Right ON !
Better late than never . . . now if we can convince the Feds that corn fuel and hydrogen are a waste, we might just be ok!

I think that taking the tax rebate that congress is trying to push into jolting the economy would have a better long-term effect on the economy if it were spent on R&D for renewable energy and technology like this.

Too bad they can't look any further into the future than the next election.

Are we supposed to be excited about an under-funded ($30M is tiny for the proposed scope) project that aims to provide battery technology six years after two major auto makers promise to have PHEVs on the road, and 20 years after the EV-1, the Rav4EV, and the Ford Ranger EV?

On the outside it sounds great. On the inside it is a waste of money.

1) What could possibly come out of it? Seriously, Is nobody looking at improving batteries until Uncle Sam comes along?
2) What came from all the other money the US spent on auto technology over the past decade?....bigger SUVs?
3) If anyone has a big improvement in technology with a multimillion payoff, are they going to hand over the rights to the US governement because they got a million dollar grant?

The CARB having a zero-emissions mandate many years ago had a BIG impact. This is the job of the government, establish the legislation that allows the back room crews to succeed.....not give your tax dollars to the best con artists.

Meh, I seem to recall Clinton had a project for funding hybrid technology (can't recall if it was peanuts like this though), and I seem to recall one of Bush's first acts was to scrap that in favor of.... hydrogen *golfclap*

Toyota's Prius. When they were excluded from the US program they felt US manufacturers were going to have an advantage so they started their own R&D. This proposed program is just pork for Michigan and a waste of money for the rest of us.

If by 'they started their own R&D' you mean the Japanese government started throwing money at Toyota and Honda (but not Nissan, oddly enough), then you're right on.

Bud Albright??

Source

I am not convinced that Hydrogen is a complete waste. The energy source of the future is Nuclear. Nuclear is clean and is a unlimited resource. (due to breeder reactors and such).

I think of hydrogen as just another way to store energy. Plus it is clean. The choice for storing energy for vehicles will be batteries or hydrogen. I am not sure that batteries will win that battle.

Corn fuel is not the best choice for vegetable fuels. However, some sort of vegetable fuel will be around for quite a while.

ok, i didnt read any of the responses, but 30 million???

i dont think that even finances ONE MINUTE of the war!!

this is technology that potentially (with high probability!!) save us hundreds of billions!!...

sounds like a pathetic token to me. unless it leads to much more money, its a waste of time

Makes it rather difficult to have a discussion if you don't.

Clean?...like Chernobyl?
Unlimited?...like power so cheap it would not need to be metered?
Why did the US stop building nuclear plants?

H2 is clean and it is a way to store energy. It is just crazy inefficient compared to electric vehicles. Keep in mind the problem with electric cars is that few companies have seen the light. Don't buy the "battery technology is not there yet" story.

One minute of the war is (on average) about $200K. $30M would cover a whopping two and half hours of the war!

Hydrogen is a really lousy way to store energy for transportation. The density is way too low, even at high pressures, which by the way results in tanks that far outweigh the hydrogen.

You can do much better with methanol. Using methanol can be carbon neutral at a small energy cost. You produce the methanol from, for example, hydrogen and CO2 collected from the air. Then you have a fuel with a reasonable and useful energy density per unit volume. It would even be suitable for aircraft which are penalized even more than ground vehicles for low energy density fuels.

As for batteries, there might be breakthroughs someday to get comparable energy densities out of them. But they have a few orders of magnitude to go, and the lithium batteries are already blowing up. So I'm not betting on batteries to win the energy density battle.

I agree with you about hydrogen.

Methanol from H2 and CO2 is an interesting idea. I had not heard this one before.

New lithium chemistries are much more stable, and therefore much safer than the old chemistries. Lithium Ion batteries are subject to thermal runaway and combustion if not controlled properly. They do not "blow up." They catch fire. However LiFePO (lithium iron phosphate) batteries do not experience thermal runaway and are stable even at extremely high temperatures.

My hopes are on ultra-capacitors. They are not ready for commercial development yet, but there is promising research.

No high-density energy storage will be completely safe. Energy, by its very nature, can be destructive when you have enough of it in a small space. But when your chances of being killed by another driver who is drunk or talking on a cell phone is 1,000 times greater than your chances of being killed by a failure of your energy storage system, then I think the safety of your energy storage becomes a moot point. I expect that even the Tesla Roadster, with its thousands of li-ion laptop batteries, will pose a much greater risk due to its high speed and rapid acceleration than due to its old-chemistry lithium batteries.

In the end, the Xebra is one of the safest cars on the road simply because of its 40-mph top speed.

There are pros and cons to every energy storage solution. Gasoline is not a very "safe" medium either.

You could make a matrix of various options with their pros and cons. Maybe Hydrogen will not be the answer, but I think it still has possibilities, mainly because it is so clean.

Nuclear is coming back to the US because it is a great energy source. The US quit building Nuclear power plants for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was that the cost per Kw was much higher than expeceted. The world is different than it was 30 years ago. Oil is much more expensive, nuclear plant designs have been refined, there is a greater empasis on reducing carbon emissions, etc, etc.

Sometimes the US is not the leader. A couple examples; nuclear power, the death penalty.

Why make a plug in - the Prius' electric system is already self contained. Coasting on the highway or braking renews the energy in the battery.

As for interesting ideas, what about bio-diesel grown from algae? Find a use for non-areable land. The yield from algae is much higher than that of any other source of bio-diesel and the yield is superior to ethanol produced from corn. Better still you don't create havock with the world's food supply - poor people have a historical tendency to get really upsent whey they can't feed their kids. Kinda crazy... I know. Most importantly, at least to me, it would reduce our dependency on oil produced by those who cause us harm.

Use of diesel fuel is getting cleaner. The engines are a proven technology - very simple and durable. What's not to like. At least as an interim solution, there are plenty of upsides bio-diesel.

Agree on nuclear, disagree on death penalty

Nuclear can be a very good energy source, and about as clean as we can get, among the energy sources which can realistically support current demands.

Not so hot on bio-fuel. IMO it's potentially the worst of all solutions. It destroys increasingly scarce land and resources. Currently popular, since it gives politicians a way to continue to provide farming subsidies, while talking green.

Bottom line though: $30 million is nothing, and it does not address the real problem. We can all start bicycling tomorrow, but unless you start seriously reducing the number of births, you are NOT dealing with the real causes of environmental pollution - OVERPOPULATION.

There may be quite a few vehicles where H2 is a good answer (space shuttle). It just that commuter cars will not be one of them.

The problems of nuclear power are no different than they were 30 years ago, just better understood. The chief problem is not on safe plant operation, it is with waste disposal. The staggering cost of safe waste disposal keeps hammering the utilities since the government has no solution for the NIMBY problem, and never will. Take some time to learn about the technical success of concentrated solar power (15 years of successful operation). It truely is ready for prime time (like the new plant planned for Florida). The hurdles are cultural, not technical.

Where was the first nuclear plant built? Where was the first utility nuclear plant built? I agree that the US is often not the leader (e.g. Production Hybrid Vehicle would have been a better example)