It seems as if the Hydrogen car is like a bad rerun of an old zombie movie. Just when we think its dead, it raises up and starts howling again. The question is this, "Is the Hydrogen car for real or is it a pipe dream that just won't die?"
They claim that the rebirth of the electric car didn't do so well. That the sales where lackluster and that it is an utter failure. Lets examine this a little more closely and see what the truth is. The truth is sales are exactly what they are supposed to be. If you look at the year the electric car was reborn and look at the sales figures from there, they are ahead of what the hybrid car was when it first came on the market more than ten years ago. The hybrids still comprise only a small percentage of the market, so technically they are still in the early adopter phase. Once they hit 10 percent market share or so, that is when it takes off.
Why then is the Hydrogen car poised to make a return.........again? Well think about it this way. If we all started driving electric cars we would have several advantages over a fuel cell car.
First of all a hydrogen fuel cell is extremely complicated and expensive. They would maintain the cost and complexity of the car and we would still need regular maintenance that only the dealers could perform. The electric car is battery powered. It is a simple chemical device and no more. No matter how complicated they try to make an electric car it will always be a very simple device, no matter how it is arranged. They are cheaper to buy and easier to maintain then a fuel cell car.
Next if the cost of fuel. Take a car like the Nissan Leaf for example. Given the current cost of electricity a Leaf can run for about 100 miles on 3 dollars or so of electricity. We can refuel it at home, and there are already several charging stations popping up all over the place. The fuel cell car on the other hand is always a decade or more in the future and probably always will be. There is no refueling infrastructure at all right now unless you live in one of the laboratory markets that have a small handful of stations. An electric car on the other hand can be refueled from my garage. I can make the fuel. And we then become slaves to whomever decides to sell us the fuel. Anybody that thinks that hydrogen will cost less than gasoline is lying to everyone. And if the electricity for the electric car gets too expensive, I just start putting up solar panels and wind turbines.
And lastly, HYDROGEN IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE. It is an energy carrier. At the moment the only way to get hydrogen is through the reformation of natural gas or the electrolysis of water. The latter is only 15% efficient at most, in laboratories. So why would be use 15% of the energy in electricity to make hydrogen to put in a car, when you can put 100% of the electricity itself in the car?
The simple truth is this. Hydrogen is not sustainable as a transportation fuel. Maybe it is if you want to sustain the status-quo for the people who make us dependent on them for fuel, but it is certainly not sustainable for those of us who want to be truly sustainable in our own lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment