With all due respect to a lot of folks who see hydrogen as the future fuel for cars, trucks and home fuel cell solutions, I don’t see the value.  Today, we are using hybrids and batteries to decrease CO2 output from cars, trucks and even trains. I believe that rechargeable batteries will provide sufficient energy for most local transportation, before a hydrogen infrastructure necessary for the mass of vehicles can be deployed.

Does that mean hydrogen is waste and leading us down a dead end, like Ethanol is? No, it’s not that bad.  When discussing hydrogen, it’s important to keep several things in the mind: 1) the Hindenburg, the stuff is highly explosive 2) it’s the lightest thing on earth, it’s much harder to contain and transport, than methane (natural gas) which is about 6 times heavier. 3) creating hydrogen from anything besides water, will still release CO2 into the atmosphere.  So any benefit of hydrogen, for example, it’s pollution free combustion (when you burn hydrogen you get water) and it’s availability as part of every atom of water. 

So?  What next?

The 3 top problems with solar energy replace all human engery needs are 1) econmic cost of the infrastructure. 2) The cost (the loss of power) of transporting electricity far from it’s generating source. 3) Limited sunlight, at most, the sun is available about 1/2 of the time, depending on geographic location, season and weather.  These 3 issues are major stumbling blocks to solar becoming a widespread solution to human power needs.

Hydrogen solves 2 of the 3 inherent problems facing solar adoption. First, by using solar electrcity to create hydrogen gas to send to “traditional” power plants via pipelines solves the issue of energy loss during transmission.  Granted we’ve already talked about the cost of transporting hydrogen, but by limiting it’s use to thousands of power plants, rather than 10’s of millions of autos it’s a smaller, more rational approach.  The second problem, that of where we get eletricity when the sun is not available can also be solved by creating hydrogen from solar electricity.  Granted we would need at least twice the capacity of solar collection, to generate enough fuel for use by gas fired powered plants at night, but the ability (in theory) to eliminate CO2 from the generation energy production is the most any global warming opponent could/should hope for.

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