Edited by author 03-14-2003 03:25 PM
This article entirely misses the plot.

The future of power is about power, not about the minutia of which energy storage device will be fitted to cars. Fuel cells are good and fine, but not much use without one hell of a lot of extra electricity production. Hydrogen is expensive to make, store and use. And sure, we could spend a lot of time and money and probably crack those nuts, but the time and money would be much better spent on simply making more electricity.

Move all cars to hydrogen, a product that needs to be made from electricity pulled from the already taxed US grid and you'll have to build a whole hell of a lot more power plants. And the truth is, that NIMBY will largely prevent any new nuclear reactors, pebble bed or other wise, from being built in the US. So to move to fuel cells, we'll have to at least double the existing number of fossil fuel burning stacks. Mostly built out in the countryside, pumping the juice into the cities to make this hydrogen. So all we accomplish by quickly adopting hydrogen fuel cells is moving existing pollution from the cities and into the countryside, remote emissions at it's finest.

The author suggests spending 100 billion on fuel cells, a complete waste in my mind. However, I have long suggested spending that sort of cash on fusion power research. Because once you crack the fusion nut, the little matters of localized power storage for automobiles will mostly solve themselves. If electricity is as cheap as air and doesn't pollute, who's going to want to pay for petrochemicals? Sure, fusion may not be quite that cheap, but compared on an environmental cost and given the benefits of near total energy self sufficiency, fusion would be so very much more beneficial.

Solve the power problem and the free market will figure out the best way to get that power into cars.