To be clear, I find fuel cells fascinating technology. I don't know how much potential improvement is possible and I support continuing research to find out.
That's different from supporting a build out of a hydrogen infrastructure. There is significant cost to do so and, to be effective, it will probably need to be as extensive as the current fueling infrastructure. I suppose one could argue that such infrastructure partially exists already, considering the land and some structures would be repurposed. But that's only part of the cost. We still need to deal with new storage tanks and delivery systems from tank to vehicle. Given that hydrogen is hard to contain and that the current hydrogen infrastructure is essentially zero, this is a huge expense. Second, the only method I know to produce hydrogen from non fossil fuel is by cracking water. It's my understanding that it is substantially more efficient to just use the electricity directly to charge a battery. Perhaps, if you take into account the production of the battery you might show that in some cases the fuel cell comes out ahead. But that's with last year's battery technology. Enough progress is being made that I think such arguments will be false if not already false. To have a large number of businesses supporting an unknown technology makes me suspicious. This is not an altruistic effort. Sure, support the build out now. Get government money to help. Once all this is built, it will be supplied with non fossil fuel hydrogen. Or not. If not, is that infrastructure just going to sit there? Ha. The pressure to use it, with hydrogen from natural gas, will be unsurmountable. Goals will be crushed and the petrol industry will win. So, let's support research. But no build out until we have reasonable evidence of a technology to efficiently produce hydrogen in a sustainable way. Peri _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
