Yes however it is so easy to build EV charging stations almost anywhere, whereas hydrogen fueling stations are crazy expensive.
Definitely. What's Tesla's cost to install a typical 8 stall SuperCharger? I recall someone saying about $200k?
This NREL document from last year says that H2 stations today cost about $3M and can supply about 333 kg/day. Future stations after 2016 will cost about $5M and supply about 1200 kg/day.
Typical FCEV seems to take about 1 kg H2 per 50 miles, so today's H2 station can fuel cars for about 16k miles/day and future stations could fuel about 60k miles/day.
The
capacity of a 8-stall SuperCharger is around 3.6 cars/hour, delivering around 32 MWh/month, let's round to 1 MWh/day to make the math easy. 1 MWh is good for about 3,000 miles, so really need to deliver about 5x more energy (5 MWh/day) which would take about 25 stalls to do at the same blocking rate.
Anyway, simple extrapolation would indicate that might cost about $1M, though there are probably economies of scale to be gained, so the cost would likely be significantly less. Though if you add battery storage and solar PV, that will increase upfront costs but reduce operational costs. Lots of variables.
To get up to the future hydrogen station example, you need to expand by another 4x which would mean around 80 stalls. Cost of SuperCharger sites would still be significantly less than the H2 station.
All of this ignores the fact that by far most charging for EVs doesn't even need to happen at SuperChargers, but instead at home, work, etc, so less SuperCharger would be required in the first place than H2 capacity.
It's still very interesting to try to estimate just how many SuperCharger sites would be required if significantly more vehicles on the road could use them - and then compare to hydrogen.