this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Moving electricity around only requires aluminum wire and transformers. Incredibly cheap. Moving hydrogen around requires either roads and trucks (already more expensive than high voltage AC transmission) or a pipeline that won't leak hydrogen plus training for emergency response (also more expensive than high voltage AC).
Steel pipes are even cheaper. You are just regurgitating pro-BEV talking points. It is much cheaper to move hydrogen around than electricity.
But it isn't just steel pipe. It's steel pipe precision welded and leak checked, buried under ground, with lots of continual maintenance, pump stations to increase pressure, control systems, etc. More expensive even than natural gas piping, which is already difficult to get installed with municipalities frequently rejecting it for safety reasons.
We've been back and forth on this countless times over the years, you and I, but you keep coming back to these same points. None of which are correct. BEVs use existing infrastructure, and while they are NOT the best solution, they are the best solution people are going to choose. You're flat out not going to get someone to pay more for hydrogen than they would for any any other fuel, producing the hydrogen isn't as energy efficient as charging a battery, and installing an H2 station is significantly more expensive than installing even a DCFC station with four or six stalls and all the complimentary transformers necessary.
And yet that's the same idea as natural gas pipes. It is not any more expensive than natural gas pipes. In fact, natural gas pipelines are 10x cheaper than wires. This whole line of reasoning is just BEV propaganda. Wires are not magic and have huge costs associated with them.
In the end, an FCEV will be cheaper to own and by a huge margin. Hydrogen will be nearly free since it can be made from excess and unused electricity. The infrastructure will be cheaper by a huge margin too. People are just stuck in the past and are refusing to accept change. It is the same rhetoric as anti-wind and anti-solar. It is a doomed argument and its ridiculous to keep on repeating it.
It is, because hydrogen will leak more easily than methane.
Well now I damand you cite your sources, because natural gas pipelines are 5x the price per installed mile compared to high voltage transmission lines. I mean, the amount of material alone should be sounding alarms in your head. And that's from EIA. Even PG&E is citing $2M per mile to bury their high voltage transmission lines in California of all markets. Several markets in the US have absurdly low costs of under $300k per mile installed. So, yeah, I'm going to need to see a source that isn't hydrogenhype.org or something.
My guess is in 20 years time, the cost of buying an FCEV and a BEV will be equivalent. The cost of fueling the two vehicles will still strongly favor BEVs, and the only advantage that FCEV will have is refuel time (5 instead of 30 minutes) and range per kg. Batteries are going to be heavy no matter what the futurism weirdos claim and hydrogen gas is more energy dense per kg no matter what we do.
Here is the source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668
You are simply regurgitating BEV propaganda by denying this. It's just all made-up bullshit from those people. Pipelines are radically cheaper than wires and that is undeniable.
Hell, if wires were really cheaper, why do natural gas pipelines exist at all? Just run gas turbines at a centralized locations and send the electricity to where it needs to go.
In the long-run, BEVs will end up being too expensive to be competitive. In fact, they're not competitive at all even now, and rely entirely on subsidies to be viable. The pathway to zero emissions will reveal these inconvenient facts and likely drive BEVs to a marginal niche. And if the future is not FCEVs, then it will be something like synfuel powered cars.
Let's take a couple things you've said and compare them to the link you just provided me. You said that the cost of hydrogen pipelines was equally inexpensive as methane / natural gas. Yet in the abstract of your link,
Now how could nat gas be 11x cheaper than electricity but hydrogen is only 8x if they cost the same? That sounds like it's 37.5% more expensive per MWh delivered. Interestingly, to deliver 1 MWh of hydrogen, you only need to deliver 30kg. Of course, the LCOE of that 30kg of hydrogen is hilarious compared to methane gas power plant.
And, of course, the very next paragraph dives into that.
That's only true for DC, not for AC transmission lines which regularly move 900 - 2200 MW of power. Not that it's even a point that matters much, since most power plants don't produce 2200 MW of power at one location. We tend to distribute the generation for reliability reasons at the very least.
Now, are you ready for the kicker? I mean, are you really ready for me to just put the final nail in this coffin for you? What kind of electricity transmission are they comparing pipelines to in this link?
And there it is. The cost of HVDC is overwhelmingly dominated by AC to DC and DC to AC conversion hardware, as noted by EIA in their reports. But, of course, if you compare to AC transmission as I mentioned above, this entire report is so upside down that it's laughable. And that is why we have electric transmission lines rather than natural gas generators at every home and business in the entirety of the US. You should read the whole report, it's really full of a lot of fun tidbits like this.
Here's a fun EIA link talking about HVDC transmission line cost per mile https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36393 and the report linked to from that page, which EIA commissioned. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmission/
You basically picked the highest cost method of electricity transmission with the least adoption, and wondered why piping natural gas was cheaper. The fact that the into to the research said that electricity was hard to move at such high MW levels was the first clue that something was wrong here. That's a rookie mistake for you.
You're just engaging in more obfuscation. 8x and 11x are pretty close to being 10x cheaper. It is sufficient for physicists or engineers to just say it is 10x as a first-order approximation.
AC suffers from more losses at long distances. It is also quite expensive. Both HVAC and HVDC are more expensive than pipelines: https://www.apga.org.au/sites/default/files/uploaded-content/field_f_content_file/pipelines_vs_powerlines_-_a_summary.pdf
You cannot fudge your way around the facts. If HVAC was really that much cheaper, there would never be HVDC connections in the first place.
No, I was building a case. And you very clearly do not understand what's being talked about in that research. Claiming that AC transmission lines are as expensive to build as HVDC is absurd in every way. https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring11_AEP_Transmission_Facts.pdf
Even the EIA link I supplied shows that the conversion electronics are 60% of the cost of HVDC. Now you respond with Australia Pipeline & Gas Association? lmfao Dude. Come on.
Ok, now I know for a fact you don't understand what you're talking about. The only reason HVDC is a thing is to reduce transmission losses on very long runs. Something that we don't really do in the US, and the most popular installations are in Europe where nations sell energy among EU members. The increased cost serves multiple purposes in that case- It reduces transmission losses as I said, but it also allows you to build more compact systems, and you get less capacitance issues in under ground and under water installations. It's honestly crazy you'd even say that.
How about you actually read my link? I clearly stated that at long-distances, HVAC become inefficient and therefore costly. Your link is not comparing them to pipelines.
Yeah, we're done here. You've moved the goal posts so much we aren't even on the same field.
You're completing making shit up and none of your arguments are even relevant to the conversation. Fuck off with your Ludditism.
Making things up, got it. BTW, the luddites were correct. You might want to actually look up what their concerns were rather than just repeat bullshit. Like reading a gas company's research that says piping gas is cheaper than running electricity. BTW, do you find it strange that nearly every structure in the US has electricity running to it, but not gas? Hmm. Makes you wonder. Well, makes me wonder. I'm sure you'll just blame some climate change denial conspiracy.
A huge number of structures have gas piped in. Not sure what you're even arguing here.