Comments on: Hydrogen power is a sham

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:07:05 +0000

I never know this about hydrogen. All I know is that hydrogen is highly explosive. I’m glad you have elaborated it here.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:45:42 +0000

Too bad I wasn’t giving that speech. I would have shot down every fallacious argument you just brought up against Hydrogen.

You did part of the work for me. Battery technology is stuck right at the threshold where it would actually be useful to power a full time EV car. So instead we get extended range EV which are less efficient because they have a heavy engine which is not even running most of the time. See the Chevy Volt.

So we have this problem if range. How to solve it and still use EV propulsion? The way is to instead combine batteries with Hydrogen. Now you very succinctly pointed out the places where inefficiencies enter the equation for hydrogen. You however left off the part about the internal combustion engine. The ICE (for short) is horribly inefficient. It converts maybe 25% of the actual energy into movement.

So even taking all the places where you make electricity, use it in electrolysis, transport the Hydrogen, convert it back to electricity and water in a fuel cell, and then use an electric motor to power the car it is STILL MORE EFFICIENT!

But don’t let little things like facts get in the way Michael Moore… I mean whatever you name is. In addition the system reduces pollution the same way EV battery cars do. Because power plants are WAY more efficient and WAY less polluting. Besides, places like California hope to achieve 30% renewable power in it’s grid in the next decade or so. SO as time goes on the system improves.

ICE in the other hand has peaked and has only a few tricks up it’s sleeve which still leave it with worse mpg then an extended range EV.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:02:24 +0000

Good points about how people usually don’t think things the whole way through. I agree that hydrogen is probably a dead end. However I would like to present the scenario wear it would work.

We greatly increase our nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and wave power production. We then use this energy to produce hydrogen.

However we are very unlikely to greatly increase our nuclear power production which is the only way at this point we could feasible generate enough power with current technology to run a hydrogen economy. We know the environmentalist won’t let that happen. (This is one reason environmentalist have been the greatest producers of green house gas in the past 50 years)

But basically the benefit of going to a hydrogen economy is that if we could develop clean power production on a large scale then we could have a completely carbon neutral energy system.

But most likely it would be an expensive fiasco.