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Here’s why you won’t see an electric Bronco

boxwood

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Hydrogen's periodic table symbol is H.

When a number follows a letter, it's showing that there are more than one atom. Example - H²O (water) two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

To stay on a fuel theme......

Natural Gas - CH⁴ , one carbon four hydrogen.

Propane - C³H⁸, three carbon eight hydrogen.
You do realize you need H2 right? Not H2O, or staying on a fuel theme CH4, and C3H8. The only way you get that is splitting the H2 from the O, or 2H2 from the CH4. You need pure hydrogen
I honestly didn't know or hadn't bothered to think about this, but these posts got me looking.. Apparently (in my brief research) fuel cells operate on
Dihyrdrogen... aka Hydrogen Molecules (not just individual atoms)

"a catalyst at the anode separates hydrogen molecules into protons and electrons, " source

so I think what @Jdc is saying, is ya gotta use H2 not just H and there is overhead there

...interesting to me anyway
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harpo

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discussion uuOTE="Techun, post: 608146, member: 9064"]
It's crazy to say we don't have the electricity for BEV and then say hydrogen is the answer. Hydrogen takes more electricity than battery electric vehicles per mile driven.

Also with the bronco highway mpg an electric version is going to struggle. It takes a lot of horsepower for the bronco to cruise at 65. A bev bronco will have terrible range.
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Terrible range, just like the 2 door badlands...

"Riversimple" is a car company in England. They have good discussion on battery versus hydrogen.

The main advantage of fuel cell is eliminating the weight of the big battery pack.
 

Jdc

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I honestly didn't know or hadn't bothered to think about this, but these posts got me looking.. Apparently (in my brief research) fuel cells operate on
Dihyrdrogen... aka Hydrogen Molecules (not just individual atoms)

"a catalyst at the anode separates hydrogen molecules into protons and electrons, " source

so I think what @Jdc is saying, is ya gotta use H2 not just H and there is overhead there

...interesting to me anyway
Close but not quite. Generally hydrogen isn't found in nature as H, it's usually H2(the same goes for several other gases), so when people talk about pure hydrogen they're talking about H2. The main issue is that while Hydrogen is all over the place, water and hydrocarbons, it generally needs to be split from all those things. I.e you can't pour water into a fuel cell and expect it to create power. You need to use electrolysis to split the H2 from the O, or some other process to split the C from the H4 in methane. I think there may be some fuel cells that can use natural gas but the majority need pure Hydrogen.
 

MayhemMike

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Every vehicle I have ever owned is a solar vehicle. The sun is what provided the energy, that through the eons was transformed into oil. The simple facts are, the current electrical infrastructure can not support millions of EV’s. Secondly, while an EV may be fine for scooting back and forth to work or to run errands, it is useless for extended travels. In these parts ,folks travel from the Mid Atlantic region to Florida in 12-16 hours. That 1500 mile trip, would require an EV to stop and have extended recharges multiple times. Folks would now need to stay at hotels overnight, most likely twice and make the same trip in three days instead of 16 hours.
 

MayhemMike

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Close but not quite. Generally hydrogen isn't found in nature as H, it's usually H2(the same goes for several other gases), so when people talk about pure hydrogen they're talking about H2. The main issue is that while Hydrogen is all over the place, water and hydrocarbons, it generally needs to be split from all those things. I.e you can't pour water into a fuel cell and expect it to create power. You need to use electrolysis to split the H2 from the O, or some other process to split the C from the H4 in methane. I think there may be some fuel cells that can use natural gas but the majority need pure Hydrogen.
Excellent post. Currently, the cheapest way to extract hydrogen is by using basically the same cracking process used to turn crude into gasoline. Except, it takes forty more times the crude, and a whole lot more energy consumed to convert that crude into hydrogen. Gasoline wins again.
 

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wjfawb0 [hacked account]

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I just sat through a one hour presentation on lithium battery uses for microgrids, battery energy storage systems, and industrial/telecom applications. Safety around lithium batteries was a big part of the presentation as it always is. Remember that the solution for thermal runaway on a battery is to deprive it of oxygen to prevent an explosion and let it burn to the ground. That being said, battery storage systems and arrays of them are being installed all around the country to store solar, wind or conventional grid power for peak load support and backup/blackstart situations. They're even designing small battery systems that hook to low power electric grids and act as a buffer to charge electric vehicles.

