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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Say goodbye to fossil fuels. Author and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin explains why hydrogen is the next great power source.
Sep 24, 2002 | Imagine driving a car that not only doesn't pump out any greenhouse gas emissions, but also acts as a generator to power your house at night, and feeds any excess energy back to the power grid. It's a dream that goes by the name of "distributed generation" and it's based on the idea that hydrogen is the next great power source.
In the hydrogen future, owning such a car would mean that it would drive your house, when you weren't driving it. The car would be a kind of power plant on wheels, with a generating capacity of twenty kilowatts, all powered by hydrogen. Unlike fossil fuels, hydrogen is abundantly available everywhere and just needs to be extracted from a source like natural gas, gasoline or water. And unlike an electric car, which must be charged up at night by the electrical power grid, a hydrogen car would actually make its driver an energy producer.
Sixteen prototypes of these wonder cars, which run on hydrogen and sometimes methanol, are already cruising around California. The California Fuel Cell Partnership, a research group that's testing the cars, recently held a fuel-cell car rally in Monterey. The partnership expects to have 60 of these cars on the road by the end of 2003.
For Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Hydrogen Economy," hydrogen power is the next big thing, as big or bigger than the last big thing, the emergence of the Internet and the Web. And Rifkin sees a connection between the two. A future in which every car driver could also be an energy producer implies a power infrastructure that is fundamentally decentralized. When everyone becomes a buyer and a seller of power, the similarly decentralized Internet will be the medium that matches producers and consumers together.
But is hydrogen really a clean-cut chemical Prince Charming destined to rescue us from the triple-threat evil stepsisters of greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and dependence on foreign oil? Or is it yet another false idol, perpetually a decade off in the future, put forth by car and energy companies to soothe our fears about the environment and geopolitical unrest, while they go about their usual business burning up the same old suspect fossil fuels?
Rifkin spoke to Salon by phone and explained his views on the potential of hydrogen power. It won't be easy, he says, but just imagining the possibility is the first step to achieving the dream.
Where do things stand now with hydrogen power?
GE and other companies are moving to hydrogen fuel cells for home use by next year. This is just about where the P.C. and the Internet revolution was in the '80s; in other words, it's beyond the point of pure R&D, but just at the very beginning of market penetration. There are about 850 companies rushing into this. And for stationary fuel cells, we have 30 states that now mandate that if you generate energy at the end of the line with renewable [power sources], they've got to accept your energy back to the power grid. There's also legislation nationally in the U.S. that would make the whole power grid open.
You will also see it in cartridges for laptops and cell phones. Motorola is doing a methane fuel cell, others are doing hydrogen. You'll be able to power-up your cellphone for 40 days. That's in the next year or so. That's when the public will be acquainted with fuel cells.
Big oil has long been accused of doing everything it can to squelch research into alternative energy sources. Won't the petrochemical industry try to stop hydrogen power from happening, at least in the short term?
The energy industry is split. Dutch/Shell and BP are ahead of the game. They spent 10 years buying up every renewable technology and patenting it, and have huge hydrogen divisions. They're getting ready. BP's new slogan is "beyond oil."
On the other hand, ExxonMobil, which is the U.S.-based global giant -- they're not buying it. They're doing a little bit, but not much.
The power utility industry is interesting. Up until the last year or two, they didn't want to hear about distributed generation. It was too big a threat.
It would seem to be an enormous threat.
It's one of the great power changes in history, literally and figuratively, almost like the World Wide Web, at least in the possibilities. And it will be struggled around just like with the Web.
But in the last year or two, at least two of the major companies that I work with are looking at this because with deregulation they don't have a lot of cash, and now their equities have tanked. So, they're facing a situation where they really don't want to build a lot of new capacity. And it's cheaper to have a fuel cell put at the end user's site, (for business or for home use), than it is to build a new power plant.
Then the question is who will control that fuel cell site -- the end user or the power company? If the end users can control the energy, then you really have democratized, decentralized energy.
