AutoblogGreen

The “Hydrogen Economy” is simply a stall and diversion away from the far more efficient “Electric Economy.” Hydrogen production, storage, transportation, storage, fueling, storage only to make electricity in a fuel cell to power an electric car is very inefficient. We can use wasted grid electricity or make our own electricity with solar & wind etc. Series PHEVs with bio-diesel (we can make that too) auxiliary power units are far more efficient than hydrogen will ever be and are carbon neutral to boot. These series hybrids were ready years ago and so was the infrastructure. http://www.autoworld.com/news/GMC/Series_Hybrid.htm. http://ev1-club.power.net/newsltr/vol2_1.htm. New battery and capacitor tech only makes them better.

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Hydrogen fuel cells will be one of the main options for clean automobiles in the future. EVs are great, but I live in Canada and have family that I visit several times per year that are 1200Km away from where I live. Hydrogen would allow me to make that trip in one day just like I do now with gasoline powered vehicles. EVs can't do it. I would have to make it a two day trip because I'd have to stop and charge several times for several hours each time. I don't care if EVs are more efficient, I need the ability to refuel quickly on long trips which I make frequently.

Anyway, in one of the next parts of your story could you compare your experience with the FCX Concept to your experience with the Ford Focus FCV. I know the focus is a retrofit FCV on an existing platform and the FCX Concept is engineered from the ground up as a fuel cell vehicle, but it would still be interesting to hear thoughts on how the two of them compare and differ.

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"Hydrogen fuel cells will be one of the main options for clean automobiles in the future."

Wrong. Hydrogen is a grossly inefficient pollution amplifier. It is not green in any meaningful sense of the word.

Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid.

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It is nice that they are trying.

Infrastructure?

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I agree with poster 1. Unless you get your hydrogen from a clean renewable source, and I don't count bio-diesel or ethanol, then this is a dirtier and costlier method than even our basic gasoline technology. If you do get your hydrogen from a clean source, why not just skip the inefficient conversion steps with hydrogen and just use a battery? Only if battery technology stagnates, or becomes too costly because of demand, would any of the competing technologies make sense, and it would have to get *much* more costly.

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As always there is for and against on all topics, but one thing about hydrogen, thoeretically it can be easy to transport.

We all know that natural gas is running out, what do we do will the millions of miles of piping that will lay redundant? Pipe the hydrogen along it? This will then enable all houses to be fitted with Fuel cells and generate the electricity onsite.

This will then eliminate the Unsightly and grossly inefficiant method of transporting electricity to the home: Electricity Pylons! (transmission towers in the US i believe)

The other advantage would be there the power stations can be switched off once they have a sufficiant store of hydrogen. This is untill renewable sources can replace them.

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I think it's silly to portray EVs and hydrogen as being diametrically opposed from one another. Conceptually, It's perfectly possible to incorporate both technologies within the same vehicle.

If battery technology is able to overcome its current limits (i.e. slow recharge times), then the hydrogen portion might become less useful. But as a recent Scientific American article on power grids pointed out rather well, free electrons are a rather transient commodity, and finding a way to chemically store them - hydrogen or otherwise - is going to be important for any infrastructure that revolves around electric motors. The only thing worse than a 4 hour charge time would be a fuel/power station that can't charge simply because of a downed powerline. At least gasoline can be poured or pumped by hand...

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"If battery technology is able to overcome its current limits (i.e. slow recharge times), then the hydrogen portion might become less useful." --AES

Rapid-charge LiOn is already available.
http://www.altairnano.com/documents/NanoSafeBackgrounder060920.pdf

Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid, and was so even before AltairNano introduced the NanoSafe battery.

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"If something like flywheel energy storage were to become practical..." -- Peter G

Flywheel technology is a non-starter for cars. It has some limited applicability for large installations that don't move, but the required mechanisms to stabilize a high-energy gyroscope in something that twists and turns is way beyond impractical.

"An electric car that could be charged quickly with batteries that last a lifetime would be the end of the fuel cell." -- Peter G

As mentioned above, the rapid-charge battery is available. But the hydrogen fuel cell is a really bad idea even without it. Hydrogen is a massively inefficient, hazardous, uneconomic, pollution-amplifying technology. Even ethanol (which is not a particularly good fuel) is better than hydrogen.

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"Hydrogen is a massively inefficient, hazardous, uneconomic, pollution-amplifying technology."

1. It's less hazourdous than gasoline... Less flamable.
2. Why is it inefficient?
3. Uneconomic, pollution-amplifying? It depends on the technology you use to produce it. And you don't know what technology will be used in the future to produce it... Maybe algae "fields" can produce it... Water electrolise by wind power? It will for sure be better than fossil fuels.

We are still in an exploratory fase: there is potencial there, so let's see were this will go...

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"Wrong. Hydrogen is a grossly inefficient pollution amplifier. It is not green in any meaningful sense of the word.

Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid"

I get a kick out of those who are so blinded by their beliefs that they refuse to ever look at opposing ideas objectively. Like how this person can't even understand that hydrogen can be produced without pollution from non fossil-fuel sources.

All he can do is label things as "stupid" and "insanely stupid".

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"It's less hazourdous than gasoline... Less flamable." -- Tiago do Vale

What color is the sky on your planet? And just how did you managed to post here from an alternate universe, anyway?

