Unlike electric cars, which take can take hours to fully charge, refueling a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle takes about as much time as it does to gas up your car.
To grasp the magnitude of the problem facing electric vehicles, we should consider what it would take to power a world full of them. Let’s start with your local corner store fueling station.
The gas station that you visit routinely has underground fuel tanks with enormous gasoline fuel capacity, typically 10,000 to 20,000 gallons. This equates to an electrical energy capacity of 500 megawatt-hours. By comparison, Tesla’s Mira Loma 80 megawatt-hour battery energy station in California, the largest such installation in the United States, sits on 1.5 acres. To match the energy storage capacity of gasoline fueling stations with batteries would require a 10-acre battery farm. In other words, gasoline allows us to put a lot of energy in a small space.
The hope for electric vehicles is that we don’t have to store all the electricity at your local fueling station. We can simply pull the required power from the grid. But can we? Yes and no.
It seems simple enough with direct-current (DC) fast chargers, which connect to the grid, but to match the equivalent energy transfer rate of a gasoline fuel pump, an electric car charger would need to deliver multi-megawatt levels of power. Considering that the fastest level 3 chargers are rated at 0.1 megawatt, there is a massive energy transfer advantage for gasoline fuel pumps.
Most electric vehicle proponents assume the wide-scale adoption of electric vehicles would likely come with a change in consumer behavior. But are consumers willing to make those changes?
Not all automakers believe they are. Instead of placing bets on batteries alone, several large automakers are going all-in on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Fuel-cell vehicles leverage all the advances of batteries and electric motors in recent years and are, at their heart, battery-powered electric vehicles themselves. However, they can store considerably more energy in the vehicle via hydrogen, and the energy can be transferred to the vehicle in the amount of time we are used to spending at gas stations.
By storing energy in the form of hydrogen gas, the fuel cell vehicle has a range and refueling time on a par with gasoline automobiles, resulting in little change to the consumer mindset, behavior, or convenience factor.
