Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-33869270-20180703224215/@comment-28169398-20180718063232

TorrelloRR3 wrote:

I appreciate that they're much more efficient and reduce pollution in cities, but until electricity generation becomes fully renewable, they just move the pollution to the power stations.

If the power stations are running at a higher level of efficiency over an automobile's ICE, then you will have a net reduction in emissions.

You could also think that it would be easier to implement carbon sequestration technology in place at a power plant than try to capture emissions and sequester them in a car.

I don't know if this is the case, but I would assume that Catalytic Converters reduce the efficiency of the automobile, so having an energy source that eliminates the need for components that sap efficiency should help the balance of the shift from the ICE to the Power Station.

TorrelloRR3 wrote:

The rail company I work for is talking about retrofitting older diesel driven locomotives with hydrogen powered engines. Now there's some tech I can get behind.

The biggest issue here is the distribution infrastructure, cost, and regulation.

Take a country like the United States. The infrastructure for petroleum products and electricity were put in place in the early part of the 20th century. There is no infrastructure in place to distribute liquid Hydrogen currently and establishing that infrastructure in countries the size and population densities of the US, India, and China make the expense currently prohibitive.

While you can argue that most places do not have the charging infrastructure in place for plugin electric and hybrid cars, the infrastructure of electricity delivery is there. Costs can be transferred to individual consumers (installing a charging station at home) or on local governments through tax brakes and incentives to get businesses to make the technologies available.

That brings us to cost. Most companies and consumers will not chose a more expensive option when a less expensive one is available, no matter what the impact. It is only when newer technologies become less expensive does a shift begin to occur.

That leads to regulations. The easiest way to promote new technologies is to pass laws that make them competitive with cheaper technologies. However, there is a great deal, and a lot of money, spent to undermine this process.

Hydrogen will likely be the way of the future for automobiles, especially as it has a similar paradigm to petrol, and gives similar range, however electric engines may dominate shorter range applications such as public transportation.