Life’s a gas

didn't have you down for comedy WDB. I thought all walls were economic walls until the technical breakthrough was found. If you don't have a solution then you have to keep throwing money at it until you get lucky or, you throw the towel in.
Yeah, electricity is free, no environmental impact just press a switch and it falls out the wall.
Until every country is on the same electricity production platform as Norway, I'm not holding my breath, then there are significant upstream costs to the environment. Drive an EV in Poland and a 3 mile/kWh EV has higher CO2 emissions than my 14 year old diesel.

>> it's man maths ignoring the emissions to produce the electricity.

Goes back to me saying a few times how the win farms off north Wales are often doing nothing/little when it's windy. Presumably because the demand is not local and sending it to where it is needed is not currently easy with the current grid. There are plans for new connections from where the power comes inland from the current wind farms all the way to south Wales. So great - lots of pylons. And they are planning on building a new win farm near those with fewer but much larger units so will generate about 900MW+ I think from the new ones alone.

As you say big, ignoring how the electric is generated isn't something we should do when comparing an EV to your current cars or mine. And the amount of energy and emissions needed to make a new EV should also be considered against keeping an existing car going.

Anyone up to speed on how easy it is to recycle the batteries in EVs? And we have different chemistry types even in the same car model depending on spec/country/battery size etc. The cells might be LiFePO4, Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide, etc.

And what some don't realise is the 10-80% charge rule differs for LFP and NCA.

How do you get to 66g? According to app.electricitymaps.com/zone/GB , today's per kWh value for Germany is 194g, the UK's 111g, and those are averages that will go down if you charge overnight. Even at 200Wh/km - and both your EV and mine do better than that - those equate to 39g/km and 22g/km, plus a bit for losses in the charging process. That's not 'ignoring the emissions to produce the electricity' at all. But 150g/km, or whatever, for a fossil car does ignore the 12 percent losses at the refinery, the emissions from the distribution system and all the damage that oil extraction does before the refinery.

Back to hydrogen, my point is that the technology to produce and distribute clean electricity exists today and is in widespread and increasing use. The same is not true of clean hydrogen, so its proponents are banking on something near-miraculous. Meanwhile, they go on burning fossils - and there is no such thing as clean petrol or diesel.

I suppose that’s where Germany’s Atomkraftphobie causes problems, so it doesn’t get France’s nuclear contribution or as much offshore wind as the UK, which are the sources that give us our cheap, clean overnight tariffs.

But my point remains, that improving that situation is only an engineering project away. The technology exists and is getting cheaper every year.

My “point” if we’re all going to be unnecessarily emphatic, is not to denigrate EVs but simply to express my appreciation of continued exploration of alternative fuels. When you stop trying to go forward, the effect is usually to start moving backwards, or at best, stagnation.
Hope that’s clear?
Bored now!
😉

I had hoped it would start a more interesting debate, but it has just riled up the tedious old four legs good, two legs bad arguments. Hence boredom.
Over and out on this one from me!
😉

The fuel cells are indeed powerful enough to power a full sized car. Take BMW with it's IX5 Hydrogen for example.

The winds farms overnight could help power hydrogen production quite easily. And sometimes they are not turning because the grid cannot take the electric in the day either. I see this frequently.