zurohki

If you live in an apartment and own a car, you're parking it somewhere. Put the chargers there.

What does that have to do with grid demand?

We've got enough excess supply coming online as people install solar that we're seeing the wholesale electricity price occasionally flip negative. We might not have enough power to satisfy 2035's demand today, but we can accommodate a lot more EVs than we've got on the road.

The argument against your example scales, though. You can do demand management with EV chargers, either at the household level or grid scale. Unless your power supply is running so close to the edge it can't cope with existing normal usage, adding EV charging in the midnight to 6am period when power consumption is otherwise really low works just fine. And nobody cares if their car took 6 hours to charge instead of 5, because they sleep through it.

It's a joke about Toyota's attitude towards hydrogen and batteries. Fuel cell EVs almost make sense as plug in hybrids, with 40 miles of battery range for daily use and the hydrogen system for longer trips, but that would be blasphemy against the holy fuel cell!

It's from the 380kg listed here and the Mirai's 5kg hydrogen capacity.

Sure, there's also the 'super-insulated, cryogenic tanker trucks' with super cooled liquid hydrogen, but you were claiming nothing special needed to be built?

Like, look at your house. You may just have a 100 amp breaker box on it. Now you couldn’t handle a high-speed charger pulling 40 amps for your car, 30 for the hvac, 20 for lights/tv/computers etc, and then trying to get another 15 or so from and oven or vacuum cleaner. You’ll need a bigger amp breaker box

I'm not sure if you know this, but there are smart chargers that include a sensor to put on the feed going into your house. The charger can throttle up and down as you turn stuff on and off to keep the house's total power draw under the limit, so you run all your stuff and the car just gets whatever's left over. You can even have dozens of chargers in a parking garage and program the chargers to share a limited grid connection.

EVs aren't a fixed load, you can ramp them up or down or shut them off as needed, so they're pretty easy to accommodate.

I've parked mine outside in the Australian summer. It didn't magically lose energy. The battery is a dense insulated brick on the bottom of the vehicle, so it doesn't really get hot enough to need cooling even when it's 40C / 104F and you park in the sun.

You can drain the battery in a few weeks, but you need something running like Sentry Mode consuming power.

I'm not saying building your own home filling station is impossible, just that it's probably really expensive and a terrible idea.

What? Of course you can store power for weeks. It doesn't just dribble out onto the floor. Go away for a month and come home, your EV is still sitting there with the battery charge whatever you left it on.

Yes, EVs use their stored energy for driving... I'm not sure what your point was there. Do you think transporting hydrogen is free and doesn't cost energy?

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do have batteries. You can't put energy captured from regen braking back into the fuel cell, so either you have a battery or you lose a third of your range.

Fuel cell EVs can't be fitted with charging plugs for religious reasons.

Hydrogen was the future in the 90s, when the alternative was lead acid batteries. Nowadays hydrogen fuel cell cars don't actually top the charts on range, battery EVs have taken the crown.

Hydrogen promised to be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels. You still needed big industry to make and distribute it, you still needed filling stations to sell it to end users, you still took your car somewhere to fill it up. Everyone could just keep doing their thing. But it was going to be so expensive to switch over that everyone dragged their heels and kept using fossil fuels, so now we're entering the post-hydrogen car era without it ever arriving.

If we'd had hydrogen fuel cell cars 30 years ago, today we'd have manufacturers putting bigger batteries and charging plugs on them to make plug-in hybrids and move away from expensive hydrogen.