Amory Lovins actually argues that if battery tech doesn't do amazing things soon*, distributed H2 production may kick in. Your utility will lease you solar cells for your roof and a box for your garage containing an electrolyzer, fuel cell, and H2 storage tank. You turn sunlight and water into H2 during the day, then put that into your car at night**. Any excess capacity in the solar array during the day can be used to power your house or sent to the grid, as can any excess H2 left over at night after your tank is full. This largely solves the two biggest problem with the Hydrogen Economy concept -- the fact that H2 is really difficult to store for long periods and distribute to many individual sites over long distances.
* ...which it might. Certainly Tesla's betting a lot of capital on that proposition, and we already have the tech to confine toxicity to the production site (where it can be captured) and makes the batteries themselves fully recyclable -- cradle-to-cradle engineering.
** Another fault in the fuel-cell car idea is that H2 has great energy per unit mass compared to batteries, but crummy energy per unit volume. Compressing it costs energy, making the overall results less efficient. There are some speculative improvements for H2 storage, like using metal-hydrides (related to the stuff in NiMH batteries).
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Date: 2007-04-09 09:07 pm (UTC)* ...which it might. Certainly Tesla's betting a lot of capital on that proposition, and we already have the tech to confine toxicity to the production site (where it can be captured) and makes the batteries themselves fully recyclable -- cradle-to-cradle engineering.
** Another fault in the fuel-cell car idea is that H2 has great energy per unit mass compared to batteries, but crummy energy per unit volume. Compressing it costs energy, making the overall results less efficient. There are some speculative improvements for H2 storage, like using metal-hydrides (related to the stuff in NiMH batteries).