Generally, Hydrogen for transportation (no infrastructure) makes little sense compared to EV’s (everyone has an outlet in their garage). The business model for hydrogen cars is very weak (though it is needed for trucks and road warriors).
BUT! There is a future for hydrogen in utility scale applications for the eventual Bazgigawatts of periodic solar and wind excess into electrolysis of water to hydrogen. Think of it as energy storage (the holy grail of renewables). But then creating a HUGE infrastructure from zero to distribute this hydrogen source in tiny little buckets to burn everywhere in tiny amounts in millions of cars makes no sense, when the utilities can far, far more easily burn it right there at their plants to provide a continuum of electricity at night and/or low wind. Another way to look at it is to have the utilities burn the excess hydrogen to make electricity and use the grid to distribute that electricity to EV’s. That is a far easier way to distribute “hydrogen stored energy” since EV’s and the grid distribution already exist everywhere. Of course, there will always be a market for SOME hydrogen fueled cars and trucks that must do long trips or continuous road travel. No question. But that is something like only 10% or our transportation energy… and easy to implement along the interstates… P.S. There is another thing I just became aware of. Other countries versus the US with respect to Energy Storage.. Not everything is equal. Germany has a different perspective on storage (hydrogen) for many reasons… they have no natural gas like we do. They cannot use natural gas plants to make-up solar/wind shortages. Where we view “storage” as a short-term (max 12 hour overnight) need, they view storage as a long-term requirement and not just for backup electricity, but for weeks or months… http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2014/06/energy-storage-a-different-view-from-germany?cmpid=SolarNL-Tuesday-June24-2014 Just some thoughts. Bob, WB4aPR -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140625/c518d803/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
