06.30.10
Hydrogen Cars for the Wealthy
Good news, lads! Good news! We can make hydrogen cars for the super rich.
More in from our culture of sucking up, plus wishful thinking added for just the right seasoning.
“Imagine a world where all it took to power a car was sunshine and tap water,” wrote Susan Carpenter of the Los Angeles Times a week or so ago.
But first you have to know the history of the journalist.
Carpenter was infamous for being a Times swell. Her old gig was writing for a discontinued automotive section, reviewing high end superbikes, riding with Peter Fonda, writing about breaking the speed limit and getting her picture into the newspaper.
And I used to bag on her regularly.
Here she’s lampooned for touting a $3,000 electric bicycle, the iZip, made for miscellaneous upper class nuisances, gadget freaks and conspicuous consumers.
And here, she’s dealt with in her leather gear, after pumping her high-end superbike tour of the Old Silk Route in China:
[The] Silk Route highway is empty for Carpenter and her tourmates because most of the locals are too busy scrabbling out a subsistence living to afford driving on it.
And gas is cheaper in China than southern California! Imagine that!
The main hazards on the Silk Route highway, we are informed, are “packs of animals and stacks of rocks. In rural areas, you never knew when you would round a corner and need to slow for yaks or goats.”
“[There’s] never a line at the pump because so few people drive in the remote and impoverished outskirts of Xinjiang province.”
So she’s just right to tell readers — “Welcome to the future” — and that a hydrogen generating station the size of a refrigerator is just around the corner, for her wealthy and highly regarded pals, maybe.
Was she perhaps thrilled by Brad Paisley’s latest record, too?
Carpenter’s article centers around the Honda Clarity and it never deals with the details of cracking water for automotive use. All on house current without causing fainting from billing shock.
The latter is dealt with by simply saying it can all be had with solar-power panels and an accompanying electrolysis system.
One of the only figures delivered (there are two pertaining to power generation, neither particularly enlightening or convincing) is that the new “hydrogen fueling system” is “25 percent more efficient than the electrolysis system Honda devised in 2001 and it no longer requires a mechanical compressor or storage tanks.”
While it sounds too good to be true, Carpenter swallows it without comment.
If you were interested in chemistry as a kid you may have cracked water with wall current and a transformer. If you did, it was an unexciting experiment, slow and not much of a hydrogen generator, although you could collect some gas in a test tube, enough to make a pop when lit.
The energy required to decompose the covalent bonds holding water together is not trivial. This is well-explained, in chemical and physical terms, here.
In life, that it’s not trivial is good. If water fell apart easily, life just wouldn’t be possible. It just wouldn’t do to have to worry about unexpectedly and explosively popping from hydrogen build-up.
Carpenter’s article for the Times does not explain any of this. And it is
one of the central problems facing any attempt to bring on a hydrogen-based energy rich economy, one in which the hydrogen is generated from water — with the power not furnished by fossil fuel.
Use wall power generated by fossil fuels to generate hydrogen from water doesn’t automagically do away with the problem of greenhouse gases. It just lengthens the vehicle’s tail pipe away from the house and roads where it operates.
Generating it from solar — well, let’s say no one has even come remotely close to adequately explaining how the entire country, not just sunny soCal, could get enough power from the sun to satisfy current American driving habits on a daily basis.
Like in the middle of winter in eastern Pennsylvania.
And no editor at the LA Times required Carpenter to even take a stab at it.
Instead, most of her article’s testimony is turned over, of all people, to Jon Landau. A member of the mansion set who presumably called in some favor to get his Honda Clarity lease and fueling station permissions.
Landau was the film producer of Titanic and Avatar, so he’d be the guy to go to for an explanation of how the hydrogen economy and automobiles might work.
“There’s no trip I can’t make and get back here [to the fueling station], Landau tells Carpenter.
“Now he drives it more often than his Mercedes S550,” writes Carpenter brightly.
The Mercedes S550 is a $91,000 car, about twenty thousand cheaper than Elon Musk’s electric car for the rich. The cost of the Honda Clarity is ridiculous — $1 million. And this explains the expensive cocked-up leasing program for test vehicles and attached fueling station described by Carpenter, a program which furnished Landau with his auto.
If only we could all have such gigs and opportunities. Welcome to the future. Where the class war’s been waged and you’ve all lost.