Honda FCX Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car Is Tilting At Windmills

There was a blog posting at Drudge.com that started off innocent enough talking about the new Honda FCX that was just demoed this week in Northern California to the public. From this posting the conversation quickly turned to windmills for generating renewable hydrogen to power the vehicles.

The usual topics were covers such as the need to break away from our addiction to foreign oils as it relates to national security, how hydrogen cars will help the environment and how the big oil companies will resist the transition to building a hydrogen infrastructure when there is too much oil left in the ground right now.

But, the conversation kept turning back to windmills and whether they were both feasible and attractive enough to plop up all over the country. Incidentally, over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking over the Web and through magazines to find this very thing.

From what I’m seeing, there are some pretty cool designs for small home wind turbines that have been developed recently. These rooftop wind turbines or standalone units are not the same as big, wooden windmill my grandfather had back on his Michigan farm in the 1960’s.

What would be even more cool is if we started to seeing these small wind turbines gracing rooftops in numbers to rival the amount of satellite dishes that are already there. Many of these small rooftop wind turbines, by the way, are actually smaller that satellite dishes and will help bring down your totally utility bill so that you may actually pony up the bucks and order more channels if you like.

So, for right now the Honda FCX may be tilting at windmills in regards to supply hydrogen for the car. But, in just a few short years, windmills and wind turbines may be a larger solution to the problem of hydrogen production than anyone currently thinks.