petr:

What you say is true, and I would say that what we should have government taking the lead on is financing technological development, NOT commercial development. Government should be used to advance technology in ways that aide and protect the people. Our capitalist system is quite efficient at filtering out what actually works from what is not productive.

Case in point. A company out there is very self-promoting in claiming that it can provide transportation vehicles with fuel cells. What I've been told by people in the know is that in fact their fuel cell technology is inadequate, and the units need to be replaced after a very short time. Another point, as with bio-research, if patents are going to be awarded over vital matters of biology and technology, I would rather the people own them. That's why I think government cooperation with research can be a good thing.

The point I made about wind and solar power being a good source of investment by government is arguable either way. I don't suggest that governments invest in sure losses (although this happens again and again in reality) but that, say, a handy limited range postal delivery cab might be something worth government interest. Speed and range will be less of an issue, and it will give industry of scale a boost. Likewise with government buying solar power arrays for powering remote weather reporting systems. (There's a neat unit in mid-Alaska used to power a railroad crossing that uses wind, solar, and battery storage, but damned if I can find out who designed it or paid for it - It's a hundred miles from the grid).

THE GRID. The grid is a wonder of the modern world. I don't know if Europe or Asia has anything to compare with what holds North America together. It won't go away in a hurry. It allows power to be united from the great hydro stations of the west with the big coal burners of the middle and keep lights on in the east. It allows power to be shifted from the areas that don't need their lights on to those that do, and from the areas that don't need their air conditioners on to those that do. The alternative technologies we are talking about are in early stages of development, and have the problem I mentioned already of not meeting immediate demand.

HYDROGEN
Hydrogen has taken a bit of a bad press on being thought of as explosive, particularly when your average fox network news can so readily lay a hand to a film clip of the Hindenberg going down as the hydrogen goes up. Recent research indicates that the material used to dope the zeppelin's outer covering had the same formulation as modern solid rocket fuel.

One nice thing about hydrogen (if you're outdoors) is that if you have a major malfunction your problems go 'up' and don't go flowing all around vulnerable property.

Nevertheless, hydrogen as fuel faces significant technological development (Euphemism for not ready for prime time).

Storage of Hydrogen. Hydrogen is the lightest element, it's a sneaky little atom, when pressurizing a tank, it also goes through the metal of the tank, kind of like air will seap out of a balloon. You won't want to leave your car alone for a few days in a closed garage where welding is going on. There are claims that there is a solution to this called 'hydriding', a solid material soaks up the hydrogen like a sponge.

EFFICIENCY
The Toyota Prius uses a battery to augment an internal combustion engine which by itself is undersized for the size of the car. The car is powered by electric motor acting alone off a battery, the engine charging the battery for the electric motor, or the gasoline engine physically linked to the electric motor to obtain maximum power to the wheels. One other important thing: When braking, part of the braking action is obtained by driving the electric motor from the wheels, turning it into a generator, and recharging the battery. This works well enough so that the reported miles per gallon is higher in stop and go city traffic than in highway driving.

ENERGY
Unless a fuel cell car incorporates such a recovery process, it may not be as efficient as today's Prius.

Other things they don't necessarily tell you: A battery can only charge and discharge so fast because the chemical action that stores the energy is limited by the surface area to which the battery chemicals are exposed, and just as important is the temperature of the battery and its contents. This is also true of fuel cells, which act a great deal like batteries. A way to think of a fuel cell is that it is a battery you can re-charge with fuel. Well, a cold fuel cell is not a happy fuel cell. Some fuel cells have to be many hundreds of degrees up there to be happy.

Another item that has been tried is to use a capacitor in addition to a battery. A capacitor is kind of like a battery with no electrolyte. It can store a charge of electricity with no chemical action, i.e. almost instantly. A capacitor doesn't usually care about the temperature. Unfortunately if something goes wrong, it can discharge almost instantly, too!

What all this adds up to is that we are facing a lot of interesting challenges, and a lot of us are going to have a great deal of fun making things work and writing up why they didn't.

This is a great time to be an electrical engineer! I think it would also be fun to work for consumer reports or som outfit that's going to test-crash all this new stuff and see what happens.

As the song says, "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."