EuroWire November 2015

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Transatlantic cable
November 2015 27
Mr Hoium’s main explanation for the discrepancy is the same
as anyone else’s: the relative availability of electric vis-à-vis
hydrogen recharging infrastructure. According to the US
Department of Energy there are 10,353 public electric charging
stations across the country, with 26,025 charging outlets. In
addition, tens of thousands of private stations are in home
garages and at business locations.
Mr Hoium wrote: “On the hydrogen side, California has two
charging stations completed. TWO!” Toyota is hoping to have
15 stations open in California by the end of the year. But this
scarcely reduces the challenge of getting around the state, still
less cross-country, on hydrogen alone.
Why not simply build more hydrogen charging stations?
Here again it is a question of accessibility. Electricity is readily
available in most of the USA, and even remote locations can use
distributed energy like solar power to charge vehicles. Hydrogen
must be generated from natural gas and then shipped to the
charging stations. The cost of building the infrastructure needed
to power hydrogen vehicles on a commercial scale would run
into the billions.
A $57,500 bet on the Mirai
Mr Hoium makes the interesting point that a hydrogen-powered
car is actually an electric vehicle with additional components.
A hydrogen fuel cell does not have a direct connection to the
crankshaft of the car: it produces electricity, which is stored in
a battery for transfer to the electric motor that enables driving.
In this respect he concedes to FCVs the advantages over EVs
of a smaller battery pack and shorter refuelling time. But he
holds that the components in an EV are in many ways simpler
and more adjustable than in a hydrogen-powered car. He cites
the Tesla Motors Model S with its batteries in the oor of the
car, lowering the centre of gravity and improving performance.
Hydrogen cars do not have the same exibility.
Nothing daunted, Toyota is doubling down on hydrogen with
its $57,500 Mirai, the rst mass-market car to run o hydrogen.
Mr Hoium of the Motley Fool (its contributors call themselves
Fools – one assumes in jest) terms it an uphill battle pitting a
small installed base and weak infrastructure against an installed
base of electric vehicles that could reach one million in 2016.
He declared: “The alternative fuel debate is all but over.”
† A similar view was expressed earlier in the year by Joe
Romm, founding editor of the ecology blog Climate Progress.
Noting that Toyota had backed away from its partnership
with Tesla to build an EV, he wrote (8th April), “For reasons
that mostly defy logic the otherwise shrewd car company
Toyota is placing a large bet on hydrogen fuel cell cars,”
starting with the Mirai.
“Toyota is going to lose this bet,” Mr Romm atly asserted.
“There is little reason to believe FCVs will ever beat electric
vehicles in the car market. There is even less reason to
believe they will ever be a cost-e ective carbon-reducing
strategy, as EVs already are close to being.”
† Still another interested observer, the Washington Post
reporter Drew Harwell, noted that Toyota has a track record
for “disruption,” having built the rst mass-produced hybrid,
the Prius, from “an experimental laughing stock” into a clean
and unexciting mainstream sedan. He wrote, (12th May),
“While still a niche – hybrids make up only three per cent of
American car sales – the Prius became emblematic of a way
normal drivers could help save the world without trying too
hard.”
Mr Harwell was told by David Whiston, an equity strategist
with investment researcher Morningstar: “Toyota is so big
that [the Mirai] can still be a science experiment for them. If
it doesn’t work out they can go back to selling Priuses and all
the other gas guzzlers no one ever talks about.”
† If this view of its hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle initiative
commends itself to Toyota, the company isn’t saying.
Elsewhere in automotive . . .
† Improper wiring in a roof-mounted air bag has led General
Motors to issue a global recall of 73,424 Chevrolet Cobalts.
GM said on 13 th August that improper routing of a sensor
wire in the driver’s-side front door could prevent the air bag
from deploying after a crash.
The issue a ects Cobalts from the 2010 model year. There
are 59,474 of the small cars on the road in the USA, 13,950
in Canada. The Detroit-based automaker said the recall
is unrelated to last year’s recall of millions of Cobalts for
defective ignition switches, which could stall the vehicle and
turn o the air bags.
† In robot-intensive manufacturing industries, such as
automotive bodywork factories, robots consume about half
the total energy needed for production. Now, researchers
at Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, report
that smoothing robot movements can reduce energy
consumption by up to 40 per cent, even as the plant’s
schedule is maintained. The results were achieved with an
algorithm that, by altering not the path but only the speed
and sequence of operations of several robots moving in the
same area, optimises their acceleration and deceleration as
well as time spent at a standstill.
Professor of automation Bengt Lennartson – who initiated
the research together with, among others, General Motors –
said on the Chalmers website: “We simply let [a robot] move
slower instead of waiting for other robots and machines to
catch up before carrying out the next sequence.”
Energy
With higher power generation and lower
installed prices, solar power in the USA is
looking better all the time
To Governor Jerry Brown, whose goal for California is that it
receives at least 50 per cent of its electricity from renewable
energy resources by the year 2030, recent news reports have
been more than encouraging.
As noted by James Ayre on the website CleanTechnica (27 th
August), the state’s grid operator reported a new electricity
generation record for utility-scale solar energy of 6.391
gigawatts (GW) of alternating current on 20th August.
That gure covers both utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV)
and concentrating solar power (CSP) projects. It does not
include the output of distributed solar energy system output
(so-called “behind-the-meter” electricity generation), whose
inclusion would have pushed the total even higher. By way of
comparison, Boston-based GTM Research estimated the total
distributed solar system capacity in California at 3.2GW for
rst-quarter 2015.