Automotive Update + Hydrogen
Right up there with algae, I’m loving electric cars these days. See several recent posts here, here, here, here, and here. Now let’s get a look at some news from Spain and France. Spain Sees 1 Mln Electric Cars in Energy Plan is the arresting headline from Reuters’ PlanetArk service. When? By 2014! See also this from BusinessGreen. Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian said that electric vehicles represented the future of transport.
Meanwhile, up north from Spain, in the City of Lights, following on the smashing success of a citywide bike-sharing program, Paris is going to put 4,000 electric cars at the disposal of residents in the city and suburbs. See this from the A.P. The ambitious program hopes to launch in late 2009 or early 2010. Obviously, the French want to encourage mass transit and bicycling – and never forget that Paris is one of the great walking cities of the world – but the rationale here is that if people must drive, they should borrow a ZEV. Sweet.
I’ve been a fan of Stan Ovshinsky and the company he founded, Energy Conversion Devices, for some time. Some people have compared Ovshinsky to Edison. Among his many inventions, the most ubiquitous must be the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery. In a recent paper, he was to be found touting the hydrogen economy. For a significantly less technical look at his vision, see this from CarbonFree. The article says “Reversible storage of hydrogen in a solid hydride permits the entire loop of hydrogen generation, storage and use, to be carried out now, rather than at some distant point in the future.”
Hydrogen and fuel cells are not something that we’ve looked at a lot here, I find somewhat to my own surprise. Here’s a special issue of “E/The Environmental Magazine” which includes an interview with Amory Lovins, and also an article on the Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin. (We need to look at fuel cells more. I’ll get on it.)