While tooling around the Internet, I came upon a gem of a document authored by Physicist Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Mr. Lovins’ document, Twenty Hydrogen Myths outlines 20 common public misperceptions about hydrogen cars and the building of the upcoming H2 economy.
The document calls for a rapid transition to hydrogen use in our culture and describes the benefits of moving quickly using a decentralized system as opposed to a slow rollout model using a centralized system. The white paper also argues that much of the needed hydrogen infrastructure is already in place and just needs to be adapted for current use.
The white paper calls for a rollout of H2 based upon a linkage of hydrogen for buildings and hydrogen cars. For instance, hydrogen would be rolled out first to corporate users for heating and cooling their facilities and the excess could be used to fuel employee or fleet hydrogen cars. In addition, Mr. Lovins calls for feebates (fee-based rebates) as incentives to get the oldest and most polluting cars off the road and turn over the national inventory of cars more rapidly.
The document is a couple of years old, but is still largely relevant even in today’s rapidly changing technological climate.