Hydrogen Cars

The New Great Race - - Tesla versus Clarity

Terry Tamminen — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:14:00 -0400

Listening to battery enthusiasts wax poetic about the Tesla recently - - and seeing a few of them appearing on the streets of west Los Angeles - - I began thinking about the old Tony Curtis film "The Great Race" (remember every time he smiled, there was a shiny sparkle of superiority that gleamed from his teeth?). The roads and Holiday Inns have improved dramatically since the period depicted in the movie, but the idea of testing the claims of exciting new technology at the dawn of a new transportation age is very much the same. So let's have a 21^st Century "Great Race" and pit the Tesla against the other electric car on the market today, the Honda Clarity.

The Tesla is an electric sports car powered by batteries, while the Clarity is an electric sedan powered by hydrogen (a fuel cell converts the hydrogen to electricity). The range of each is rated by USEPA-approved testing at about 230 miles. The similarities end there however - - the Tesla is the fastest production car ever built at zero to 60 mph, giving the little hot rod a distinct advantage that would seem to make a race with a Clarity anything but "great". Or would it?

The venue for the race has already been set - - in late May, hydrogen enthusiasts are staging a road rally from BC to BC (Baja California to British Columbia), some 1400 miles up the west coast of North America. The idea is to demonstrate the commercialization of numerous hydrogen vehicles and the fueling stations along the way - - the "Hydrogen Highway" - - that will power the 2010 winter Olympics in Whistler near Vancouver. Already, clean electric buses powered by hydrogen fuel cells shuttle skiers around the resorts and slopes of the soon-to-be Olympic venue.

So all that's needed for The New Great Race is to get a Tesla to participate. Surely the champions of battery technology, the undisputed 0-60 mph speed record-holders, would accept such a challenge. Well, given that they haven't, let's use a little math and imagination to stage The New Great Race anyway.

Acceleration speeds aside, highway laws in the four states/provinces along the route will limit competitors to something around 60 miles an hour. The 1400-mile distance means that each car will be driving for about 23.3 hours. At 230 miles range between fueling stops, the cars will also each stop 6 times. It takes me about 7 minutes to refuel my Honda Clarity, so add about 40 minutes for refueling and it will take Team Hydrogen about 24 hours to get from Tijuana to Vancouver.

Team Battery, however, will need four hours of charging time for each battery refueling according to the Tesla website. That's 24 hours for charging stops in addition to the 23.3 hours of driving for a total of about 48 hours to cover the same distance. Oh well, The New Great Race isn't so great after all.

In recent testimony before Congress, Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged that for batteries to compete with the performance expected by consumers - - and delivered today by the Honda Clarity and other hydrogen vehicles - - it will take $2 billion of taxpayer subsidies (in the current energy bill for starters) and many years of R&D. The results are uncertain, as recent announcements by MIT researchers suggest - - their "breakthrough" in the lab with lithium batteries that dramatically decreased charging times is years from commercialization and doesn't address the half ton of batteries you still need to lug around to power a car, which makes the battery-electric vehicle much less efficient than hydrogen-electric vehicles.

By the way, the hype around plug-in electric/gasoline hybrids is also deflated when examined in a distance-driving setting like this. That technology would either make all but 40 miles of the trip on gasoline (the range of the batteries) or stop 35 times to recharge, adding days to the trip.

While all of these technologies are important to help us kick our oil addiction and solve climate change, the clear winner of The New Great Race is definitely hydrogen. Cue the sparkling smile and roll the cameras!

Now I Know How Al Gore Feels

Terry Tamminen — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:32:00 -0400

In 1984, Al Gore held a hearing in Congress about global warming and urged his colleagues to do something about it. As we now know, he was ridiculed and largely ignored for the best part of two decades before being vindicated with a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (oh yeah, and another Congressional hearing, at which he was taken far more seriously).

I've been an environmental advocate for the same couple of decades, always suspecting that my friends raised an eyebrow or two over my predictions and admonitions about sustainability (my family, however, was not subtle about raising their eyebrows). I worked for the day when thinking "green" would be a normal part of everyday life. Well, just as Al Gore's day(s) arrived in 2007, my days arrived this week.

