Funding For Automotive Fuel Cells Cut 293
rgarbacz writes "The US will stop funding research on automotive fuel cells and redirect the work towards stationary plants, because of slow progress on the research. Developing those cells and coming up with a way to transport the hydrogen is a big challenge, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in releasing energy-related details of the administration's budget for the year beginning Oct. 1. Dr. Chu said the government preferred to focus on projects that would bear fruit more quickly. The industry and the National Hydrogen Association criticized the decision and declared their intention to fight for funding. Dr. Chu also announced that funding for a coal gasification pilot project, cut by the Bush administration, will be reinstated. The Obama administration will also drop spending for research on the exploration of oil and gas deposits because the industry itself has ample resources for that, Dr. Chu said."
csh (Score:3, Insightful)
% If I had a ( for every dollar wasted on fuel cells, what would I have?
You mean redirect the funds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a new team in town, with a different set of friends that need to be 'greased'.
Its just typical ( shortsighted ) politics at work here. Nothing new.
Real problem with auto fuel cells, the hydrogen. (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the real problem was creating the hydrogen in the first place. Not to mention the problem of compressing it to a point that it had a reasonable amount of energy per unit of volume.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I was under the impression that current methods of producing hydrogen for fuel cells was only slightly more intelligent than producing ethanol from corn.
Re:Brilliant (Score:5, Insightful)
It's had the lion's share of research funding for the past decade, and despite that, has been lapped on pretty much every front by EVs.
It's electric vehicles' turn.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen doesn't have the density we need and it's difficult to move.
Batteries. Focus on batteries, industrial solar thermal, and Nuclear.
That can solve are energy needs.
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:5, Insightful)
You may disagree with the conclusion, but don't write it off as simply shortsighted politics.
Re:suddenoutbreakofcommonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes sense. The oil industry is already established and making tons in profits. They should be able to fund their own development.
Emerging technologies on the other hand sometimes need a boost.
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen power sounds good on paper, but we need something that works soon.
Quoting Patton: A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
We, as a country, have limited resources. We have a lot that needs to get fixed. Let's be smart about it.
Follow up - isn't that true of everything? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why so much subsidies around solar and other renewable technologies then - the same theory applies. It's mainly the energy industry doing the research, they have a lot of funds to apply to it.
Re:fuel cells are/were a pipe dream (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand government's primary job is to fund research positive outcome of which is not so obvious in the present. It is government's job to take risks and invest in longer term research which potentially may have bigger pay outs 20-30 years later.
I assume here that the governments are usually more stable than all these vulture capitalists, and US government can take losses for prolonged periods of time for the greater good of being more advanced than the other more shortsighted governments.
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Effectively tactics like this destroy economic freedom, much as how over-zealous right wingers destroy some civil liberties with censorship.
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand government's primary job is to fund research positive outcome of which is not so obvious in the present. It is government's job to take risks and invest in longer term research which potentially may have bigger pay outs 20-30 years later.
The problem with this idea is that most governments can't keep policy stable enough for a decade to fund the kind of long term research and projects you're talking about. Every decade you get a president or two, a few "new" Senates and Houses, 20 budget meetings and hundreds of eager beavers trying to make their mark while slashing at someone else's budgets to do so. This is not an environment that breeds any kind of stability at all.
What the government is really good at funding is the middle-term research. Things that take maybe 10 years, maximum. The best example of this is probably the Apollo project and the life cycle of power plant construction in the US (from planning to construction generally takes about 5-8 years, nuclear power plants and large hydro plants run longer, but the need is more clear and so they're generally not terminated as soon).
There are outliers (like the Space Shuttle program which somehow miraculously lasted for nearly 30 years without its funding being cut to nothing, and programs that got cut almost as fast as they got funding like many of the stem cell programs that Clinton funded and Bush destroyed), but the pattern is very easy to see. Short term: venture capital. Medium term: the government. Long term: Wall Street and a prayer to $DEITY (you may have to build a whole conglomerate around the core idea just to get it to stick, see drug companies). This country forgot how to think in the long term a century ago.
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyways, you'll only get raped if you have a gas guzzler. If you have at least a half-decent fuel efficient car, you'll be just fine. If you drive an alternative fuel vehicle, you won't even feel a thing.
Having the customer pay the full, unsubsidized price for gas may actually create real competition in the vehicle fuel market. If people had a choice between gas or an alternative fuel, then the gas companies would have no choice but to keep their prices competitive to that alternative fuel, wouldn't they?
Or worse yet, people may actually get used to driving less and taking public transit as part of their daily commute instead!
