I just tested this and the default setting is to include location, but once turned off it stays off (unlike the iPhone share sheet where you need to turn it off each time).
What’s the point of saying one stat is better than another, when all of them are meaningful in a different way? When renewables reach big numbers of TWh, someone will say “total generation is misleading if doesn’t line up with demand; what matters is capacity for power when we actually need it”.
I did the same math. The closest guess I have is that it is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $32150 (which divided by four is $8037).
Nope, I just spent 15 minutes reading the original paper and can’t make any sense of what he is calculating.
International dollars are normalized to USD, so there’s no conversion necessary. The figure he quotes of 63 min per dollar converts to $8343/year. However, his original paper states that he created this measure by inverting income, so the number 8343 is his starting point.
The closest guess I have is that is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $32150 (which divided by four is $8037).
If that is the case, what he is really doing is comparing poverty line definitions between countries.
The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.
Yes, the original procedures didn’t find the problem, but it says they were eventually able to duplicate it in the lab and the new material has passed that test.
This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.
I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.
Fair point that a full TCO comparison would be more complete, and it's something I'm planning to cover in a later post. But the capital cost argument actually reinforces the conclusion rather than undermining it. Hydrogen fuel cell trucks are currently 2-3x the price of diesel equivalents, roughly comparable to battery electric. The infrastructure CAPEX is dramatically higher for hydrogen (£2-5M per station vs. transformer upgrades for depot charging). And the fuel cost gap means hydrogen has higher opex too. Diesel wins today on upfront cost, yes, but hydrogen doesn't beat BEV on capital or operating costs in any current scenario I've seen. Happy to be shown numbers that say otherwise.
The big thing I haven't covered yet is HVO, which provides the WTT CO₂ saving at a slight fuel cost surcharge, which matters if a fleet is mandated to reduce their CO₂. The TCO assuming a £100k diesel truck and £200k lifetime fuel cost, a 10% HVO surcharge brings the TCO to £320k, versus a £250-350k BEV truck that costs maybe £80k in electricity over the same life. That's £320k with an 80-90% CO₂ reduction from a drop in fuel you can put in your existing trucks tomorrow, versus £280k for battery electric with zero tailpipe. Both of those are available now, with existing infrastructure. Hydrogen is asking you to spend £300k+ on the truck, £150k+ on fuel, and hope someone builds a station within range of your routes.
It would be a stronger argument if you first tried looking at the cases where hydrogen has an advantage. The port example you brought up, where hydrogen is produced on site, is a good one to analyze. If you can look at cost projections of fuels cells and electrolyzers vs. batteries over the next 20 years and demonstrate that there’s no chance hydrogen will catch up, that would be a very strong argument, since it doesn’t rely on the hand-wavy “fueling infrastructure will never happen” argument.
Show me how the capital costs of rolling out high PSI hydrogen infra will be cheaper than building a power grid. You can even refit and re-use existing natural gas pipelines to move hydrogen if you want to cheat. I am willing to bet the costs per kW will still be crazy, especially at last mile where you are in an area populated by humans.
I don't see a bright future for hydrogen in transport while we keep putting cheap solar, wind, and batteries on the grid / roads.
Yeah. Vehicle costs are pretty much the same (for battery electric and fuel cell electric buses, at least) and are about 2-3x more than ICE. On-site hydrogen infra for fueling/storage is substantially more than charging equipment. H2 fuel is currently $10-20 per kg (the higher end accounts for vapor losses), which is, again, much greater than either diesel or electricity.
Replying to myself. I just read the article. The gray/blue/green H2 fuel costs in the article do not reflect current U.S. fuel costs.
Gray is $8-10 for liquid delivery. This equates to a little over $1 per mile, which - compared to a CNG bus - is double the operating cost (and about 4x more than a battery electric bus per mile... just for fuel/electricity). And yeah, as I mentioned previously, capital costs will be like 1.3x of battery electric.
That said, there are lots of novel ideas out there for creating H2 fuel! Forest waste (with supposedly all carbon captured), methane pyrolysis (with carbon bricks as an output). The promises never end.
Rather than reading this opinion piece, you can learn more about the “debt crisis” by just studying this chart which shows what percentage of the federal budget goes toward paying off the debt:
The situation is similar to what it was in the late 1980s, and it can mostly likely be managed with the same level of spending restraints we saw in response to that.
Share of budget is actually a terrible way to look at this because the budget itself has exploded, and that ratio hides most of the real modern risk.
Interest costs in the 80s spiked because high rates were applied to a much smaller debt base. Today we have the opposite problem: rates that are high compared to the 2010s are now rolling onto a massively larger stock of debt. We’ve only just started to refinance that debt at the new levels, so the full impact hasn’t even shown up yet. We are still seeing significant inflation (meaning rates still have upwards room to grow), beginning signs of an economic pullback, are beginning to see signs of a Fed unwilling to raise rates sufficiently due to the impact on the fiscal environ, etc.
If you compare government budget as share of GDP, you can see that is hasn’t “exploded”, outside of crisis periods. Current spending rate is elevated about 25% over the 1990s period of restraint, but quite close to the 1980s.
You keep switching between flows and stocks and what you want your numerator and denominator to be, why wouldn't I just look at real spending and real debt numbers - ie. the number we ultimately have to pay interest on?
GDP % is only relevant if we are politically able to raise taxes.
Both of the charts I posted have GDP as the denominator (although I incorrectly said the first was “share of budget”).
I think it’s very important to use GDP as a denominator, because otherwise you’ll be stuck crying wolf, saying “debt always keeps going up” even during the good times.
There are a lot of people who simply don’t believe that the government budget needs a trim right now, because people have been continuously saying there was a debt crisis even when the financial situation was relatively favorable.
Because measuring things against GDP like this is completely meaningless.
If you use your brain for even the slightest moment it would be completely obvious that the sum total amount of a debit is a huge deal because of scale of the interest.
IANA economist, but if there were a debt crisis, it would ultimately be about the psychology of the investors who would buy government debt. They want to be very, very confident that they will be paid back (which is why they're willing to accept a low interest rate).
If those investors are satisfied with a return to a late-80s fiscal posture, then great. But if they're worried that spending would just creep up again once the pressure is off, they might "demand" further cuts.
In particular, investors often like to see the contrast of infrastructure development (investing in future GDP), as opposed to paying day to day operating costs, retirements, interest on debt (never mind larger debt as far as the eye can see), and other creative ways to prevent future GDP. And there is very, very little infrastructure development in US budgets.
The author took the CBO's budget projections and adjusted them for "false sunsets", i.e. the tax cuts that were supposed to expire before they were extended, and the fake spending cuts written into the law that will never happen, i.e. the FRA.
I was mistaken to say “share of budget”, because the chart I linked to is actually share of GDP, which hopefully isn’t affected by the problem you pointed out.
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