Electric vehicles have spread their charisma all over the world. Tesla and Elon Musk fans are enthusiastic about EVs on various social media platforms. And now the Indian car makers are also shifting towards electric vehicles.

In the era of EVs, our Road and Transport Minister has introduced Hydrogen cars. He arrived in Parliament in this car (Toyota Mirai) and became part of many headlines. So, what are these Hydrogen cars? Before the mass utilization of EVs, can Hydrogen cars replace them? Let's explore this together in today's article.

History of Hydrogen Fuel

It is not the first time that Hydrogen has been used as a fuel. In the year 1937, Hydrogen was used as a fuel in the Hindenburg Aircraft. But unfortunately, it got ruptured in its flight and 35 people out of 100 died due to the arson. The aircraft was eradicated, but Hydrogen continued as a fuel NASA also uses hydrogen gas as a fuel to shift its crew and cargo from one place to another. In the year 1960, General Motors invented an Electro Van which was an FCEV. The car in which Mr. Gadkari went to the parliament was Toyota Mirai was also an FCEV. FCEV stands for Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle.

How does a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car work?

It is very simple Hydrogen is filled in its tank and Oxygen is obtained from the surrounding air. So, there exists a fuel cell where Hydrogen and Oxygen interact and produces water, heat, and electricity. Heat escapes into the atmosphere, and water gets evaporated. And the electricity generated drives the electric motor and accelerates the car.

Benefits of Hydrogen Cars

If you think this type of EV has advantages over both normal fuel-based vehicles and electric vehicles.

It does not need to be recharged via electricity, Fill the hydrogen tank of the vehicle and travel anywhere. The advantage of FCEVs is the use of electric motors, which don't cause any type of pollution. These FCEVs don't even have the issues of Range and Charging.

A range of 250-300 Km in an electric vehicle and the charging time ranges from 6-8 hours. In FCEVs, the range is around 600 Km for this, you only have to get your hydrogen tank full which takes nearly 5 minutes There is one more problem with the EVs which is less spoken.

There is a weight-to-range ratio suppose you have an EV, a battery is installed in it, and it has a range of 100 Km. Now you want your EV to run for 200 Km then how many batteries would be required? You might be thinking of 2 but this is wrong. The battery itself has some weight that will make the EV heavier. So, two batteries won't provide a doubled range you can reach somewhere around 180 Km. The more range one thinks to increase more batteries are required It will become impossible after a certain time to install more batteries.

Hydrogen-based cars are free from all this. Just Increase the size of the tank fill more H2 gas and increase the range. Exactly like conventional fuel-based vehicles. So, the benefit of the Weight to Range ratio is provided in Hydrogen based vehicles.

One more problem with Electric Vehicles is less taken care of the optimum temperature for an Electric Vehicle to perform better is 21 degrees The batteries of EVs exhaust rapidly in colder regions similar to your smartphones. But there is no such issue in hydrogen-based vehicles. There are no special batteries used in FCEV to drive the car. FCEVs use hydrogen gas, and acceleration depends on the burning of Hydrogen gas. If there are so many benefits, you might be thinking that these vehicles should be having a good market share.

Market Size of Hydrogen Cars?

Not at all, In the year 2021, a total of 6 Million electric vehicles were sold, but only 15000 Hydrogen based vehicles were sold. Now there are more than 1000 charging stations for electric vehicles, but there is only 1 hydrogen station in our country. Elon Musk makes a mockery of these FCEVs in Public he terms these infeasible and told them they have no future.

What are the problems with hydrogen-based vehicles which prohibit their growth?

The first problem is that these are very expensive. A normal car is available for Rs 10 Lacs, and a similar vehicle under the EVs is available at 12-13 Lacs. But the Hydrogen cars would cost you around 24 Lacs. The charging stations of electric vehicles, if cost around $50000 for their development. Then the development of a hydrogen station requires $20 Lacs. The reason is the storage if the hydrogen is stored at a high pressure a lot of expertise is required and that's why it is not at all cost-effective.

The second reason is the issue of Psychological Safety. Everybody has watched the videos of the Hindenburg Disaster. But Toyota Company is determined They declare that these vehicles are safe, and they even fired a bullet at the car to show that it does not catch fire.

But Psychologically many people doubt the safety of FCEVs. So, Safety is a major concern. If we keep the cost and safety aside but still, FCEVs have many technical disadvantages.

Hydrogen Cars vs Electric Vehicles

There is no point in comparing these with conventional fuel-based vehicles. As they are already less in demand. So, EVs which are the replacement for conventional cars must be compared with the FCEVs. To know the limitations of FCEVs. 

The first one is low energy efficiency. This whole article has been published which explains this. Let me lucidly tell you, Hydrogen gas is required to run a Hydrogen based vehicle, It will be extracted from somewhere suppose you extract it from water for an instance, takes 100 Watts of electricity and supplied it into the water. 25 Watts of electricity was consumed and Hydrogen was extracted. Now you would transport this hydrogen gas It would require compression 10 Watts of electricity will be used for this. When this Hydrogen will be filled in the Vehicle and then it will react with oxygen to produce electricity. 25 Watts will be consumed in this process. So your 60 Watts of electricity has already been consumed 40 Watts of electricity is left. This means the efficiency of Hydrogen based vehicles is around 40%. If we compare it with EVs, then EVs have an efficiency of around 80%. So this article mentions that Hydrogen should not be used in cars. Hydrogen can be used in Industries where natural gas is being used, but Hydrogen is not at all efficient for cars. 

The second one is Performance a car is picked based on good pick-up and acceleration and EVs are far ahead of FCEVs in this criterion. Also If we compare Toyota Mirai and Tesla Model 3 these two vehicles have similar costs Mirai takes around 9 seconds to reach 60 Kmph from 0 Kmph. But Tesla requires a meager 3 seconds. Mirai has a top speed of 170 Kmph And Tesla has a top speed of more than 230 Kmph. So the performance of Hydrogen cars is poor than the performance of EVs.

Environmental Concerns

The third one includes environmental concerns, Hear it carefully EVs and FCEVs seem to be environmentally friendly from the outside but Hydrogen Based vehicles emit water and EVs don't have any emissions as these have batteries. But the point is what is the primary source of energy? Cobalt which is used in the batteries of EVs comes from mining which causes environmental damage when EVs would be adopted on a large scale. Then where will the malfunctioning batteries be dumped? No one has any idea similar problems are present with the FCEVs All the Hydrogen which is made nowadays is made by burning Methane or Coal and the environmental damage caused by these is 3 times more than the damage caused by EVs.

Investments in Hydrogen Fuel

Despite all this Toyota, Hyundai, and BMW are manufacturing Hydrogen based vehicles. The reason behind this is all the issues that I have mentioned would be solved when the FCEVs would become efficient and more scalable. The Indian Government has set a target that by 2030. India will produce 5 million tons of green hydrogen every year. Gautam Adani and total energy have signed a deal of $ 50 Million to produce green hydrogen. Apart from this Tata and Ambani are also investing in green hydrogen.

What is this Green Hydrogen?

As I told you earlier, nowadays Hydrogen is produced from methane. Green hydrogen will replace this would be produced from renewable resources. And the vehicles using hydrogen emit water. So the environmental damage caused by vehicles based on green hydrogen would be very less when compared to the EVs. Hydrogen Fuel Cells can disrupt the market in two ways.

Where would Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles be used more?

The first is Industrial/commercial vehicles which require long ranges EVs would be ineffective as a lot of batteries would be required. Hydrogen-based vehicles can work exceptionally here. FCEV would be more powerful for heavy-duty commercial vehicles, polluting less. The second one is Industrial used cases where natural gas has been used. 

The use of hydrogen gas will make them more environmentally friendly and like today, Elon Musk makes a mockery of hydrogen-based vehicles. Similarly, people used to laugh at solar energy around 8-10 years back. But now it has developed a lot and India is not very far in solar energy.

 The world has come around to see we need to produce energy as responsibly as possible however, there is one major hurdle that we face when it comes to producing energy through renewable sources intermittently.

Can renewable energy be produced anytime energy is needed? that is a question wind and solar power cannot answer yes to, there is however a breakthrough method of generating energy that neatly solves the intermittency problem that invades wind and solar energy. This game-changing tech is Tidal Energy and is getting many players in the energy industry excited.

Why Tidal energy is 10 times better than wind and solar energy?

Wind and solar energy are great ways to generate the energy they're relatively cheap and do not cause pollution unlike fossil fuel-based generating stations that produce carbon emissions moreover we can't run out of solar or wind power at least not in billion years. However as great as wind and solar energy they have serious drawbacks, they can be affected by environmental seasonal and daily cycles that can limit their use or efficiency as such renewable energy cannot always consistently produce energy at all hours of the day, for example, you can't produce solar energy when the sun has set, this is called intermittency.

Intermittency is a big headache for energy professionals for example solar and wind farms' energy production in Europe has been known to vary between 0 to 23 and 24 gigawatts of energy respectively, during peak times. So these peak production periods provide a large share of energy however sometimes unpredictable lows are the bane of renewables compare this intermittency with the constant power output that can be generated by fossil fuel-based power plants using coal or natural gas and you will see renewable energy Achilles heal energy production companies try to mitigate this inherent flaw with battery solutions. But this only introduces a different set of problems as you shall soon see. This is where tidal energy comes in it is renewable energy that means no damage to the environment and at the same time, it can be available all day and at any time solving the intermittency problem of wind and solar energy.

What is Tidal Energy?

Simply tidal energy is produced by the surge of ocean waters during the rise and fall of tights when the water has risen to its highest level covering much of the shore it's at high tide. When the water falls to its lowest level it's a low tide. Some lakes and rivers can also have types you can thank the sun and the moon because the two celestial bodies responsible for the rise and fall of times how the forces that cause tides are known as tidal constituents, for example, the earth's rotation is a tidal constituent but the major tidal constituent is the moon's gravitational force acting on the earth. The closer objects are the greater the gravitational forces between them and this is why the moon exerts more pull on the planet than the sun does despite being significantly smaller.

So basically the moon is constantly pulling on the earth including on land surfaces. However, land surfaces do not move that much because they are not very flexible they move not more than 55 centimeters a day. But when it comes to the ocean the pull is more dramatic because water is liquid and can respond to gravity more the moon pulls on both the side of the earth facing it and the opposite side. But the greatest force is felt on the side closest to the moon, at the center of the earth the gravitational force is zero. High and low tides come with a degree of accuracy as the earth continues to spin and tidal energy engineers simply take advantage of this phenomenon.

How does Tidal energy work?

The primary maneuver is to harness the kinetic energy created from the rise and fall of ocean tides and currents or tidal flows and turn it into electricity. The larger the tidal range or the height difference between high and low tide sea levels, the more power can be produced. When you want to build a tidal project there are three types that you can choose from.

Tidal Turbine

The first is the tidal turbine which is fairly straightforward it is very similar to wind turbines except that you place them below the water's surface instead of above or on land. So the water's current pushes the blades of the turbine which is connected to a generator and bam you have produced electricity. Tidal turbines can produce much more electricity than wind power plants because water is much denser than air meaning it will move the blades faster. However, the same water's high density also means the tidal turbines need to be much stronger than wind turbines making them more expensive to manufacture. Tidal turbines are large but they have the advantage of causing relatively little disruption to the ecosystem around them. They could cause collision damage like wind turbines however with marine life but the slow speeds of the blades mean it isn't that much of a concern.

Tidal Barrage 

The second type of tidal power project is the tidal barrage here the tidal barrages are actually low-walled dams they're constructed at tidal inlets or estuaries. They're similar to your standard hydroelectric dams because you use sluice gates to form a reservoir on one side of the barrage the barrages attach the sea floor with the top of the barrage just slightly above where the water level hits, during the highest tide you then place your tidal turbines towards the bottom of the barrage inside a tunnel, which lets water pass through the turbines are turned with the incoming and outgoing tides. during an incoming high tide, water flows over the turbines as the water rises then the water flows back through the turbines as it becomes low tide. The turbines are connected to a generator which generates electricity. While tidal barrages are the most efficient way to harvest tidal energy they're also the most costly. Engineers have to construct an entire concrete struct, which adds to the development costs. Also, the barrages have a more serious environmental impact on the surrounding ecosystem than tidal fences or turbines. You are basically building an underwater wall so fish and other sea creatures can't pass through causing a myriad of effects on the local ecosystem.

Tidal Fence

The last type of tidal energy project is the tidal fence which is like a cross between tidal barrages and tidal turbines. Here the vertical tidal fence turn styles are positioned together in what looks like a fence which is why it's called a tidal fence, instead of spinning like a propeller tidal fences spin like a turnstile. You produce electricity by using the energy from tidal currents to spin the turn-style blades which are connected to a generator. Tidal fences have vertical blades that are pushed by moving water these vertical turbines are installed together like a fence, but they don't require the large concrete structure that tidal barrages do. Usually, they'll be installed in between land masses in things like inlets and fast-moving streams they are submerged entirely underwater and have little impact on the surrounding ecosystem.

How do engineers decide if a site is suitable for locating a Tidal energy project?

The fact is that even though water covers two-thirds of the earth's surface not all the nations or regions on the earth are suitable for tidal power projects due to the specific requirements for example the difference between flood tide and herbicide must be minimum of the order of 4.6 meters or above that or the project would not be viable. The volume of water moving around during the tide or the cubature of the tidal flow also matters.

Let's say your preferred site is a place where the tide may go up and down by say around 10 meters but with a minuscule volume of water associated with it. It makes no engineering sense because there is not even energy to spin the blades you must also account for wave actions and storms because these two can be destructive so you must find a way to protect your tidal plant or find another site or you could be spending much of your budget on constructing an embankment your site must not interrupt the flow of normal shipping traffic which passes through the estuary, otherwise it will interrupt the economic cycle of the region. there's also the silt index of water in the factory. However, it is very possible to find suitable sites for tidal energy projects it's worth noting here that the first title projects did not involve electricity production but were used by our ancestors to grind grain. They came to be known as tide mills.

Where was the first Tidal Plant built?

The first modern tidal plant used for generating electricity was built in 1965 in the branch estuary in France, It was on a commercial scale and used 24 turbo generators the plant still produces electricity today from the difference between high and low tides up to 600-gigawatt hours per year evidence that tidal power projects can withstand the test of time. The power from this station is enough to power more than 50000 American homes for a year. 

The second commercial-scale tidal barrage was installed in Nova Scotia in 1982 to highlight the working of the Straflo turbine an invention by Escher Wyss of Switzerland. Despite its initial problems the plant now generates electricity with no issues the largest tidal power project in operation is located on Shiwa lake in South Korea. It has an installed capacity of 254 megawatts. However, it was more than just a power generating plant, it was created to provide reclaimed land for the nearby metropolitan area flood mitigation and secure irrigation water by converting the coastal reservoir to fresh water using a 12.7-kilometer-long sea wall at Joni bay. Let's hear what you think of tidal energy in the comments section below.