Very promising. Great to see hydrogen getting the industry snub it deserves.

Lol you call this an “industry snub”? It’s one manufacturer. Lots of other participants going after hydrogen. I think you’re calling the game a bit early

There’s talk of Toyota doing ICE hydrogen V8 in the landcruiser by the way. Can’t wait to read the guffaws and feel the wrath of down-votes!

The numbers don't lie, hydrogen is just way too expensive to ever compete with batteries. It really is that simple, it's why this happened, and will continue to happen: https://cleantechnica.com/2...

That is true but it (Hydrogen) has the advantage that it does not require reliance on China and the cost can likely be brought down over time. China now owns just about all the mines that produce materials to make batteries. It has a further advantage in that existing engines can be converted in many instances.

Haha that French city gets lots of mileage around here!

Irrelevant, they simply did the numbers and worked out what any techie already knows, that hydrogen is never going to do it financially.

Not correct as your $12000 car replacement battery that can not currently be recycled and is cheaper to be made from raw materials.
Oh and glad you asked the current largest mine for lithium is currently digging up 3000 tones of dirt for 1 ton of lithium

The problem with hydrogen is it's inefficiency - almost as inefficient as ICE at around 20-25% plus the cost of infrastructure. Toyota's hydrogen dreams are shattered despite their best efforts as the numbers just don't stack up. They'd be total idiots to bring out a hydrogen landcruiser and think they were going to grab market share but they have demonstrated their idiocy before with the Mirai so who knows.

I actually don’t see how it would stack up. I know Japan has a massive plan to roll out hydrogen stations. On the other hand if you’re buying a $150k+ Land Cruiser I’m guessing the cost of hydrogen wouldn’t figure into your thinking, especially if you’re anchored to the cost of fuelling with diesel

Why would Japan who will import most of their hydrogen roll out new infrastructure instead of using the imported hydrogen to generate iCCGT with much better overall efficiency and little new infrastructure? Japan is now madly trying to catch up in EVs - the hydrogen car is dead.

No guffaws, just facts. Hydrogen in this context is just inefficient.

Dream on. Pure battery for heavy vehicles will not fly. Prepare yourself for the Hydrogen surge

How is this going to work?
At dusk 1000 B-doubles leave Sydney and hit Port Macquarie at 9pm for battery changeover. The forklift or roboforklift flies around like an octopus on steroids changing batteries. 1000 batteries out, 1000 batteries in.
1000 x 620 kWh batteries hit the charger for 8 hours to be ready for the returning 1000 trucks from yesterday. 620kWh/8h*110%*1000 = 80 MW charge draw at Port Macquarie. 2000 batteries in circulation.
Repeat at two more stops up the coast.
Those are big numbers, and I know, watch the fuel trucks cycling between Brisbane and the Newell Hwy refeuling stop at Goondiwindi. Big numbers can work but it won't be simple.

80 MW is nothing in the scheme of current generation of 22,000 to 34,000 MW generated across the day.

Add in 20 charging stations and it becomes just 1.6GW Australia-wide. Or around 8 months of additional roof top solar added on homes.

Meanwhile the mainline transmission grid network goes right along most major highways (for a reason).

You’re envisaging a station holding 620MWh of batteries - that’s 6 times the size of the Hornsdale big battery in South Australia. That battery makes a massive profit providing FCAS services to the grid and stabilising the grid. If it gets to that stage I find it inconceivable that a service station wouldn’t leverage their assets to make similar profits arbitraging on wholesale electricity prices, and still providing swap in and out batteries to trucks who book in advance giving them line of sight to when they need to provide a full battery. There are so many ways to make money (and I mean millions), that it’s almost bound to work.

Yeah the article only considers the cost of electricity (so cheap! 🥳) yet you’re going to require multiple battery packs per truck and industrial sized facilities to manage them (and the industrial infrastructure to produce H2 is baked into the price)

As a battery pack can be swapped, & charged around 2x per day - then the number required is not as great as you may think. An automated 'plug & play' battery swap system will require some space but as the pack density can require just possibly as little as a 2cm clearance between the shelves greater than the battery's dimensions.

If you look at the precision placement required for docking at the space station, or landing the used rocket boosters on floating platforms at sea - then an automated battery replacing & stacking system is child's play by comparison.

