The Hydrogen Car May Be Making a Comeback
Remember former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s much-hyped hydrogen highway? Back in 2004, the governator, in his typical understated style, rolled up to the state’s first commercial hydrogen fueling station at Los Angeles International Airport in a hydrogen-fueled Hummer to publicize plans to build a network of 100 such stations.
“This is a modest beginning, but [hydrogen cars] hold the promise of a revolution,” said Schwarzenegger said.
The revolution was not to be and
Schwarzenegger’s dream of Californians zipping from the Oregon border to
Mexico in carbon-free hydrogen fuel cell cars crashed and burned along
with the state’s economy in 2008.
But like the Terminator, the
hydrogen highway is back. The California Energy Commission yesterday
gave a preliminary award of nearly $50 million to eight companies to build 28 hydrogen fueling stations—13
in Northern California and 15 in Southern California. Along with nine
existing stations and 17 currently being built, that means California
will have 54 hydrogen fueling stations online by November 2015, which
not co-incidentally is when major automakers like Honda and Toyota plan
to start selling futuristic hydrogen cars in California. (Hyundai this spring will begin leasing a hydrogen fuel cell version of its Tucson SUV.)
“With this funding, California will accelerate the construction of a
reliable and affordable refueling infrastructure to support the
commercial market launch of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles,” Janea A.
Scott, a member of the California Energy Commission, said in a
statement.As I wrote in Quartz last month:
"Powered by a fuel whose supply is practically inexhaustible—every nation can be the Saudi Arabia of hydrogen—fuel-cell cars convert pressurized hydrogen gas into electricity that powers the vehicle. The hydrogen cars now coming onto the market have triple the range of most battery electric cars and can be refueled in minutes rather than recharged in hours. And hydrogen technology can be scaled up to fuel buses, long-haul trucks and other big vehicles that most current battery packs are too puny to power. “We don’t see any reason customers wouldn’t adopt this technology in exchange for a gasoline vehicle as there’s no trade-offs,” Craig Scott, Toyota’s US national manager of advanced technology vehicles, told Quartz.”
A 2012 report from
the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a coalition of automakers,
technology companies and government policymakers, determined that it
would take 68 fueling stations to make hydrogen cars commercially
viable.
That’s because the new generation
of fuel cell vehicles can go 300 miles or more on a tank of
hydrogen—versus 75 miles for most electric cars currently on the market.
That means it will take relatively few stations to create a statewide
network. But automakers had been reluctant to make the cars—which cost
between $50,000 and $100,000—until they can assure potential buyers that
refueling will be easy as finding a gas station. Under the California
plan, drivers in major metropolitan areas will only be six minutes away
from the nearest hydrogen station.
Under an executive order signed
by current California Governor Jerry Brown in 2012, the state will
support the building of infrastructure to fuel 1 million alternative
energy vehicles by 2020.
That will not include a hydrogen
Hummer, though. General Motors killed off the symbol of environmentally
destructive automotive excess in 2010.
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The Hydrogen Car May Be Making a Comeback
Remember
former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s much-hyped hydrogen
highway? Back in 2004, the governator, in his typical understated style,
rolled up to the state’s first commercial hydrogen fueling station at
Los Angeles International Airport in a hydrogen-fueled Hummer
to publicize…
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