Gigacasting Pitfalls, Daimler's 1000km Fuel Cell & Island Mode
Croft | Future of Fuel: 10.04.23
This newsletter is written and compiled by Tarani Duncan, with help from Isaac Holeman, Roderick Blevins, and other colleagues at Croft. We send it out every other Wednesday.
Automotive:
Rivian lost $33,000 on every truck it sold in the second quarter, which is roughly the starting price of a base model Ford F-150 (link).
Recently, The Drive’s Caleb Jacobs took a hydrogen-powered Lexus ROV for a ride at Fuji Speedway: “And let me tell ya, it rips.” The new recreational off-road vehicle (ROV), a collaboration between Lexus,Yamaha, and KYB, offers a similar off-road experience to its fossil fuel-powered counterparts by using an internal combustion engine (link). While hydrogen internal combustion engines lack the efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells, they are cheaper to manufacture and less vulnerable to harsh shocks/vibration or to impurities in fuel and air supply. OEMs like Cummins and JCB are developing hydrogen combustion engines in part because they can leverage existing capital assets, talent, and market positioning. Internal combustion engines also provide a similar user experience to legacy technology in their footprint, serviceability, and driving experience, making them an excellent fit for retrofit applications.
Collision repair numbers for EVs that rely on gigacasting, like Rivian and Tesla makes, can cost upwards of $30k (link).
Suzuki’s biomethane gas-powered Wagon R will be on display at the 2023 Japan Mobility show (link) as well as a hydrogen-powered scooter (link).
Toyota’s Mirai hydrogen cars will be official fleet for the Paris Olympics (link).
Lucid opens first-ever car manufacturing facility in Saudi Arabia (link).
GM’s ultium battery-electric platform finally picks up sales pace in Q3 after selling only 49 Hummer EVs in a six-month period (link).
LG Energy Solution of Holland, Michigan, and Toyota announce a new partnership for lithium-ion batteries. Beginning in 2025, the automotive batteries will be manufactured in Holland, then assembled at a Toyota plant in Kentucky (link).
Toyota is learning a lot from its liquid hydrogen GR Corolla race car (link).
Material Handling, Logistics, and Distribution:
Daimler hydrogen fuel cell semi travels 650 miles on one fill, setting a single-hydrogen-fill run record (link).
Public Transportation:
Justifying a record-breaking spend on hydrogen buses, Santa Cruz says battery electric buses operate fine on totally flat ground but were a poor fit for the coastal city’s hilly routes. The city will spend $87.4 million on 57 hydrogen fuel-cell electric buses after a failed test run of a battery electric bus (link).
Nigerian senate rejects loans on CNG buses that aimed to cushion pains of fuel subsidy removal on Nigerians (link).
Long Duration Energy Storage, Micro-Grids, and Off-Grid Production:
BP launches plant that generates renewable energy using gas from a landfill in Indiana (link).
The DOE provides funding for nine long-duration energy storage technologies, including companies repurposing electric car batteries to power low-income communities, zinc manganese dioxide batteries, vanadium flow batteries, zinc bromide batteries, and pumped thermal energy storage (link). The DOE subsequently released a webinar covering awardees and the project selection process (link).
With the Pentagon’s stated goal for all bases to be power resilient, the military is turning to microgrids to fight global threats and global warming. An example in this article outlines how the US Marines use solar and methane gas from rotting garbage to power Miramar, a base that can go 21-days in a self-contained mode called island mode (link).
The DOE awards $17.2M for Colorado microgrids. Colorado’s MCR program primarily focuses on developing new microgrids, particularly centered around community-level systems. The program highlights reinforcing essential infrastructure and/or community-based anchor institutions’ resiliency, including hospitals or other health care facilities, public safety agencies, law enforcement, libraries, emergency medical providers and schools (link).
Vehicle Retrofits:
First Mode is now offering three mining truck retrofit solutions: a Hybrid Electric Vehicle with a regenerative battery pack, which cuts Co2 emissions by up to 30% using regenerative braking; a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle; and a battery electric vehicle (link).
London’s double decker sight-seeing buses to go electric in mass retrofit (link).
BEDEO unveils RE-100 range extender, a retrofit solution for diesel vans that allows drivers to toggle between diesel and electric modes with the push of a button (link).
Leclanché SA wins a project to provide an electric retrofit of Norwegian Ferry (link).
Balfour Beatty secures Scottish Government funding to retrofit carbon intensive vehicles to run off both hydrogen and diesel (link).
Policy & Infrastructure:
A Minnesota-based private company, the Otter Tail, partnered with Tesla to fill a rural gap in the state’s charging network (link). The site cost $750,000 to build with an 18-month lead time to gather necessary equipment due to supply chain limitations. Jason Grenier of Otter Tail has been told there is a 3-year wait time for some electrical transformers needed to supply power to charging stations.
Electric car owners in rural areas have to drive thirteen times further for a charging station than drivers in London, according to a report by the County Councils Network (link). In the United States, the state of Washington is pushing for widespread electric vehicle use, but rural areas still lack access (link).
A South Dakota-led poll finds that many Americans, from rural and urban areas, would consider EV purchase but worry about power costs and grid reliability (link).
Michigan announces Nel Hydrogen to build a hydrogen gigafactory in Plymouth Township (link).
Air Liquide and Trillium Energy Solutions sign a Memorandum of Understanding to pursue the development of heavy-duty hydrogen fueling stations in the United States (link). The stations will be sited along a “strategic trucking route,” like many of the 104 hydrogen stations that are active or under development in the US.
Swedish Ambassador to Tanzania, Carlotta-Ozaki Macias backs CNG for local communities (link).
Research & Development:
Rolls Royce fuel spray nozzle breakthrough brings its hydrogen plane engines closer to reality (link).
Business News:
MIT Technology Review posts list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch (link).
Peregrine Hydrogen, a Santa Cruz-based company developing technology for producing clean hydrogen, raised $7.8 in seed financing (link).
Electric boat startup Arc raised a $70M Series B from Eclipse, a16z, Lowercarbon Capital, and Menlo Ventures (link).
European Industrial battery tech startup, Morrow Batteries, raised a $74M round from Å Energi, PKA, Siemens Financial Services, and more (link).
H55, which develops electric propulsion technologies for the aviation industry, raised a CHF 45M Series C led by ND Capital, Tippet Venture Partners, RTX Ventures and private investors (link).
Pexapark, a Zurich-based energy investment platform, raised a €20M Series C led by Telstra Ventures (link).
Ayro, a Paris-based manufacturer of emission reducing sails for cargo ships and yachts, raised a €19M Series B led by Blue Ocean (link).
Digital rock analysis startup GeologicAI, which supports the discovery of the critical minerals required for the energy transition, raised a $10M Series A extension from Export Development Canada (link).
Power amplifier startup Falcomm raised a $4M round from Squadra Ventures (link).
Croft Updates:
Croft co-founder Isaac Holeman is an alum of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which supported his PhD studies. In a recent interview with The Gates Cambridge Trust, he reflects on his background in off-grid humanitarian work and the ways it shaped his technical perspective and motivation to move to a small farm and start making hydrogen accessible in rural communities (link).
See you out there,
Tarani and the Croft Team
🤠🛻💧