I would like to see all delivery trucks be CNG hybrids and eventually fuel cell. The difference is buses are bought by cities and counties, delivery trucks are private sector.

Buses are public sector because no private sector company wants to provide the service. They would have to charge $10 for a 5 mile ride and still lose money. It is done for the public good, not quick massive profits.

Al-air and CNG suffer from the same problem:  a lack of public fueling infrastructure, which arises from a lack of users to finance it.  CNG should not be difficult to build out given the reach of the pipeline network, but even so there are stretches of Interstates where stations are further apart than the one-tank range of a Civic GX.  In the hinterlands, forget it.

Fixing this will not be easy, cheap or fast.

Mitsubishi reports two Lithium ion battery fires.

http://phys.org/news/2013-03-mitsubishi-battery-problems-recalls.html

Fuel cells are looking better all the time.

“Fuel cell reference:”

That is an old reference. Have the laws of physicist changed. Nope.

Of course this is California, policy makers do not worry about the laws of physics just to pandering to those who do not worry about the laws of physics.

“The same is true for cars ”

That is also an unfounded theory. Something is true when after you do it the data shows that it is true. Often when project take public money, a report is required to document if it was a good idea after all. I have only read one report that say the results were better than expected.

The California fallacy is that they will create a 'green' industry that the rest of the country will accept. We will not accept it because,

“Using fuels cells is inefficient energy usage ”

What's the efficiency of the process that produces the FC's hydrogen?

how would you store excess renewable energy produced in spring and fall for use in winters, when the grid will go above 80% renewable energy?

Roger,

I keep seeing comments about how much energy it takes to manufacture a Lithium battery. Do you have a source?

I've never been able to find one and compared with the energy it takes to do "normal car manufacturing" such as trying to sort bauxite to get your aluminum, I'm just not believing any wild numbers about lithium...at least by comparison.

@ DavidD

Actually one can recover the energy used to manufacture lithium batteries by capturing the heat given off when they catch fire in one's EV. How does that work for you?

Oh, by the way...as your so worried about fires, you do know that over 250,000 cars a year catch on fire in the US alone.

I know that batteries are scary and everything, but so are lots of other things in life.

"It worked."

All I got from this article is that FCV are very expensive and do not work very well.

While R&D on buses is a logical staring point, give me $100 M and I will be happy to issue a press release not and then.

Please, I an will to do R&D on FV sail boats in a south seas while singing show tunes from south pacific.

"I know that batteries are scary and everything, but so are lots of other things in life."

Storing electricity demands a healthy respect.

They have had a fuel cell bus running in Palm Springs, California for more than 5 years. It is good prove out data. You don't make improvements without this and they have made improvements.

Up-to-date ultra caps (or future high power ultra quick charge batteries) combined with Aluminum-Air or Zinc-Air or FCs or ICE as range extender, gives the industry more options?

Wonder what Japan, China and EU will do?

H2 is needed for making fertilizer, hydrogenation of biomass, and for vehicular fuel, organic chemistry feedstock, etc.

1. NH3 can be made by direct electrolytic synthesis; see Stranded Wind.  This avoids the energy loss of the Haber process.
2. Biomass does not need to be hydrogenated unless carbon economy is paramount.  Sequestering carbon is the important thing once fossil fuels have been replaced, and hydrogenation just makes it more valuable as fuel than anything else.
3. Vehicle fuel can be made from the fraction that can be dehydrated stoichiometrically.  Most liquid vehicle fuel should be replaced by electricity anyway.
4. Chemistry feedstocks are varied, but so far the work seems to be going into routes like dimethylfuran; hydrogenation is used on triglycerides, not lignocellulose.

The energy demand of summer and winter is 2-3x that of spring and fall.

There are plenty of other things you could do, like my idea of having big dump loads such as kilns to roast scrap concrete to dehydrate the Portland cement and return it to dry cement, sand and gravel for re-use.  Use it to make electrolytic products like aluminum, magnesium and titanium in plants running seasonally.  Or just crank the units back to 50% power so they don't have to refuel quite as frequently.  This is not rocket science.

H2 is very cheap to make. Electrolyzer will cost no more than $50/kW and will last >20,000 hrs, and this computes to 0.25 cent/kWh.

If you're using electrolysis as a dump load, the duty cycle will be much lower than the capacity factor of the generation feeding it.  This is much less of a problem for nuclear than wind or PV, but still.

Carbon fiber tank costs around $10/kWh of capacity that can last >10,000 cycles, meaning < 0.1 cent/kWh.

A heap of dry dirt heated to 200 C costs... as much as a heap of dry dirt, plus the heaters and pipes to remove the heat.  Generally these things get cheaper as they get bigger, because the insulation and such has to cover the surface and not occupy the volume.  A cubic meter of dirt with a heat capacity of 0.4 and density 2.5 stores 1000 kJ/°C or 27.7 kWh for 100°C ΔT.  I'd be surprised if a big heap of dirt costs even $1/m³.  If the dirt-pile addresses your seasonal heating and A/C demand, power production can just run at 100% year-round using the storage as a dump load.

If you're going to store things seasonally, solids and liquids are your best bet.  Stranded Wind wants to make anhydrous NH3.  Pryolyzing biomass can be tuned to make mostly liquids and solids, and the gases can be scrubbed and steam-reformed to make whatever hydrogen you really need.  That looks like the path of least cost to me.

Now, if you throttle back your nuclear plant to 50%, then you nearly double the cost of electricity.

Physical forms of energy storage can never beat chemical means of energy storage in term of volumetric nor gravimetric efficiency!