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Fuel-cell Vehicles for Americans
hey writes "An article titled Fuel-cell vehicles run clean, but is their future clear? in the Japan Times says Honda is leasing fuel-cell cars to individual Americans. The article mentions: 'Honda officials said it is easier for the automaker to start leasing in the U.S. because there are more hydrogen gas installations there than in Japan.'"
We have hydrogen gas installations? Do you have to go to an industrial chemical supplier to buy your fuel?
After all, I am strangely colored.
Until the legislation and tax rules are changed to make it un-economic to run a massive SUV. Sure these things are cleaner, but with Gas in the US being so much cheaper than pretty much all of the rest of the western world, and no additional taxes on large vehicles then what will be the incentive for the MAJORITY of Americans to do this?
Sure one or two tree-hugging people will go for this, but it won't actually matter until its cheaper to buy a Fuel Cell powered vehicle, and its ridiculously expensive to buy ridiculous cars like the Ford Excursion.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
While the US government would want you to believe otherwise, oil is not the only source of energy. You can use a renewable power source, such as solar/hydroelectric/wind power, when producing hydrogen. While you still need the initial input to create the solar plant, dam or windmills, the amount of hydrogen produced with very little impact on the environment would be astronomical!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
At the G8 summit, Bush seemed to be looking for technological silver bullets rather than do as the rest of the developed world and actively reduce petrolium consumption via e.g. higher taxes on fuel. He claims the US economy would be wrecked by similar measures however it doesn't seem to have harmed the UK's (mind you we travel shorter distances). In an earlier statement he said that the US economy was overdependent on middle east fuel and this was a problem for national security and economic stability (so why not try to reduce consumption? Oh never mind). I'll be fascinated to see whether he puts his money where his mouth is and starts pumping funds into this type of technology (i.e. subsidises it) to give Americans an appealing alternative to 10mpg SUVs.
But it's easier to build better power plants every few years than to get everyone to buy better cars every few years. Centralized energy production may not be more effective right now but it has a better perspective. At least so I think.
...that /. readers go apoplectic over the Supreme Court decision to let the government of the city of New London, CT take property from private individuals to give to developers, but are more than happy to suggest further intrusions on property and basic economic rights when it comes to alternative energy and environmental pet issues.
There are many many issues to be worked and a top-down socialistic approach of using coercion and forcing the people to make changes that people haven't thought through or properly justified to a degree commensurate with the methods being used is only a prescription for disaster.
The American economy is part and parcel of the world economy. If the American economy takes a total nose dive, then so too does the rest of the planet since we all trade with each other. Consider it an economic food chain or food web. You can't total any sizeable portion of it without totalling the rest.
Let's say they use punitive taxation to force people to use alternative and hybrid vehicles? What about the fleets of trailers and diesel locomotives that bring goods to the people? Will they be similarly targeted? Of course, why leave those polluting behemoths out? Up goes their costs, there's no near-term solutions, drastic moves cost money, and guess who that gets passed to? We're going to save the environment by making Americans pay $10 for a gallon of milk and $20 a pound of beef? Increase the costs of every damn thing on the shelf of every store because the cost of getting it there skyrocketed? At the same time their cost of getting to work in the morning and back home in the evening has gone up 5000%?
Give me a break.
The solution is to keep putting hybrids out, keep making them more efficient and cost-competitive, and allow them to be hooked up to power at home to kick-start them, without having to make owners mod them to do it. They need to make engines for the hybrids that run on gasoline, ethanol, diesel, etc. Pretty much rotary or gas turbines.
The solution is to keep working on increased efficiency and decreased cost of solar panels and solar water heating systems, making them something you'd find standard at the big home stores like Home Depot and Lowes and something that high end home builders would include in their homes encouraging them to be commonplace and low cost enough for lower end home buyers to install.
The solution is to come up with systems that turn sewage into methane and other useful things, perhaps even within the home itself, putting out less pollution into the sewage systems in the first place.
The solutions are indeed technological advancement and economic positioning to bring costs down to make adoption natural and not something that will crash a powerful part of the world's economy.