Then, consider this, will existing service centres (for trucks) just sit idly by and watch their diesel sales plummet without taking steps to offset that loss? Perhaps by installing a battery swap facility?

Equally - the article & Janus implicitly assume that a truck battery is used purely in series and not parallel. If used in parallel then each parallel battery pack can be charged separately.

Just as top of the range Tesla's having multiple electric engines - Semis will also have mutliple engines per driving set or perhaps per driving wheel. Potentially reducing charging times down to 15 to 30 minutes....

You cannot blame Janus for pushing its product - but it only uses the facts that make its product look better.

Good points. If they could reduce charging time down to 15 to 30 minutes then they wouldn’t bother with swapping. I think the idea is low charging rates to preserve the life of the battery

I don’t think this is universally attractive enough for its competitors to come on board, and battery swapping would require wide adoption to work

I've spent òver 30yrs perfecting my driving style to the point where I travel between 2 km/l at full load (ie 60t+) and 2.7 km/l in an empty B-Double running Brisbane/Sydney and return. Given that I obtain far better (10% and over) fuel economy than most other drivers, I can see me rolling into a station with a lot of charge left in the cells. Is that taken into account or are Janus just going to charge for a replacement battery anyway? If so, then driving economically is a moot point. I may as well just drive flat foot up and down hill like every other American Cowboy out there each night.

I would guess they'll charge you based on what is left over in the battery.

Interesting stuff. Will be interesting to see if they establish an industry standard for swapping batteries - it looks like they’ve been resistant to this pretty much everywhere (e.g. the failure of “A Better Place”). And if hydrogen is $2 a kilo then the energy cost difference between electricity and hydrogen drops to $74 using the information they’ve provided for the described scenario

Hydrogen, certainly not renewable hydrogen, will never be $2 per kilo. The inefficiency of the hydrogen fuel cycle means that hydrogen will always be more expensive than BEVs, because BEVs get 3 times the travel distance from the same amount of renewable electricity. It really is that simple, commercial operators buy by the numbers.

The inefficiency of the hydrogen fuel cycle is what makes it uncompetitive, and after 30 years of development, that inefficiency has barely been dented. It isn't going to get much better any time soon.

The only people pushing hydrogen are those with vested interests, those with a lack of understanding of the numbers (CEOs, politicians), and those who are brain locked and refuse to see the reality of the inefficiency of the hydrogen fuel cycle.

The cost of energy will be so low that the cost argument against hydrogen will be dwarfed by other issues. It doesn’t mean that HFC trucks will be the default choice, it means operators will look at other reasons when choosing

Also the inefficiency of the fuel cycle won’t matter after a point because we’ll be producing so much green energy. A bit like how we bathe in potable water - would have been very different back in 1850

We are a long, long way from having that much excess green generation that we can piss away 70% of it in hydrogen systems. It's going to be another decade or more before we get close to that point...

and even if we did have that much surplus RE, this would have to compete with alternatives uses for it — opportunity cost in other words. one of those competitors will be batteries, which are still improving much faster the FCs and still have plenty of theoretical room to improve using a wide range of chemistries.

Yes. We will have that amount of surplus: in Australia having a massive surplus of solar during the day is far from out of reach. But hydrogen generated from that could be used to run power stations overnight when the sun isn't shining.

The electrolyser industry is years away from commercialising capillary cells and the like that will get the energy cost for H2 to <$1/kg and to then ramp up the electrolyser industry to the scale needed (100Mt/a) means that happening by 2040 is possible but a definite stretch. So H2 as a precursor or reducing agent will eventually happen, but for transport or heating or standby is a dead duck: those have to have decarbonise 100% well before then.

Spot on. Why would an electricity provider pay for excess generation in order to give it away? On days they do have an excess they would rather store it (Pumped hydro, batteries, compressed air etc.) for days of lower generation. No need to over build by some three times to provided free electricity for hydrogen production.

My expectation is that there will be a global commodity market for liquified hydrogen, or ammonia, or whatever we turn our excess electricity into. If the economics stack up then by all means we could use it for transport

I think it's valuable to look at Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder (twitter(dot)com/MLiebreich/status/1397210398252732433?s=20&t=Lt8V9KtoTEy47bdHyIyLAA - link will glitch in Disqus) - regardless of all the money being thrown at hydrogen, if we are to have any hope of keeping <1.5deg rise there needs to be priorities. The priority according to Liebreich for hydrogen is fertilizer, with hydrogenation processes and steel, long haul aviation and shipping well in front of heavy vehicles.

We’re also a long way off having a meaningful share of our heavy haulage fleet made up of non-ICE vehicles 🤷‍♂️

we are some ways off seeing a non-relevant price of electricity in Australia and most other places.

Will be interesting to see what FFI can do with its ambitions

ask their cheif scientist i guess.

Better Place never even got started and was a long time ago in terms of battery technology and adoption. In hindsight looked fairly pointless for personal transport to battery swap. Trucks on the other hand…

Yeah I’m arguing that car manufacturers chose to compete on proprietary battery technology rather than develop an industry standard automotive battery. I can’t see Tesla advocating for standardised batteries for any type of vehicle for example, nor would any EV truck companies at the bleeding edge

Yet the bulk of prime movers here don't come from bleeding edge companies...they come from American companies that make almost lego-like trucks with near standard running gear and engine choices.
Make a kit that fits where a Cat and a Roadranger used to be and you've got half the trucks in aus covered

i agree.

If you can use a calculator (not even a scientist calculator) then it is easy to see that battery only heavy vehicles with swaps is a dumb idea. Logistics weight, storage, charge infrastructure.

Rail beats road. Especially if multiple battery stops are needed between Sydney and Brisbane. The trouble is always the double handling with rail; Sydney warehouse to train to Brisbane to Brisbane warehouse/shop. As well trucks can be easily rescheduled but trains can't if a load is half an hour late.

You'd hope that in the not too distant future we'd get to autonomous last mile vehicles feeding into automated container loading at rail heads, then fully electric trains

There is still at least a two hour penalty on deliveries for rail - an hour onto the train, an hour off to the destination. Brisbane - Sydney - Melbourne - Adelaide traffic works on late afternoon dispatch for start of business delivery. Automated loading/unloading of trains won't get over that. Faster trains needed.

Faster trains go without saying. I don't know of any very fast trains running on diesel.

Not talking Very Fast Trains (VFT), just UK standard 1980s type diesel freight. Get a through run on 100km/hr average, needs straighter track, more passing lanes, fewer curfews to share track with commuters out of Sydney. It can be done a lot cheaper than VFT but needs

I'm talking VFT. If China and now Indonesia, Japan and France, can build thousands of km and get people out of planes and freight of roads, with significant reductions in emissions and oil product imports, they should be on the agenda. If China can operate 38,000km, France 2,300km, surely 1,800km on our busiest route Bris-Syd-Melb is not beyond us! It would of course require remedying the legacy mess we have in Melbourne and Sydney where the airports/ports are on the opposite side of the city from industry but that's underway to some extent in Melbourne (Western Port) and Sydney (Baggery's Ck airport).

The advantage of electric traction for freight rail is obvious. Widely used in Europe and Asia and includes use of renewable power. East Coast inter-capital routes would be suitable for electric rail freight except that 19th century rail alignments have not been improved while road alignments have been improved 2 or 3 times over last 80 years. Rail freight transits of 8 or 9 hours would be possible with some track straightening and high power electric locomotives. Fast enough to compete with road and include local distribution. Passenger VFT is another matter.

With regenerative braking presumably the brakes need replacing far less often than diesel or hydrogen. Is that a big factor? Or negligible?

“We’re not trying to bash hydrogen, it just doesn’t make sense as an energy source.”

i suppose it all depends on how they make the electricity in the first place. Not factored into the overall price either for battery. Battery is just storage of electricity and hydrogen is fuel to make electricity. takes only long enough to refuel like diesel and any service station will be able to have it. plus are you using white, green or blue hydrogen. blue hydrogen will not work as you need a fossil fuel to produce it. the future no doubt will be a mix of different technologies in use but eventually i think we will use the most abundant element in the universe which is hydrogen.

Hydrogen is really a storage mechanism for electricity - just one with hydrolysis as part of the process to store it. Its round trip efficiency is less efficient than a battery, and can’t easily do regenerative braking because it can’t accept charge fast enough. It has a higher energy density though, so has possible uses - particularly in aviation where that’s critical. However in transport if a lithium battery’s energy density is already sufficient, then it’s hard to see hydrogen ever competing - especially as lithium energy densities are continuously improving.