Solar and wind generate DC voltage, so it has to be inverted (converted from DC to AC) using an inverter and then stepped up using a special inverter transformer that can handle all the high frequency noise from the inverter. Most people don't understand that all of these solar and wind farms have dozens of inverters and transformers that will sit and eat no load power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. If you disconnect them, then there's the maintenance issues of heating and cooling the windings and oil in the transformers and all the fun that comes with reduced life and possible catastrophic failure with the thermal cycling. It's all very non-trivial.
 

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Jdc

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Your own link does not say that. Not even close.

Try again.
Yeah I was confused by the wind turbines generate DC thing myself. The bottom paragraph is from the first link, I bolded the important lines.

"The electrical power from the generator is typical 60 Hz, AC power with 600V output for large wind turbines. A transformer may be required to increase or decrease the voltage so it is compatible with the enduse, distribution or transmission voltage, depending on the type of interconnection. Small wind turbines produce a variety of voltages and some produce DC power. Small wind turbines generally require an inverter to match the power output with the load and/or interconnection frequency and voltage."
 

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This all still comes back to needing huge numbers of batteries to store all that power. Sun doesn't shine at night and usually wind doesn't blow or is greatly reduced.

So how are the batteries going to be dealt with at the end of their life? What are the health issues with huge batteries sitting around? What is the back up plan for failing, on fire, paying for, etc. Batteries? We don't have these issues now because worse case scenario a couple hundred people lose power.

I live in an off grid house, there is a propane generator as back up. In the winter it is vital to have the back up. No power means no water, a requirement to live. I still have heat thanks to propane but if it was all electric I would be completely SOL.
 

Jdc

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This all still comes back to needing huge numbers of batteries to store all that power. Sun doesn't shine at night and usually wind doesn't blow or is greatly reduced.

So how are the batteries going to be dealt with at the end of their life? What are the health issues with huge batteries sitting around? What is the back up plan for failing, on fire, paying for, etc. Batteries? We don't have these issues now because worse case scenario a couple hundred people lose power.

I live in an off grid house, there is a propane generator as back up. In the winter it is vital to have the back up. No power means no water, a requirement to live. I still have heat thanks to propane but if it was all electric I would be completely SOL.
The sun doesn't shine at night and eventually we're going to run out of fossil fuel. We currently store billions of tons of toxic coal around the country and we currently don't have really good solutions of what to do with it. As has been mentioned multiple times, batteries can be recycled. There are currently quite a few companies working on higher density batteries that are also less flammable. Also, while we don't have the issues you mentioned, we do have a whole host of other issues related to our current infrastructure. Ultimately if we want a more resilient grid we're going to have to pay for it
 

wjfawb0 [hacked account]

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Let me put it this way, the most popular wind turbine is an induction machine that runs variable speed requiring an AC-DC-AC converter so it can be utilized by the grid. Maybe in Montana your grid is able to use large synchronous machines that can maintain a constant speed. Variable speed allows you to generate over a broader range of wind speeds.
 

NatureMan

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This all still comes back to needing huge numbers of batteries to store all that power. Sun doesn't shine at night and usually wind doesn't blow or is greatly reduced.

So how are the batteries going to be dealt with at the end of their life? What are the health issues with huge batteries sitting around? What is the back up plan for failing, on fire, paying for, etc. Batteries? We don't have these issues now because worse case scenario a couple hundred people lose power.

I live in an off grid house, there is a propane generator as back up. In the winter it is vital to have the back up. No power means no water, a requirement to live. I still have heat thanks to propane but if it was all electric I would be completely SOL.
Hank Hill approves your backup fuel source.
 

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I realize im new here but I have some intimate inside information about offroad EVs on the horizon. I own a very large solar company and we are contracted with several EV manufacturers to install car chargers (including the two way home chargers for ford) , some in very very remote places.

ford better get with it because by the 2025 model year theyll be the only manufacturer without one otherwise.


Id write an $85k check right now for an electric bronco raptor. Yeah maybe for a while id need a basecamp with solar and a generator instead of overlanding but I have a diesel gladiator thats perfect for that job already.


edit: my house in socal is entirely off the grid and although the generator kicks on for about 30 minutes once a month, ive otherwise not needed Anything other than solar, batteries and two 600w wind turbines. Its got full climate control, all the appliances a “normal” house has and an ev charger

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