Quote:
Originally Posted by RustyLugNut
There IS an excess of electricity in my region and regions such as Iceland. Electric cars are nice for you if you don't expect to go much more than 200 Km or so. Can you show me the numbers for taking an 80,000 lb tractor trailer 600 miles in a day using batteries? A disproportionate amount of that load would have to be batteries. How about airliners? No dice with batteries of ANY formulation. You can store hydrogen in hydrocarbons and power both.
Care to argue that point? Because truthfully, you have not provided a solution for heavy load transport. Trains can only go where tracks go.
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i'm not trying to argue, just give a different point of view. I don't imagine either of us have much involvement in what the auto industry, fuel industry and the governments eventually decide to do. So it is just a discussion.
I have little first hand experience with heavy industry but i expect they would follow the path of least financial resistance.
I don't know what it would cost to convert heavy industry from diesel to hydrogen but i wouldn't expect it to be cheap.
Simply swapping to bio-diesel as a way of being greener would also allow them to keep their existing investment in diesel machinery.
The aviation industry would need heavily redesigned planes to store and use hydrogen. Imagine what a plane ticket would cost after the aviation industry completed paying for that sort of transformation.
Again a swap to a greener fuel that has the same properties as their current fuel is a much more likely move.
Aviation bio-fuel is already being tested.
These bio-fuel technologies could be very green and very low impact.
If some countries or regions have an energy surplus they may be able to use it to intensify production on their algae farms to boost bio-fuel production without increasing the amount of land allocated. This may give them enough production capacity to create export opportunities. Transporting diesel is an existing activity, transporting bio-diesel should be no different.
But I was talking mainly about cars and using hydrogen as their fuel source. Hydrogen still has a lot of issues. Many of which rely on future innovations to completely solve.
There is promising technology currently in labs that may come to fruition but there is also a lot of promising technology that never makes it out of the lab.
Whereas electric cars are already in production and in use on the roads. No waiting for possible future technology to make them happen. Their fuel is available just about everywhere. Even the garage they are stored in overnight has a readily available source of fuel. They are as green as the grid. Greening the grid will benefit not just the transport sector but all areas of society, environmental, manufacturing, agriculture, etc, etc.
Electric cars will not suit everybody, no car will.
But if i can have a car that is super cheap to run, requires almost no maintenance, is quick and quiet, can carry the passenger and cargo load that i have become used to with ICE vehicles and is available today. Then why wouldn't i choose it.
And for those occasional trips where 200klm is not enough range and i can't organise a 30 minute stop along the way. Well i could always hire a car that would normally be well outside my price range and travel in luxury that day.
Or that beautiful classic car that i keep for special occasions could be rolled out and given the chance for a road trip. Everyone will come up with different ways of organising their transport.
Lots of people ride a bicycle to work each day yet still have a car for longer trips. They don't throw away the bicycle just because it doesn't work for every trip.