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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
What about hydrogen cars? How realistic is that?
The car companies have spent a couple of billion on this but most of us in the environmental community have been saying that this isn't serious. We've always thought that it was kind of a ruse so that the car companies wouldn't have to deal with fuel efficiency and conservation.
Right. It's always off in the future. Meanwhile they keep pumping out their SUVs.
You got it. Without second-guessing them, that's all changed because of California in the last few months. Gray Davis signed legislation this summer saying that if you want to sell a car in the state of California in 2009, you can't come into the state without near zero emissions, and that's hydrogen. General Motors is suing to stop this, and so are other companies, but they're also rushing furiously to get to hydrogen, because they can't lose California. It's the single biggest automobile market in the entire world.
How do consumers become producers of energy in the hydrogen economy?
When a hydrogen car is not operating, you can plug it in to generate power for your home, factory or shopping mall. So, if the whole U.S. fleet was hydrogen, and if 25 percent of the fleet were plugged in when it was not operating, you wouldn't need one power plant in the country. That's the power of distributed generation.
When do you think that you and I might be driving a hydrogen car?
You'll be able to buy a commercially viable hydrogen car by 2009 in the showrooms in the U.S., along with regular fossil-fuel internal-combustion cars. Those hydrogen cars will use fossil fuels to get the hydrogen, but at least it's a bridge.
How does hydrogen power fit into the renewable energy movement?
You cannot really have a renewable energy society without it. Because when you generate electricity with wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric, the electricity immediately flows. You can't store that electricity. So, when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining and the water isn't going over the dam because of drought, your economy stops. [In contrast,] coal, oil and gas are stored energies.
Hydrogen is the way to store renewable energy. You take renewables. You generate electricity. You use that electricity to separate hydrogen from water, and there's your stored energy. Then, you put it in fuel cells whenever you want.
Hydrogen is [also] ubiquitous. Unlike coal, oil and gas, every community has hydrogen. Yes, you have to extract it. But what's going to happen is that Moore's Law has already set in here with hydrogen, where you're doubling the knowledge and halving the cost, as you did in software and in the biotech revolution.
Why is the shift to hydrogen so important?
The big revolutions in history that change the density of exchange between people economically and socially occur very rarely, and they're based on two things happening, a revolutionary change in communications or in energy.
If you, the end user, can share energy back to the power grid, then you have to decentralize the power grid so that you can move energy where you want, when you want. But you will need the language of software to be able to actually move the energy in a decentralized way. The digital technology revolution of the last 20 years will become the language to redesign the power infrastructure of the world, so you can decentralize energy and move it where you want, when you want it.
What do you see as the barriers to a hydrogen economy really taking off?
I think that the obstacles are huge. But, of course, why wouldn't they be? This is one of the great changes in history. When we moved to steam and coal there were huge obstacles. It started off small, but it changed our living patterns, it changed governments. We went to urban life, centralized living, big cities, the bourgeois family, the nation state. We went from craft to factory, but it didn't take place overnight. With hydrogen, I think that the infrastructure gets laid down over the next 25 to 30 years.
We have to wait 30 years?
This isn't a one-year bubble. But by 2050 hydrogen subsumes fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are still here but hydrogen now is the main power carrier. By the end of the century fossil fuels are boutique, meaning for plastics, materials, pharmaceuticals.
You point out in your book that civilizations haven't been very good at changing energy regimes, until they absolutely have to. Why do you think that we're going to be any different?
I don't know if we will. We could be in deep trouble for a long time. I don't know. But what I do know is that putting out the possibility for a new framework gives us something that we can work towards.
Can you imagine the possibility that you generate your own power? It's kind of like if you and I were having a discussion in the early, early period of the first PCs. People are sort of playing around with them for research, they're starting to sell them but not too many people are buying them, and it's kind of the early take-off years. That's about where we are with this technology.
