Is the Hydrogen BMW a pointless waste of time

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(HBO6 @ Nov 19 2006, 08:18 PM) [snapback]351879[/snapback]</div>

The reason that we spend mass amounts of money on other energy sources is because if we diverted all the funds to electrical energy powered by solar we couldn't charge for the sunlight since the sun delivers its power to us for free. If corporations cannot charge delivery and refining fees, they may not be able to get there multi million dollar bonuses and stock options. This might cause them to loose there sugar daddy status and realize that they are no better than everyone else including there wee knee size. This could cause them to not be able to start wars and kill innocent people because everyone would just say: “Why should we listen to them, there no better than us.†This would send this Country into complete chaos. So please don’t ask these foolish questions anymore.

 

It's a feel good yuppie car that goes 125 miles on Hydro and 300 miles on gas. You can fuel up in Sweden or Norway but the plane ticket is gonna be pricy.

Well I supposed it's better than the alternative (continuing to go all gas)...a step in the right direction away from petro. You got to give accolades to the German Engineers. They are good and make the best driving/handling autos around.

I agree that we need plug-ins that go 250mile per charge.....I wish.

-b

 

Wow. Fun article.

The "not as much energy out as is put in" comment is a bit over the top though. When you charge a battery you don't get as much energy out as you put in either. Same with converting any fuel to electricity. You always get less out than you put in. The big difference is that if you START with electricity (no matter how you make it) you get 4x the energy out of a charged battery as you would get out of a fuel cell that used H2 made from that same amount of electricity.

H2 is just an energy carrier, and as such, will always give up less energy than is put into it. Just like a battery. Just like power lines. The difference is in magnitude. H2, as an energy carrier, is just a huge waste of energy when compared to other options.

The only reason that we get more energy out of oil than we put in (to drilling, pumping, refining) is that we consider the energy in the oil itself as "windfall" - it just exists. Every day we get closer to parity even on that though. It won't be long before as much energy is required to refine oil as we get out of it - and at that point renewables will finally seem like the "windfall" that they really are.