http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021223&s=rifkin

article | Posted December 5, 2002

Hydrogen: Empowering the People

by Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Biotech Century (Tarcher Putnam), is 
president of The Foundation on Economic Trends, in Washington, DC. 
His latest book is The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World 
Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth 
(Tarcher/Putnam).


While the fossil-fuel era enters its sunset years, a new energy 
regime is being born that has the potential to remake civilization 
along radically new lines--hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most basic and 
ubiquitous element in the universe. It never runs out and produces no 
harmful CO2 emissions when burned; the only byproducts are heat and 
pure water. That is why it's been called "the forever fuel."

Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil. 
Switching to hydrogen and creating a decentralized power grid would 
also be the best assurance against terrorist attacks aimed at 
disrupting the national power grid and energy infrastructure. 
Moreover, hydrogen power will dramatically reduce carbon dioxide 
emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. In the long 
run, the hydrogen-powered economy will fundamentally change the very 
nature of our market, political and social institutions, just as coal 
and steam power did at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Hydrogen must be extracted from natural sources. Today, nearly half 
the hydrogen produced in the world is derived from natural gas via a 
steam-reforming process. The natural gas reacts with steam in a 
catalytic converter. The process strips away the hydrogen atoms, 
leaving carbon dioxide as the byproduct.

There is, however, another way to produce hydrogen without using 
fossil fuels in the process. Renewable sources of energy--wind, 
photovoltaic, hydro, geothermal and biomass--can be harnessed to 
produce electricity. The electricity, in turn, can be used, in a 
process called electrolysis, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. 
The hydrogen can then be stored and used, when needed, in a fuel cell 
to generate electricity for power, heat and light.

Why generate electricity twice, first to produce electricity for the 
process of electrolysis and then to produce power, heat and light by 
way of a fuel cell? The reason is that electricity doesn't store. So, 
if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing or the water isn't 
flowing, electricity can't be generated and economic activity grinds 
to a halt. Hydrogen provides a way to store renewable sources of 
energy and insure an ongoing and continuous supply of power.

Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are just now being introduced into the 
market for home, office and industrial use. The major auto makers 
have spent more than $2 billion developing hydrogen-powered cars, 
buses and trucks, and the first mass-produced vehicles are expected 
to be on the road in just a few years.

In a hydrogen economy the centralized, top-down flow of energy, 
controlled by global oil companies and utilities, would become 
obsolete. Instead, millions of end users would connect their fuel 
cells into local, regional and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs), 
using the same design principles and smart technologies that made the 
World Wide Web possible. Automobiles with hydrogen cells would be 
power stations on wheels, each with a generating capacity of 20 
kilowatts. Since the average car is parked most of the time, it can 
be plugged in, during nonuse hours, to the home, office or the main 
interactive electricity network. Thus, car owners could sell 
electricity back to the grid. If just 25 percent of all US cars 
supplied energy to the grid, all the power plants in the country 
could be eliminated.

Once the HEW is set up, millions of local operators, generating 
electricity from fuel cells onsite, could produce more power more 
cheaply than can today's giant power plants. When the end users also 
become the producers of their energy, the only role remaining for 
existing electrical utilities is to become "virtual power plants" 
that manufacture and market fuel cells, bundle energy services and 
coordinate the flow of energy over the existing power grids.

To realize the promise of decentralized generation of energy, 
however, the energy grid will have to be redesigned. The problem with 
the existing power grid is that it was designed to insure a one-way 
flow of energy from a central source to all the end users. Before the 
HEW can be fully actualized, changes in the existing power grid will 
have to be made to facilitate both easy access to the web and a 
smooth flow of energy services over the web. Connecting thousands, 
and then millions, of fuel cells to main grids will require 
sophisticated dispatch and control mechanisms to route energy traffic 
during peak and nonpeak periods. A new technology developed by the 
Electric Power Research Institute called FACTS (flexible alternative 
current transmission system) gives transmission companies the 
capacity to "deliver measured quantities of power to specified areas 
of the grid."

Whether hydrogen becomes the people's energy depends, to a large 
extent, on how it is harnessed in the early stages of development. 
The global energy and utility companies will make every effort to 
control access to this new, decentralized energy network just as 
software, telecommunications and content companies like Microsoft and 
AOL Time Warner have attempted to control access to the World Wide 
Web. It is critical that public institutions and nonprofit 
organizations--local governments, cooperatives, community development 
corporations, credit unions and the like--become involved early on in 
establishing distributed-generation associations (DGAs) in every 
country. Again, the analogy to the World Wide Web is apt. In the new 
hydrogen energy era, millions of end users will generate their own 
"content" in the form of hydrogen and electricity. By organizing 
collectively to control the energy they produce--just as workers in 
the twentieth century organized into unions to control their labor 
power--end users can better dictate the terms with commercial 
suppliers of fuel cells for lease, purchase or other use arrangements 
and with virtual utility companies, which will manage the 
decentralized "smart" energy grids. Creating the appropriate 
partnership between commercial and noncommercial interests will be 
critical to establishing the legitimacy, effectiveness and long-term 
viability of the new energy regime.

I have been describing, thus far, the implementation of hydrogen 
power mainly in industrialized countries, but it could have an even 
greater impact on emerging nations. The per capita use of energy 
throughout the developing world is a mere one-fifteenth of the 
consumption enjoyed in the United States. The global average per 
capita energy use for all countries is only one-fifth the level of 
this country. Lack of access to energy, especially electricity, is a 
key factor in perpetuating poverty around the world. Conversely, 
access to energy means more economic opportunity. In South Africa, 
for example, for every 100 households electrified, ten to twenty new 
businesses are created. Making the shift to a hydrogen energy 
regime--using renewable resources and technologies to produce the 
hydrogen--and creating distributed generation energy webs that can 
connect communities all over the world could lift billions of people 
out of poverty. As the price of fuel cells and accompanying 
appliances continues to plummet with innovations and economies of 
scale, they will become far more broadly available, as was the case 
with transistor radios, computers and cellular phones. The goal ought 
to be to provide stationary fuel cells for every neighborhood and 
village in the developing world.

Renewable energy technologies--wind, photovoltaic, hydro, biomass, 
etc.--can be installed in villages, enabling them to produce their 
own electricity and then use it to separate hydrogen from water and 
store it for subsequent use in fuel cells. In rural areas, where 
commercial power lines have not yet been extended because they are 
too expensive, stand-alone fuel cells can provide energy quickly and 
cheaply.

After enough fuel cells have been leased or purchased, and installed, 
mini energy grids can connect urban neighborhoods as well as rural 
villages into expanding energy networks. The HEW can be built 
organically and spread as the distributed generation becomes more 
widely used. The larger hydrogen fuel cells have the additional 
advantage of producing pure drinking water as a byproduct, an 
important consideration in village communities around the world where 
access to clean water is often a critical concern.

Were all individuals and communities in the world to become the 
producers of their own energy, the result would be a dramatic shift 
in the configuration of power: no longer from the top down but from 
the bottom up. Local peoples would be less subject to the will of 
far-off centers of power. Communities would be able to produce many 
of their own goods and services and consume the fruits of their own 
labor locally. But, because they would also be connected via the 
worldwide communications and energy webs, they would be able to share 
their unique commercial skills, products and services with other 
communities around the planet. This kind of economic self-sufficiency 
becomes the starting point for global commercial interdependence, and 
is a far different economic reality from that of colonial regimes of 
the past, in which local peoples were made subservient to and 
dependent on powerful forces from the outside. By redistributing 
power broadly to everyone, it is possible to establish the conditions 
for a truly equitable sharing of the earth's bounty. This is the 
essence of reglobalization from the bottom up.

Two great forces have dominated human affairs over the course of the 
past two centuries. The American Revolution unleashed a new human 
aspiration to universalize the radical notion of political democracy. 
That force continues to gain momentum and will likely spread to the 
Middle East, China and every corner of the earth before the current 
century is half over.

A second force was unleashed on the eve of the American Revolution 
when James Watt patented his steam engine, inaugurating the beginning 
of the fossil-fuel era and an industrial way of life that 
fundamentally changed the way we work.

The problem is that these two powerful forces have been at odds with 
each other from the very beginning, making for a deep contradiction 
in the way we live our lives. While in the political arena we covet 
greater participation and equal representation, our economic life has 
been characterized by ever greater concentration of power in ever 
fewer institutional hands. In large part that is because of the very 
nature of the fossil-fuel energy regime that we rely on to maintain 
an industrialized society. Unevenly distributed, difficult to 
extract, costly to transport, complicated to refine and multifaceted 
in the forms in which they are used, fossil fuels, from the very 
beginning, required a highly centralized command-and-control 
structure to finance exploration and production, and coordinate the 
flow of energy to end users. The highly centralized fossil-fuel 
infrastructure inevitably gave rise to commercial enterprises 
organized along similar lines. Recall that small cottage industries 
gave way to large-scale factory production in the late nineteenth and 
early twentieth centuries to take advantage of the capital-intensive 
costs and economies of scale that went hand in hand with steam power, 
and later oil and electrification. In the discussion of the emergence 
of industrial capitalism, little attention has been paid to the fact 
that the energy regime that emerged determined, to a great extent, 
the nature of the commercial forms that took shape.

Now, on the cusp of the hydrogen era, we have at least the 
"possibility" of making energy available in every community of the 
world--hydrogen exists everywhere on earth--empowering the whole of 
the human race. By creating an energy regime that is decentralized 
and potentially universally accessible to everyone, we establish the 
technological framework for creating a more participatory and 
sustainable economic life--one that is compatible with the principle 
of democratic participation in our political life. Making the 
commercial and political arenas seamless, however, will require a 
human struggle of truly epic proportions in the coming decades. What 
is in doubt is not the technological know-how to make it happen but, 
rather, the collective human will, determination and resolve to 
transform the great hope of hydrogen into a democratic reality.


Biofuels at Journey to Forever
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Biofuel at WebConX
http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm
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