A little over a week ago I talked about how the DOE was restoring funding for hydrogen fuel cell research and other hydrogen related funding. Now, according to stargazette.com another important step in Washington D. C. has taken place.
According to this online newspaper, “The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Energy and Water Appropriations Act, which includes an amendment to restore $45 million in hydrogen fuel cell research funding, New York Democrats Eric Massa and Steve Israel announced.”
Congressman Massa is particularly interested in restoring funding since General Motors operates a large fuel cell research and development center in Honeoye Falls in upstate New York.
The U. S. Senate is also close to restoring $190 million in hydrogen fuel cell research funding. Columbia, South Carolina will be another benefactor of restoring the hydrogen research budget as they have been building a “hydrogen triangle” of business, university and government research facilities in the area.
Of course, once the Senate and U. S. House vote on their separate bills, they will still go to a conference committee that will submit the final 2010 national budget to President Obama who nixed the hydrogen budget in the first place.
So, even though the restoration of the hydrogen budget is looking hopeful it still has some hurdles to pass first. We’ll know in the coming weeks and months whether the current administration is serious about attacking global warming and energy independence on all fronts or whether they would rather hand pick winners and losers in this emerging marketplace.
Why hydrogen fuel cell cars instead of say BEVs with a microwave receiver allowing them to receive electrical power transmitted from a power plant? I
run into a lot of people who make wild claims about the energy density of batteries that simply aren’t true. It dawns on me that one could argue, “you
can get further using hydrogen than you can using a large Li ION battery.”
By the way, there is wireless transmission of electrical power, but I think the losses are somewhat staggering.
Some have envisioned football stadium sized solar arrays in space that transmit power back to earth. Say we had a large space based solar array. Would it make sense to transmit the power to a central location where you electrolyze billions of gallons of sea water or would it make more sense to
do something else?
I notice with the gas/electric Volt’s 450 pound battery and gas engine
that it is a very expensive vehicle. I imagine the fuel cell version
can be sold for less than the gas/electric hybrid version, but can
anyone prove this? I’ve heard that the battery alone in the Volt is a
$15k item.
The problem with the Obama administration is that it is trying to pick a
winner instead of letting the market decide. I think there’s an attitude
that we can’t do hydrogen fuel cell vehicles now and another attitude
that we can’t wait for an alternative to OIL based transportation. Can’t
we convert government vehicles to run on hydrogen now? How about
mass transit? Is there a real case to do hydrogen fuel cell vehicles
now? All of the automakers seem to think that 2015 is the year when
they will start selling fuel cell cars. Why 2015?