Re:Real problem with auto fuel cells, the hydrogen (Score:3, Insightful)
That may be fine for a few experimental operations, but what happens when we try to put those in *millions* of vehicles? The price would quickly be impractical / unaffordable.
Yes, you would eventually get to a sustainable level for recycling, but platinum would take a very very long time to get to that level, platinum is just plain rare.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not let supply and demand do the trick? Right now the costs on the supply side are distorted by the welfare checks the US government doles out to the oil industry on a regular basis; as I note in another post farther down in the thread, ending that practice would probably cause prices to go up, and certainly would leave a great deal of money for helping out the people who would pay more at the pump. New taxes really aren't necessary for this result.
one size (Score:2, Insightful)
Right off the bat, as in other things, one size doesn't fit everyone. With that said, the "problem" with the attached generator trailer doesn't exist, people in suburbia would park it in their garage (where it can act as an emergency home generator, something people might want anyway) and folks in town don't even have to buy them, they could be *rented* for the few times a year when they go to the grandparents, etc.
A hundred mile range pure EV is good enough for millions of drivers today, they just don't drive more than that per day. I have read average commute in the US is 33 miles. And being a pure EV, it doesn't have to tote around the ICE and fuel tank, a significant weight reduction, meaning the battery bank is now a more normal load and can be larger than the battery bank in a plug in hybrid, and the vehicle will still weigh less. And when they do need that ICE, the generator trailer, being on its own axle it is easier to tow than carry. Towing occasional decent weight is always easier than carrying, that extra axle works.
Really, there's very little downside to it and it isn't a kludge, it's a remarkably workable and common sense solution.
Cramming an ICE AND the electric drive train AND the batteries AND the liquid fuel tank all in something that is supposed to be light weight is the big kludge. It also makes the vehicle *twice* as expensive as it needs to be, and *significantly* heavier once you start talking about a plug in hybrid with even 40 miles range, let alone a hundred. Most of the time, for most people, they won't be using the generator so it wouldn't be attached, so as a purchase option or once in awhile special trip rental, there's little downside to it. With a hybrid, you are already buying the whole package anyway, jso if you split that up, with the generator part on a trailer instead of built in, you don't HAVE to haul it with you all the time.
If the range you need to drive daily is just too close to "batteries flat" stage, you don't need an electric then, just get a normal gas or diesel and be done with it (my datsun diesel pickup gets 40 mpg!)
My next ride, a project vehicle, will be electric (but I will retain the diesel, I like choice), probably build one of the chevy s-10 conversion kits, they keep getting cheaper.
Re:You mean redirect the funds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not let supply and demand do the trick? Right now the costs on the supply side are distorted by the welfare checks the US government doles out to the oil industry on a regular basis; as I note in another post farther down in the thread, ending that practice would probably cause prices to go up, and certainly would leave a great deal of money for helping out the people who would pay more at the pump. New taxes really aren't necessary for this result.
I agree. Let supply and demand work. However, that means you must free the supply, which is something that has yet to happen.
Lighting plants with plant power (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of doing this, why don't we grow rats, and have cats eat them. Then we harvest some of the cats, and kill the others to feed to the rats.
Re:Lighting plants with plant power (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with hydrogen isn't that it's not a valid way to store energy, but that we'd have to change too much to make use of it. Biofuels from algae are not only a proven technology, but are entirely compatible with current petrofuels which we need to replace. Manipulation of the photoperiod is a commonly used strategy in commercial agriculture. The electricity I propose to use is currently going to waste and it's not clear what will be done with it; so far the best proposal has been to make hydrogen, which has numerous problems I've already discussed.
Re:Lighting plants with plant power (Score:3, Insightful)
But this is not an unavoidable problem in energy production, it's a problem of old design assumptions not applying to today's needs.
Well, they didn't really apply to yesterday's needs, either... except the "needs" of the power generation companies. Regardless, it would actually take more work to retrofit the existing plants than to build new ones, and you know what building new power plants in the USA is like if you're been following the news. Using the currently excess power is something that we can do right now to improve efficiency. Many of the existing plants will continue to be used in their current form until they explode or fall apart, so we must consider ways to use that power as part of our total strategy.
In the future, I hope that you will be correct; that we will not have excess generated power going to waste because of the basic design of the equipment involved. A more-distributed power generation system is more resistant to failure, so there are multiple reasons to scale down individual generators. Unfortunately, tonight, tomorrow night, and every night for many years, we will be wasting power no matter what happens right now (barring global catastrophe, I guess.)