Who Killed the Hydrogen-Powered Car? James Anderson Jun 08, 2009 10:10 am |
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Energy density or transportation problems didn’t kill hydrogen. What killed it is the deliverable amount of energy to the wheels of a vehicle compared to a battery solution. This is why we won't be seeing hydrogen-powered cars from Toyota (TM), Honda (HMC), or Ford (F).The table below needs a little explanation. It starts with 100 kilowatts of electricity from renewable sources -- solar or wind for example. It then compares the steps required to get the electrical energy stored on a vehicle as either hydrogen or batteries. During each step, energy is lost -- generally as heat -- until electric power is driving the electric motors on a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle or a battery-powered vehicle. Each step shows the percentage efficiency and the remaining energy left after each step.
This table used data from an article published by Ulf Bossel entitled, "Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?" in Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 94, No. 10, October 2006. You can argue all you want about the exact percentages used in each step, but the result won't be much different. A battery-powered vehicle will be close to 3 times as efficient as a hydrogen- powered fuel cell vehicle.
The DOE got it right.
If the one word back in the 1967 movie The Graduate was “plastics," the word for the future will be “batteries,” with the possible addition of “ultracaps." I’ll discuss batteries and a potential “ultracap play” in a follow-up article.
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