while it would be a nice transition vehicle while the H2 infrastructure is still developing, I doubt that any manufacturer will be willing to sink the development costs into a vehicle like this.

 

This is a pretty big assumption. As long as hydrogen is made using electricity, the cost will always be significantly higher (for the fuel) than pure BEV. The hybrid fuel cell / battery is interesting for those than can plug in at night. It doesn't get much easier than plugging in every time you pull into the garage. And then you start off every day with a full battery. As BEV's become more popular, I'd expect most apartment complex to also get plugs for charging in many parking spaces. When you are charging over night, no need for fast chargers, so even just a simple 240 plug would be enough for most peoples daily driving volume. So the cost of installing these would be pretty minimal. I expect the market to figure these things out as there becomes more demand. We are still in the early stages of the chicken and the egg.

 

Youre correct that the Clarity (and all FCVs) are really hybrids. It would be unnecessarily and unreasonably expensive to size the fuel cell to handle acceleration loads when a much smaller stack with a battery will provide better performance at much lower cost.

But as I said, presuming that all energy is eventually produced from renewable sources, the very large round trip efficiency loss inherent in using hydrogen for storage gives battery storage an significant edge in terms of energy efficiency.

Basically, you would need 3 times the PVs or wind turbines to generate the same number of miles driven in a FCV versus a BEV.

That trade off is worth it for long-range driving or emergency backup, but for daily short range commuting (which averages something like 20 miles in the US) it’s unnecessary. You’re building an electric drivetrain hybrid vehicle regardless, why not increase the size of the pack somewhat and add a plug.

The only caveat is that hydrogen can more easily be produced during periods of excess renewable generation, making its effective energy cost cheaper (though with a smart charging infrastructure you can do some of that with BEVs as well).

No, the cost of production varies widely. But while hydrogen reformed from natural gas is relatively cheap, the emissions aren’t much different from an ICE, they’re just in a different location.

Hydrogen from electrolysis is always much less efficient than using the electricity directly, although as noted there may be times when that electricity is in excess and therefore very cheap.

Biofuels are an unknown. We did some bench scale research on catalytically producing hydrogen from carbohydrate solutions (which could be algae, agricultural waste, etc, and could be quite efficient), and it does work, but how viable that is at industrial scale is an unknown.

Hypothetically though you could end up with a source of cheap industrial hydrogen from vast algae farms or waste digesters.

Yes, H2 is only an energy storage medium.

In technical terms hydrogen does have inherent chemical energy, but as far as what you’re talking about you need to put more energy in to produce it than it contains, whether that energy comes from a wind farm into an electrolyzer, or from a different chemical (methane, methanol, etc) plus some additional input to process it.

And yes, there are times, particularly with renewables, when you generate more than you have anything to do with, and the effective price is low or negative. Industrial electrolysis is one solution to this. I was on a research study looking into exactly this a couple years ago.

The potential issues are currently that the electrolyzer and transportation infrastructure are so expensive that the cheap energy use means you might only be running your plant at 30% of capacity, which isn’t economically viable. On a national scale were you to try to produce most of your transportation fuel this way you also get into relative scale questions—only so much electricity is needed, and the overproduction available is probably nowhere near sufficient to handle a major fraction of all transportation fuel needs.

Fundamentally, there probably is not one right answer, just many different, and complementary, ways of getting people from point A to point B.

 

Regarding cost, I have no definitive evidence about this, but I strongly suspect that current FCVs are being leased at a very substantial loss. There is a reason they won’t sell you one outright.

Costs are decreasing no doubt, but I don’t know that there is any guarantee that FCVs will ever be genuinely economically viable for a middle class market. If they eventually are, it’s just as feasible that decreases in battery cost and technology improvements will make putting a ~10kW battery onboard viable.

And you might well be right about dev costs at this point, but the practical cost of designing one is trivial—the power electronics and drivetrain are identical, you just need to fit the larger battery somewhere and slap a charger on it.

 

Huh?
All I can say is glad your happy with your solution. I'll stick to the one that works much better for me. Actually the only clean one that is even an option for me, and currently the vast majority of people.