Quotes about Fuel Cells from the world's top natural health / natural living authors
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 "The technology roadmaps of today point toward electrification of our vehicles as the answer; hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles would use onboard fuel cells to generate electricity from hydrogen gas, a renewable energy source.
Hydrogen cars, and an entire economy based on hydrogen-generated energy, sound great in concept. In reality, hydrogen vehicles carry a long list of unknowns. Foremost are the cost and performance of the hydrogen fuel cells themselves. Currently, hydrogen fuel cells require complex manual assembly, and therefore production is slow and costly."- Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) |
 "There was photovoltaics (using solar cells), or fuel cells, or water batteries (an attempt to convert the hydrogen from water into electricity in the cell). There was wind, or waste products, or even methane. But none of these, even the more exotic among them, were turning out to be robust or realistic.
Bill and Hal agreed that what was really needed was an entirely new source: a cheap, endless, perhaps as yet undiscovered, supply of energy. Their conversations often veered off in this kind of speculative direction."- Lynne Mctaggart, The Field - The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe (Get the book.) |
 "Hydrogen fuel cells are also playing an increasing role in electrical power generation for transportation and buildings. Sir William R. Grove built the first hydrogen fuel cell in 1839. As in the case of internal combustion, fuel cells have been continually perfected to the point where they can produce electricity with about 90 per cent efficiency. The cost of fuel cells keeps decreasing as they become ever more common in the marketplace."- Brian O'Leary, Reinheriting the Earth: Awakening to Sustainable Solutions and Greater Truths (Get the book.) |
 "Be sure to check out their latest returns and get expert advice:
New Alternatives Fund invests 25 percent of its funds in renewable energy such as wind power, fuel cells, ocean energy, solar, hydrogen, biomass, and geothermal. Visit them at www.newalternativesfund.com.
The Domini Equity fund is based on the Domini Social Index 400 (whose companies include McDonald's). So why did Domini pick McDonald's? "- David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.) "Today, when you invest in GE, you're also investing in fuel cells, wind turbines, and photovoltaic technology. Buying shares in Chevron—with its energy conservation and renewable energy divisions and its widely recognized high environmental standards—or BP and Shell, both of whom are investing heavily in solar, is buying green equity. It isn't that these companies are by any means environmentally perfect—and in this book I've tried hard not to sugarcoat?" - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.) "GM nonetheless in the first five years of the new millennium put most of its eggs in the fuel cells basket and pledged to have mass-produced fuel-cell vehicles by 2010, although U.S. News & World Report wondered if "GM engineers have been inhaling too many fumes."19 With not even two dozen hydrogen filling stations in the United States and with most of these expected to be in or near L.A. and San Francisco, 2010 might have been overly optimistic." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.) |
| "Furthermore, fuel cells have consistency, quality, and performance issues, including materials' degradation and the inability to work in subfreezing temperatures.
Another major issue is finding a way to store enough hydrogen on board the car to support a driving range that is equivalent to that of current gasoline-fueled vehicles, without compromising the passenger and cargo space. Finally, there must be an infrastructure to support the delivery of hydrogen to refueling stations for retail sale." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) "The Orcelle would be powered by a combination of sails, solar energy, and fuel cells, using optimal designs to carry the most cargo possible—while requiring no ballast water, using fewer toxic chemicals, and generating no greenhouse emissions. The company predicts that such vessels may be plowing the waves as soon as 2025. ez Why Does the United States Still Export Cotton? That's the sort of question economists like Pietra Rivoli, author of The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, like to ask. Intrigued when an antiglobalization protester asked her, "Who made your T-shirt?" - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) |
 "Later, in manned spacecraft, the astronauts could also drink the water that the fuel cells produced.
