AltEnToday

According to Travis Bradford (author of Solar Revolution), the wave of the future in solar is closely tied to the wave of the future in hydrogen - specifically fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells mean portable energy on demand, with essentially no greenhouse gas emissions. However, hydrogen itself isn’t a very potent form of potential energy - even pressurized it doesn’t provide the same energy-output per unit of volume as fossil fuels (by density). However, as demand shifts away from oil over the next century, hydrogen appears poised to become one of the dominant fuel sources in the world.

General Motors is beginning to test out the theory that, along with ethanol biofuels and all-electric, hydrogen fuel cells may become a viable energy option for the future. To that end, I caught an article on BNet about GM’s plan to work with Clean Energy Fuels Corporation to build a hydrogen filling station in Los Angeles, CA. This is going hand-in-hand with General Motor’s development of the hydrogen fuel-cell powered Equinox, which will be provided to a select number of test households to see how viable a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle might really be. As with any infrastructure demand the challenge is always to balance the growth of demand to supply. In this case, hydrogen fueling stations can’t come to market until there are hydrogen cars, and hydrogen cars won’t appear until there are fueling stations.

Bradford’s prediction is intriguing as well… He proposes that excess home- and business-based solar supplies will provide a cost-effective method to develop distributed hydrogen fueling options between commute destinations - with hydrogen stations (like our current petroleum-based fueling infrastructure) being much less significant than our current model.