If anyone proved that top-down control of society by the state is not an answer, it was the Soviet Union and where is Russia now? Struggling to dig out from under. Where is China now? Struggling to find a way to join the modern world without undergoing a dangerous destabilizing total revolution that would set them back for decades never mind the rest of the world that is doing business with them. Statist solutions are not solutions, they're a guaranteed ticket to global disaster.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I'm not sure that the U.S. oil problem is caused so much by the huge 10 mpg SUVs as it is the people who choose to drive those vehicles. What is going to make someone who drives a Ford Excusion choose a hydrogen-powered car over a civic that's been available for decades? By the time gas prices in the US hit a point where people start reconsidering their SUVs, the economy and the whole country will be in a very bad place.
You, sir, are the reason the words "nutjob" and "hippie" were invented. Let me count the ways...
1) We're not running out of oil anytime soon.
Oil isn't just a biomatter byproduct, it's also a naturally-occurring geochemical substance. Remember, this planet has been here for billions of years, and has had life on it for most (80% or more) of that time. That alone provides more biological oil than we could use in thousands of years.
Add to that the quantity of geochemical oils that are produced by normal geological processes in Earth's mantle layer. Animal and plant life are not the only sources of carbon on this planet.
Now add to that agricultural oils that we produce from recently-departed plants. We use those to further dilute the other types of oil we find, and stretch it further. And despite what you probably think, oil doesn't degrade over time unless you expose it to oxygen (which doesn't happen in pressurized underground deposits).
We won't be running out of oil anytime soon.
2) Oil doesn't have to be a huge source of pollution.
True, we're misusing oil, but we are improving in our understanding and methods of using it. Cars now burn fuel noticably cleaner than cars from 10 years ago. And cars from 10 years ago burn fuel noticably cleaner than cars 10 years before them. And so on, all the way back to when cars were invented. It's not just about cleaner emissions, though, since burning a fuel in a cleaner way causes more energy to be released from it, causing more power output. Theoretically, only water and a little carbon dioxide should be left after gasoline oxidation. The more engines improve, the closer we'll get to that theoretical limit point.
Not using oil is just a stupid suggestion.
3) This planet can easily sustain a lot more than 6 billion people.
Given current usable land area on Earth, if everyone (man, woman, and child) was allowed an acre of land (so a normal family would have around 3-5 acres), the Earth can sustain 46 billion people. No one would starve. No one would be homeless. No one would be crammed in a tiny apartment with a couch, a TV, and a hot plate.
The "land area" calculation used for this example purposely excluded deserts, mountain peaks, and the polar regions (all of which are nearly uninhabitable).
Clearly, reducing the population is not necessary.
Your point number 3 is a sensible one, however. But unfortunately, I fear there are far too many people in power that want to keep that power. This would remove their power over the rushed, oppressed, poor common people who are locked-in to central government and locked-in to inefficient and costly utilities controlled by... the same people who have the power.
That said, I doubt people ever lived in caves when houses were available, and I don't think an asteroid will ever hit Earth again. But that's just me.
The party is just beginning.
The rush to hydrogen is an attempt to pre-judge the issue. For instance, solar panels have an energy payback time of 4 years (single-crystal cells) or less; if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment. But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency and you need about 2.5 times as many solar panels. You get a similar answer for wind.
If you insist on hydrogen, it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy (artificial photosynthesis excepted, but that's not even being done on a serious laboratory scale yet). That's why hydrogen isn't the answer. You can put enough lithium-ion batteries into a fairly small car to get 300 miles range, and the Toshiba electrodes have cut the charging time from hours to minutes. Why are we allowing our governments to waste money on this expensive, bulky, volatile and lossy gas?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Storing Materials (For example, Gasoline), and using it to produce energy is primitive and inadecuate. What we need is better, smaller batterys.
That is a stupid statement. Batteries are just as much 'storing materials' as oil or hydrogen. It's all chemical energy. Only that batteries are far worse at it! There is much less energy to be had oxidizing a pound of lead than oxidizing a pound of gasoline.
So, we have a form of energy (Electricity), that is clean, easy to store, cheap, and that is portable across different aplications
This article is about fuel cells. Fuel cells produce electricity directly. Saying that "Electricity is clean" is utterly moronic. It depends on where the energy for producing that electricity comes from! Do you think batteries grow on trees or something?
Besides which, no: Electricity is not easy to store. What are you proposing? Giant capacitors? Oh, right: Batteries. But batteries don't store electricity. Batteries store chemical energy.
Finally: Fuel cells already are the 'improved' batteries you are looking for.
