Fuel cell vehicles costs

There are several reasons why fuel cells are unlikely to make it as power plants for automobiles any time soon, BMW engineer Christoph Huss asserted in his paper. For one thing, he explained, an electric traction motor for a fuel cell vehicle costs as much as a normal internal-combustion engine. 

Many of the world s major automakers, prompted by both this consumer demand and progress in reducing the inherent cost and size of fuel cells, are now committed to developing and commercializing fuel cell vehicles. 

The problem is that hydrogen, even at 10,000 psi (or 690 bar), requires five to ten times the volume of today s gasoline tank, depending on the fuel cell vehicle s real world efficiency. Packaging volume is compromised even further because pressurized tanks require thick carbon fiber walls and are, therefore, nonconformable. Moreover, they may cost several thousand dollars more than a conventional gasoline tank. 

Efforts continue to improve fuel cell technology and utilization which should reduce costs. The General Motors fuel cell program aims at having a commercial fuel cell vehicle by 2010. Volume production of fuel cell cars should reduce costs, but one Department of Energy projection with a production of 500,000 vehicles a year still has the cost too high. 

Fuel cells could become a major player in our energy future. In order to see more cars on the road that are fuel cell vehicles, many obstacles and challenges will have to be overcome, but there does not seem to be anything that is insurmountable. The cost of specialized materials is dropping and higher-volume manufacturing will bring production costs down. 

The costs of a PEMFC stack are composed of the costs of the membrane, electrode, bipolar plates, platinum catalysts, peripheral materials and the costs of assembly. For the fuel-cell vehicle, the costs of the electric drive (converter, electric motor, inverter, hydrogen and air pressurisation, control electronics, cooling systems, etc.) and the hydrogen storage system have to be added. Current costs of PEM fuel-cell stacks are around 2000/kW, largely dominated by the costs of the bipolar plates and... 

Based on input assumptions to be described below, these two models are used to calculate the costs of fuel-cell vehicles and hydrogen infrastructure and estimate the benefits in terms of reductions in C02 emissions and oil consumption. 

Table 15.5 lists our cost and performance assumptions for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) and a gasoline internal combustion engine reference vehicle. FCV... 

Initially, only a few thousand fuel-cell vehicles are manufactured each year, and the cost is high (> 100000 per vehicle). As more vehicles are produced, the cost comes... 

Transition modelling estimating the investments required to bring hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles to cost competitiveness... 

To study this buy-down process for hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles, the Simplified Transition Model (STM) was used to aggregate costs over the entire fleet, based on the fuel-cell vehicle and hydrogen infrastructure costs previously described ... 

To estimate the overall transition cost, the STM tracks the incremental costs of the hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles sold in the market relative to the same number of gasoline vehicles. Two components of this transition cost are estimated over time. First is the incremental price of buying hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles each year,... 

Figure 15.13. Cash flows for introduction of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Positive cash-flow values indicate that the cost of H2 vehicles and/or fuel is lower than the cost of gasoline vehicles or fuel.

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