There is no question that fuel cells exist and that they work. But huge and confounding questions arise over the economics of hydrogen. The problem is that hydrogen is not exactly a fuel. It's more accurately a "carrier" of energy than a fuel. It takes more energy to manufacture hydrogen than the hydrogen itself produces."- James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) |
| "By using a combination of modular solar panels, wind microturbines, batteries, and plug-ins for fuel cells and biofuel-friendly diesel engines, the MPS can generate a constant 150 kilowatts. It can operate both off-grid and in parallel with grid power, is rugged enough to be dropped via parachute, and requires so little maintenance, SkyBuilt says, that one of their solar/wind units has been operating for a year continuously without being touched." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) |
| "There is no question that fuel cells exist and that they work. But huge and confounding questions arise over the economics of hydrogen. The problem is that hydrogen is not exactly a fuel. It's more accurately a "carrier" of energy than a fuel. It takes more energy to manufacture hydrogen than the hydrogen itself produces. So at this time hydrogen production depends on the other known energy sources that are all problematic for one reason or another—namely, oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, biomass, wind." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "One weak spot in the theory was that the fuel cells would run on natural gas, a commodity now in depletion. Another weak spot was that research and development by several companies, led by General Electric, had so far failed to engineer an affordable home generation unit. So distributed generation has come to naught so far. The upshot has been that the giant regional grids, with their long ranks of towers and power lines and substations, are not being maintained because the utility companies are still betting that they will be obsolete sooner rather than later." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "They are modular and can be stacked to produce different amounts of power. fuel cells can operate at efficiencies two to three times that of the internal combustion engine, and require no moving parts. In a kind of reverse electrolysis, hydrogen introduced through a catalytic metal membrane combines with oxygen to produce water vapor and an electric current, which then does useful work. In a fuel-cell car, for example, electricity from the fuel cell would power an electric motor and make the car go." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) |
| "Another promising technology is fuel cells, which run on hydrogen and oxygen. The cleanly burned product is water, with the release of electricity. This process is the opposite of the electrolysis of water, where electricity dissociates the water into its constituent atoms hydrogen and oxygen. Unfortunately, we have not yet found cost-effective ways to provide the hydrogen for the fuel cells and for other energy uses. All of that could change in the fully developed hydrogen economy described in the next section." - Brian O'Leary, Reinheriting the Earth: Awakening to Sustainable Solutions and Greater Truths (Get the book.) |
 "Transportation and heavy industry are experiencing their own molecular revolution. fuel cells that don't use internal combustion have been around since the early days of space exploration. Today they're entering into commercial use for power plants. They're still too heavy and expensive for broad adoption, but molecular manufacturing may dramatically decrease weight while increasing efficiency. Once this happens, every factory or truck could use fuel cells cheaply to generate power."- Douglas Mulhall, Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World (Get the book.) |
 "And when fuel cells are able to use pure hydrogen as a fuel, the electricity they generate will be pollution-free.
Fuel cells have been used for a long time in our space program, but were thought too large and costly for autos. Now they have been made lighter and cheaper. DaimlerChrysler and Ford Motor Company are collaborating with once-tiny Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, British Columbia, to develop fuel-cell cars. Each plans to have five working prototypes on California roads in the near future, and for sale by 2004."- Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.) "Trains are a natural market for fuel cells. Today's diesel-elec-tric locomotives are essentially small electric power plants that drive 4,000 horsepower electric motors. Trains have more space to store hydrogen or methanol, and they would make an ideal vehicle to test medium-sized fuel cells. I confess that I have a small child's love of trains. I have taken the Trans-Siberian Express across the full breadth of Asia; the Orient Express across Europe; the Indian-Pacific across Australia." - Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.) "But over late-night beers their executives confide that fuel cells are the real wave of the future. They would much prefer to plod along with yesterday's cars until fuel cells are ready to capture the market. But as the computer industry shows us every month, there can be a huge market eager to buy products that are better than yesterday's machine, if tomorrow's perfect machine is not yet available. Ford, GM, and Chrysler all hope to sell fuel-cell vehicles by 2004 or 2005." - Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.) "In late 1999, automotive fuel cells still cost ten times too much and were about 600 pounds too heavy for mass production for automobiles. However, fuel cells have few moving parts and are simpler than gasoline engines, so they should be affordable and reliable once they are mass-produced. The most important obstacle facing them may be the creation of neighborhood filling stations with hydrogen pumps. It is a chicken-and-egg problem. As discussed earlier, hydrogen is typically obtained today by breaking down a fossil fuel to extract its hydrogen." - Denis Hayes, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair (Get the book.) |
| "As in the case of internal combustion, fuel cells have been continually perfected to the point where they can produce electricity with about 90 per cent efficiency. The cost of fuel cells keeps decreasing as they become ever more common in the marketplace.
As promising as these traditional hydrogen energy technologies may be, we come up against fundamental constraints which chemistry places on how much energy we can get out of the hydrogen atom." - Brian O'Leary, Reinheriting the Earth: Awakening to Sustainable Solutions and Greater Truths (Get the book.) |
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