"Why is it inefficient?" -- Tiago do Vale

That has to do with the laws of thermodynamics, physics, and chemistry. In *this* universe, that is.

"Uneconomic, pollution-amplifying?" -- Tiago do Vale

Yes, much more polluting than fossil fuels. The only economical way to produce hydrogen by electrolysis is with nuclear power, which has its own problems (non-renewable, waste-disposal, etc.) -- and it's far more economical (safer, greener, etc) to just use the energy directly instead of wasting it by generating hydrogen, regardless of the energy source. All other means of production are uneconomical, polluting, and/or completely impractical, including and especially wind power (aka "bird-slicers"). Again, that may only apply in *this* universe.

"I get a kick out of those who are so blinded by their beliefs that they refuse to ever look at opposing ideas objectively." -- JP

Precisely, JP. Look in a mirror sometime, should be good for a real kick.

"...hydrogen can be produced without pollution from non fossil-fuel sources." -- JP

Name one source of economical commercial quantities of hydrogen with no pollution. Even if biological production of hydrogen becomes feasible (unlikely), that doesn't do anything for the inherent hazards and other difficulties associated with hydrogen.

Wishful thinking of future possibilities involving repeal of physical laws or invention of entirely new technologies don't count.

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I personally like the idea of having a solar panel on my roof that splits water into hydrogen and stores it in a tank at my house. Then I can use it to generate electricity (Fuel Cell) Heat (Burn it) or use it to power my car. (Any gasoline powered car can be converted to run on Hydrogen)

It seems to me to be not the perfect source of energy per se: but the perfect method to store or bank that energy.

Fuel cells will get cheaper and solar cells will get better... so maybe it is a moot point?

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We should have a poll, to see who everybody thinks in dumber, Howard or Tim.
My vote goes to Howard. Now I admit Tim's comments are pretty stupid, but at least they're funny. Howard's comments are just as stupid but not funny at all, just annoying. In Howard's defense, when he pulls a fact out of his butt, he does at least try to make it look respectable

I admit I have nothing useful to contribute with this post, but anyone reading these comments are doing so purely for entertainment, so I don't feel like I'm wasting anyone time. We haven't had an intelligent comment for some time now. Howard and the other morons chased away all the intelligent people.

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"I personally like the idea of having a solar panel on my roof that splits water into hydrogen and stores it in a tank at my house. Then I can use it to generate electricity (Fuel Cell) Heat (Burn it) or use it to power my car. (Any gasoline powered car can be converted to run on Hydrogen)" -- Alfred

Several problems there, among which are that photovoltaics aren't quite ready for prime time. That might actually change soon: There is a new PV technology called Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (CIGS) that promises to break the 20% efficiency barrier. With current silicon technology, the fully loaded cost of a kilowatt-hour is around $1, or about 8-10 times what you can buy it for from your local electric utility. With CIGS, maybe that will come down into competitive range, maybe not; that hasn't been established.

But the major problem is that converting electricity into hydrogen, and then converting hydrogen back to electricity is ENORMOUSLY wasteful. It would be much more economical (and safer, and greener, etc.) to just store the electricity in a battery or supercap, to use later. If you are willing to do some research on the topic of energy conversions, you might want to look up "exergy". The formal definition is a bit difficult to explain, but you can think of it as a measure of "quality" and "cost" coupled with "convenience". The exergy of a solar-cell system is fairly low; the exergy of hydrogen is much lower.

And that doesn't address the hazards or the difficulty of containing H2 gas in usable quantities, which will require the invention of entirely new technologies.

Hydrogen is the proper fuel for applications where weight/energy is the most important consideration, and cost isn't an issue -- e.g., rocket fuel. For applications where cost, efficiency, and safety are considerations, it makes no sense at all.

Lastly, converting a gasoline car to run H2 is not as trival as you seem to think.

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Howard,
It sounds like you got it all figured out. Man, I can't wait until you start selling your electric car. I'll be your first customer. You are gonna show Honda and everyone else how it's done. You are going to be the next Albert Einstein. I can't believe I was here to witness history in the making.

So when can I come pick up my car?

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Howard's an Ass,
When you have a site like this that allows anybody to add comments, you invariably get know-it-all morons, who think their ignorant, short sighted opinions mean something.
Howard has been posting his "insanely stupid" comments for as long as I've been reading autobloggreen, and he'll never stop. All you can do is ignore him. The people, companies, and engineers who are doing research on fuel cells know better than to listen to every jack-ass out there who thinks he knows what he's talking about.

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Jusin, Howard\'s_an_Ass - We'd love to hear some of your ideas. Or do you not have any and just like to compain and call people names? If you can't offer any helpfull info, go play on YouTube with the rest of the children and let the adults talk now, OK. Let's act like adults and if you don't have anything posivite to say, don't say anything at all. We're trying to save the world here...

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Tim,
You're a crack up. I can't tell if you're serious or just messing around.
Of course I don't have any ideas. If I did, I would be out working on it, not wasting my time reading Howards stupid comments.
I like your YouTube idea, that should be more entertaining than playing with you boys, so I'll let you get back to saving the world :)

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Howard\'s_an_Ass - This is kind of fun, isn't it! I know... We should all put on our blue tights, red capes and little red booties. Maybe if we all run around our houses real fast with our arms out we can get Lex, the GM exec and Grod the Oil Baron to do the right thing!! ;)

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