First, I turned on a Los Angeles Laker game and found the entire team wearing "NBA Green Week" tee shirts. The NBA.com website lists dozens of things anyone can do to live more sustainably (and save money in the process!). When a major sports league feels that all they need to say is "green" and that it's a good color for their brand, our time has come.

The second big "arrival" moment came this week when the Honda Clarity - - an all-electric car powered by hydrogen and a fuel cell - - was named the "2009 World Green Car" at the New York International Auto Show. "The FCX Clarity is an utterly real, hydrogen-fuelled luxury sedan that provides the amenities people expect in a premium car with 430 km range, fuel consumption of about 3.3 litres/100 km (72 mpg US) equivalent and zero tailpipe emissions," the judges wrote. I drive one in Los Angeles and have long believed in the future of this technology - - but the future has arrived today.

Maybe the message in this is simply that we can invent our future when we have the vision to imagine it. We need not fear those who give warnings of dire consequences, just hear their messages as opportunities to evolve, invent, and invest in something new. That will mean a lot of "green" days ahead.

Bail-out or Build-out?

Terry Tamminen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:34:00 -0400

As Washington and Wall Street dicker over a financial rescue plan, everyone is missing the real opportunity to fix the problem. Some see the variously proposed plans as bailouts of dumb borrowers and dumber lenders, while others view it as a chance to restore liquidity to the marketplace so we can all have access to credit again, whether it's for student loans or to finance the acquisition of industrial machinery.

But when the "Great Depression" struck America more than 70 years ago, we didn't just make more money available and hope people would borrow it to jump start the economy. President Roosevelt put us back to work, building bridges, highways, schools, and water projects. All of that infrastructure has served us well over the years, although at the time it must have looked like a lot of pork barrel spending designed to keep workers off of street corners and out of soup kitchens. What if we could do something like that again, but this time, make it a build-out that had fantastic economic, environmental, and social return on the invested capital?

In 2003, President Bush spoke about hydrogen cars in his State of the Union address. Shortly thereafter, the American Petroleum Institute (API) warned that building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure that could reach all Americans would cost $140 billion. Although I'm sure the API had no reason to use scare tactics and biased estimates (well, OK, maybe I'm not THAT sure), let's assume that's an accurate figure.

If we built those fueling stations, we would also need vehicles that run on hydrogen. It takes about $5,000 to retrofit a car or truck to run on hydrogen. Yup, almost any car or truck (or bus or train for that matter) that currently runs on gasoline or diesel fuel will also run on hydrogen gas. It's not the most efficient use of hydrogen (a fuel cell, which converts hydrogen to electricity and thereby powers an electric motor in an all-electric car is far more efficient), but anything is more efficient than digging oil out of the ground and making it into transportation fuel. Let's say we convert 50 million cars and trucks nationwide to run on hydrogen - - that's $250 billion more.

So for just under $400 billion, we could eliminate the need for all of the oil we now import (and a lot of the domestic supply for that matter). We would have given tens of thousands of Americans jobs in the design, building, and servicing of hydrogen fueling stations; and tens of thousands more would be working in the new retrofit business. Detroit could now start making new hydrogen powered cars, knowing that the marketplace accepts these products, so we would simultaneously revitalize our domestic auto industry.

We could recoup 100% of this investment when retailers sell hydrogen fuel with a few cents per unit sales tax, just like the gasoline tax. But we would recoup it even faster with the payroll and business taxes generated from all of the new employment and businesses created with this program.

So there you have it - - a domestic jobs program that will kick the oil addiction, solve global warming, create new industries and jobs that can't be outsourced to India or China, eliminate billions in annual subsidies to oil companies and billions more that we now spend on defense costs to protect our oil supply. For half what we will spend on Wall Street and 20% of what we have spent securing oil in Iraq so far, we will have social, economic and environmental prosperity for as far as the eye can see.

This build-out sounds crazy at first blush until you realize that we already produce 3 trillion cubic feet of hydrogen in America every year, but use the majority of that to strip sulfur from petroleum to make gasoline instead of just putting the hydrogen right into our cars. How crazy is that?! No, make no mistake, we can do this and reap all of the benefits.

Now if we just had another Roosevelt around to get us started...