So, the Earth has been like a gigantic 'battery' for the past several hundred million years or so, being trickle-charged by solar energy. All of a sudden (in a microscopic blink of an eye, in terms of geologic time) it's being discharged by human willy-nilly technology. Uh-oh... where's that Fast Recharge switch? There isn't one. The Bush/Kerry Demo-Publi-Cratican establishment tried for awhile to get us to think they could just drill a bunch of hydrogen wells or something to solve this little prob, but apparently reality recently intervened on that one. Personally, I think the only answer is figuring out how to safely tap nuclear energy to keep the whole show going, which would be the elegant solution, but oh what a head-scratcher that one seems to be so far. I guess all we can really hope is that the demand for the ancient power source doesn't get too great in the near future, giving us all time to get used to it (whatever that may mean), and find some way of dealing with what looks more and more like a "Tragedy of The Commons writ very large" taking its course. Looking back to the 1950's, say, we probably should have said to ourselves, "Gee, if we don't stop using all this stuff now, our grandchildren are going to hate us someday". Right. Oh well... (btw, if someone over there wants to label this a 'troll' post, well, that's ok with me I guess)
Is it me, or do the Japanese automakers take an "AND" approach to engineering, as in "high-performance AND low emissions." In contrast, the U.S. automakers seem to always take the "OR" approach.
"If you look at the numbers, electric has more potential to eliminate oil consumption than anything else out there."
This is the thing I wish more of the discussion would focus on. When you look at energy consumption, cars, home furnaces and some water heaters are about the only common* items that people use daily that burn oil/gas/natural gas directly. For pretty much every other device that we use that consumes energy we use electricity and even those have viable alternatives. Cars are the only one that really doesn't have mass market alternatives.
The thing about electricity is that on the consumption end, it's all pretty much the same. A couple of transformers and it's delivered in the right voltage, etc. If we switch over to nuclear at my local power plant, I don't need to change my laptop. If solar suddenly becomes more efficient, it can be switched over.
The thing that fuel cells give us (with most of the designs being put forward) is that the powertrain itself in cars becomes based on electricity. Generating it can move from one method to another as efficiencies change and we don't need to retool the whole automotive motion system. Electrical consumption at the end gives us an abstraction in the middle (like a good API between 2 computer systems) meaning that as long as the middle is electricity, we can change how we get it without having to change the other end.
*Please don't list all of the other items that can burn fuel directly. Focus on the point.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Good point, but you're forgetting something. Most people don't drive (just pulling a number out of thin air) 100 miles per day. So most people would simply come home from work, and charge your car using a charge rate that within say, 8 hours will fully charge an "empty" car.
What killed the GM EV series was the fact that you could only drive 125 miles (IIRC) and this was only a problem because it took around 6 hours to charge it (again, IIRC).
I don't have any numbers on how many people drive more than 100 miles a day, but I would think it would be pretty low. Maybe 2-3% as a guess. That's a load that could be handled.
I completely agree with your point regarding total cost, most people don't factor everything. However, I would say that if you are willing to live without the status symbol of a new car, you can do a bit better with used cars.
Most people can't bear to drive around a two generation old model and give up the status of owning the latest and greatest. But it is less than half the cost. If you are willing to drive slightly older vehicles, not only do you spend far less, but you save more of the environment. The total environmental cost of producing a new car is (by some sources) two times the cost of the car itself.
Example: Here in the states, you can buy an eight year-old Honda Accord with about 80K miles on it for around $7,000. This is a car that is going to go to 180k miles, meaning you can drive it at least 100,000 miles for an upfront cost of $0.07 / mile. Do your research, this is a car that will require very little maintenance with not much more than a timing belt, brakes and a CV joint or two. Here's the math for my typical annualized costs:
This is a 4-door, mid-sized car, with full safety features, airbags, windows and mirrors, nice paint, air conditioning, moon roof, quality wheels, etc. Drop back to a smaller car (like a Honda Civic) and you can do even better ($2,000 less upfront cost or about $0.03/mile). The trick is to find a well made automobile that doesn't need a lot of on-going maintenance, you have to read good consumer information (Consumer Reports:Used Cars) to properly evaluate.
The metro area in which I live has terrible mass transit, it would take me almost four hours to commute the 15 miles I do to work. Biking is deadly, there are no bikelanes and only narrow roads and highways. Same goes for just about everything else we do, mass transit is not an option. But this proves that one can still own a safe car, save money and the environment. Just don't buy everything shiney and new the car makers are hawking.
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