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Los Angeles City Employees To Drive Hydrogen Power
mace_15 writes "According this CNN article the mayor of Los Angeles has signed a lease with Honda to allow city employees to drive experimental hydrogen powered cars. The cars can reach speeds up to 93mph and Honda claims they have a range of 220 miles before refueling. More information on the car can be found here. Mercedes-Benz has a similar car."
They had the same problem when they first introduced gasoline autos.
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Now, the question is, which comes first: hydrogen refueling stations so that people will buy cars, or hydrogen powered cars to drive the need for refueling stations?
Cars, of course. Hydrogen can be stored in the home or in already existing stations. Hell, you could get it from K-mart.
What lessons there are here for alternative energy cars, I don't know. Aside from the folks who burn used french-fry oil in their diesels, opportunities to run alternate-fuel vehicles without special support appear to be few and far between (save for block-heater-friendly Canadian cities being EV-friendly)
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Which comes first: hydrogen refueling stations so that people will buy cars, or hydrogen powered cars to drive the need for refueling stations?
Hydrogen cars will have to become more common before the infrastructure is built. Noone is going to shell out the dough for trucking, storing, and the means of transfering the hydrogen from storage to car, without a significant clientelle. However if LA starts investing in Hyrogen for it's fleet of municipal vehicles, you can bet that one or two companies will get a sweet contract from the city to perform the essentials of keeping the cars fueled.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
This is true but belies the point so i'll ignore all the judgemental preachy-type stuff and just address this: This is a good point, which is why most environmentalists want to ultimately use solar power to bust hydrogen atoms from water... This is better than trying solar-powered cars, or the electric battery-based cars (what do we do with millions of discarded enormous batteries every year?). Personally this is why i like BMW's approach of actually burning hydrogen in a somewhat standard engine as opposed to a lot of other attempts to use H2 to fuel a generator that stores power in a battery. Besides i live in the midwest (Chicago at the moment, but will be going back to North Dakota and Minnesota in a few weeks) i've never been a big fan of battery-car anything for two reasons: batteries don't hold dick when they're cold and they don't give off any heat, when the temp is -40 i like my heat to be "ON" as opposed to "nonexistent."
Besides, increasing the humidity of cities is certainly better than polluting them with Ozone, unburned hydrocarbons, et al. i would rather deal with the problem of it raining a lot than sitting around debating whether or not diesel fumes are contributing to the Asthma epidemic in this country.
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
::sigh:: This AC is probably a flame, but since I'm putting off studying for a midterm anyways....
First of... yes, hydrogen is a storage medium... what do you think gasoline is? That lovely little eqn e=mc^2 applies (with varying efficiency) to everything. The trick is the varying efficiency. If I could have a nuke plant churning out H, I'd prefer it to the massive oli infrastructure we have now. It will centralize pollution in one place (so that we can have lovely scrubbers and whatnot to get rid of it) and (as a long time past LA resident) prevent all the smog. Yes, water vapor forms clouds/fog/condensates whatever, but we need the water. What we don't need are stage 2 smog alerts where they recommend not going outside.
Yes, I admit that H cars are just a technofix, but compared with making society change, they are an amazingly useful one.
-Brian
As for steam, you must have missed it when this question came up in discussions about fuel cell cars. The answer is that gasoline produces water in its exhaust as well, in comparable amounts, so you're overestimating the humidifying effect of water exhaust. I'm not sure what the numbers are like, really -- I wonder how a hydrogen car's exhaust would compare to a boiling pot of water, for instance.
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The cool thing about hydrogen fuel cells: you really don't need fuel stations to start deploying.
Anyone can make hydrogen. Get a bucket of water and apply some voltage.
Do technologies exist to do electrolysis today? Yup.
Can I do it *safely* and *cheaply* in my garage at night? I have no clue. Anyone have an answer?
A speech...
As opposed to cars filled with harmless, fire-resistant gasoline?
Hydrogen burns upwards.
Gasoline pours out on the ground and surrounds you with an incinerating puddle of fire.
It amazes me that people worry about cars with hydrogen, as if they weren't currently driving cars powered by miniature gasoline explosions.
bush is going to fight tooth and nail to keep his oil interests in power... granted, this article talks about electric cars, but still, it is clear that our current administration's long term energy policies are all about PETRO!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades