Really? You want me to imagine that Bush had some moralistic desire to allocate $1 billion of small-government funding in order to find ways to make the world cleaner and greener, and then decided, just on the side, to slash a few environmental protections while he was at it? What really strains the gullible mind is the idea that George Bush was trying to be some sort of techno-enviro-hero. His record suggests otherwise.

True breakthroughs in hydrogen have been few and far between. I don’t really know of any. Yes, we’ve learned an awful lot about hydrogen systems over the years, but most of that learning has simply confirmed what we already knew; that hydrogen fuel cells require a lot of time, a lot of energy, and too much scarce and expensive metal, i.e., platinum. Look up if you want to know why platinum should be so prohibitive.

Splitting water to get H2 and putting it in a high pressure atmosphere with CO2 makes CH4. This takes away the major difficulties of storing H2 (due to it being highly corrosive), which makes it 100% compatible with the existing natural gas storage and distribution network.

Apparently this technology has the highest potential in terms of storing energy for long periods of time. In addition wind+NG is highly complimentary, due to the quick response time of gas turbines.

http://www.iwes.fraunhofer.de/en/abteilungen/energiewirtschaft/energy_economy_andsystemsanalysis/staff/personal_energiewirtschaftundsystemanalyse/norman_gerhardt.html

Making hydrogen from natural gas is a loser.

Making, compressing, and distributing hydrogen using renewable energy wastes a lot of energy. We have no affordable long-lasting fuel cells. The overall efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is too low to make them a player.

Republicans have no policy of innovation. That’s a Ryan-level lie.

Republicans attempt to kill research and innovation money as often as possible. Unless it’s designed for the pockets of their major contributors.
Bush – joke of the Century. A really bad, bad joke which we’ll be paying for many, many years into the future. Just look at what he did to our national debt….

For a household which has more than one car and at least one of them essentially never travels further than the EV range, then an EV is 100% workable.

For someone who mostly travels no more than the range of a PHEV but does need to go further at times, then a PHEV is 100% workable. 30 or more miles on electricity and then hybrid mileage all day long.

A combination of EVs and PHEVs could cut our oil use more than 75%. Right now.

(BTW, battery guarantees are generally 100,000 miles. About what the very best engine guarantees run. The Toshiba SCiB lithium-ion battery is rated at 2,000 cycles. In a 100 mile range EV that’s a 200,000 mile life expectancy.)

That is why manufacturers have been shifting up dates for going to regular production with fuel cell vehicles.

As far as Republican vs. Democrat, Republicans “policy” is not regulation but innovation…like Bush’s Hydrogen Initiative. Trying to legislate the technology that creates the current power grid is a joke at best…however, putting money into nanotechnology and hydrogen, like Bush did, creates the next leap in clean energy production and storage.

There’s plenty of basic research ongoing that is dealing with production, storage and utilization Hydrogen just can’t compete with electricity when it comes to transportation.

There might be a role for long term energy storage but we’re so far from needing long term storage that there is no need to pump major money in that direction.

But enough nitpicking let’s focus on the bigger picture:

Research like that of Nocera only got some crums from the budget. Most of the money went to hydrogen storage, implementation in cars, and production of hydrogen by nuclear power plants, and from fossil fuels.

This made no sense. If he would have been serious about a hydrogen economy, and would have understood the basic concept, he would have funded renewable energy research at least equally to hydrogen storage technologies.

If you are concerned about emphysema you should be angry about the continued efforts of the republican party to dismantle environmental standards.

This resulted in breakthroughs such as that by Nocera of MIT who created “artificial leaves”. These use sunlight directly to catalyze water and separate the hydrogen. 100% clean.

It’s painfully obvious to anyone who looks at facts — the Republican party (and, for that matter, decent portions of the Democrats) are blatantly hurting the people and society they are supposed to be helping.

Hydrogen – not baseload. Fill-in possibly.

Lots of ways to store energy. Hydrogen might be one we would use. It might be fine for very deep backup – rare long periods of little solar/wind input. It’s not likely to be used for normal storage – it’s just too “lossy” when compared to utility scale batteries.

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To say that EVs are inherently inefficient is to admit that you don’t have facts in hand. EVs put about 90% of the energy input into moving the vehicle. Batteries are heavy right now, but that is very likely to improve.

There’s a tradeoff between vehicle weight and system efficiency. It’s not likely that hydrogen will win this one.

Power plants need to keep a constant voltage, or baseload. They do this by spinning up coal generators in excess of what they need and adding that power to the grid (or taking it away). Because coal “stores energy”.

Hydrogen, a fuel, stores energy. So it can be used in fuel cells as needed — at night, or in low wind. That is the value.

EVs are inherently inefficient because batteries scale to the size of the storage of electricity. Right now, a Toyota Prius has a curb weight of over 3000 lbs — more than my KIA Spectra! And 700 lbs of that is battery.

Hydrogen storage tanks are is miniscule and they don’t scale linearly to the size of the energy stored.

Hydrogen is nothing but a storage system. Making hydrogen from water using renewable electricity is very inefficient. It’s much more efficient to use that electricity directly in vehicles.

We’re years away from reasonably priced and long lasting fuel cells. EVs and PHEVs are on the road now.

Were we to move to hydrogen as a energy storage systems we would have to build massive infrastructure to manufacture and distribute hydrogen. The electric grid is already in place.

EVs and PHEVs are likely to increase in range and drop in price over the next few years. While we’re still figuring out how to make and distribute hydrogen. EVs and PHEVs will be “locked into” the market because of their low operation cost.

In order to fuel cell/hydrogen vehicles to establish a market presence they would have to offer either vastly superior performance or vastly cheaper purchase/operating prices. I don’t see how they do that.

Hydrogen is the ultimate renewable fuel only if you ignore electricity.

I suspect our future grid will be very wide and capable of moving a lot of electricity from region to region. A wide-spread grid minimizes the amount of storage and “deep” backup generation needed.

Europe’s “Desertec” idea of building a grid from Iceland to the Middle East extends the solar day by about six hours – from when the Sun peaks up in Saudi Arabia to when it slides down off the coast of North Africa.

Perhaps someone will build a thorium reactor that produces cheap electricity, I believe the Chinese are giving it a try. If someone can demonstrate that it is possible to make affordable electricity with thorium then we should give it a serious consideration. This is a well-researched idea, it’s not like we aren’t trying.

But, do remember, even if we figure out how to use thorium the cost of building a new reactor is immense. And it takes many years which means that a lot of debt accumulates. The end result is that nuclear, regardless of fuel, is too expensive.

We need to go to war with the army we have, not the army we might or might not have later on. Right now wind is producing cheap electricity. Solar has reached grid parity in a few places and its price is dropping rapidly. We could install enough wind and solar to allow us to shut down coal plants – without adding storage to the grid.

Later via a combination of renewables, storage and load-shifting we could get natural gas down to a very small portion of our grid. Perhaps use NG only when we have the very rare event of low sunshine and wind over several days.

What I would propose is that the Republican Party regroup and focus on bringing about the next industrial revolution in renewable energies. As mentioned, this would create jobs, local tax revenue, energy independence, and quite honestly, we don’t have to care about the environment, but it would help that too!

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