Lawrence, I (and probably others too) don't hate fuel cells for the right applications. What I *do* hate is that our precious tax dollars are wasted big-time on the unreasonable requirement for zero-emissions long-range vehicles, because the way the rules are written they benefit vehicles that pollute *more* than the already existing solutions, if you take "the long tailpipe" into account. You would expect that these laws would encourage battery technology development, the politics however is skewed to give benefits to non-solutions, which suck up money that *could* have been used for good investments in real solutions. And there is political pressure to keep good solutions at bay, such as proliferation of CNG vehicles is stifled, while those are far more viable and a solution that is available today, than H2. So, by suppressing these existing solutions and putting arbitrary rules in law that benefit only one or two specific cases and those can reap huge benefits without actually offering a solution, the progress is actually reduced instead of improved and the money available for progress disappears in a few pockets. *That* is what I hate about the current situation and I do not like that some proponents of non-solutions continue to harp that their solution is in some aspects twice as efficient as an ICE, completely ignoring the elephant in the room that the step before that efficiency is far more wasteful than existing technology. You may have noticed that I did not get a reply to my challenge to come up with real data instead of half-truths and hand-waving. All this in addition to the fact that H2 requires a non-existent infrastructure to be built and comes at an incremental cost per vehicle that makes a BEV look like a great deal - which it actually is. As others have said: if the playing-field was level and the decision makers had proper (scientific) data, we would be moving in quite a different direction than we are today. Now *that* is something that does bother me, for one thing because I am funding it with a 5-digit tax injection every year and secondly I am paying with my health, because focusing on non-solutions just delays the switch to good energy efficient solutions, which means that the pollution stays higher than needed and instead of a far more massive investment in EVs, many decision makers are hesitating and waiting for "better solutions" so there is less progress than we could have made if we just pushed for the available good solutions instead of waiting due to manufactured doubt. On the subject of doubt: that is how tobacco manufacturers protected their profits for many years and more recently, how vested interests avoided having to curb their pollution by seeding doubt about whether climate change is real. There is a movie made about the industry that manufactures doubt (for money). As always - just follow the money....
Please note that I am a scientist, inventor and engineer-at-heart. I love new technology. But I also discern about scientific peer-reviewed data about the merits of an invention and the lore, or false claims with hidden processes or politically motivated manoeuvrings that give us bad decisions and that hurt the people, the environment and our finances. Hope this clarifies, Cor van de Water Chief Scientist Proxim Wireless Corporation http://www.proxim.com Email: cwa...@proxim.com Private: http://www.cvandewater.info Skype: cor_van_de_water XoIP: +31877841130 Tel: +1 408 383 7626 Tel: +91 (040)23117400 x203 -----Original Message----- From: EV on behalf of Lawrence Winiarski via EV Sent: Fri 4/24/2015 10:05 PM To: Mark Abramowitz; Electric Vehicle Discussion List Subject: Re: [EVDL] Toyota FCV (fuel cell vehicle) my 2 cents: Seems to me that using methane to make H2 to run in a car isn't very compelling. Why bother since it is so easy to just use a CNG car? Even if it was a few percentage pointsmore efficient..and that's far from certain, It doesn't seem worth it. If you really cared about efficiency that much, you'd be modifiying the aerodynamics, not making some more complicated way of using the CNG. But I don't hate fuel cells. Why hate an idea? There are actually good uses for fuel cells. They are faster to recharge than lithium batteries. They make clean water too.Why not just accept that? I don't hate the idea anymore than I hate the idea of burning coal to make electricity to run the EV. That's not particularly compelling either. .IMHO what is compelling is solar panels generating electricity to run the EV. Think if Michael Faraday gave up studying his little toy magnets and wires? We wouldn't be having EV's...or even electric lights for that matter..but sometimes on the way to the future, you need to accept that "A" by itself" isn't the answer. You also need "B", but according to the law of procrastination, before you can do anything, you need to do something else, so why not give up now....anyway, the point is that you shouldn't degenerate an idea that hasn't found widespread use yet. So stop hating fuel cells. Maybe they have an appropriate use? Perhap in distant future, in a galaxy far away maybe they might use a "reversible fuel cell" (they exist) that can make hydrogen (and oxygen) from solar panels and store it for later use, then use it at will (or at night) to generate heat and electricty and Imagine everyone's fuel cell car as a hydrogen-oxygen generator while it's parked, which could potentially send hydrogen and perhaps oxygen to a "hydrogen" grid (i.e. pipeline like natural gas). that could be used for machines that don't lend themselves to batteries. Then these same fuel cells could generate electricity at night off the same stored hydrogen. Not saying it's going to happen in our lifetimes, or even that ithe future won't bring something better, but there was a time not so long ago when people laughed at ridiculously high priced solar panelsor EV's. You never know what the future's going to bring. I personally wouldn't completely condemn fuel cells as ...bull$shit and stop or halt their development as some sort of dead end That seems like the same sort of arrogant talk, not long ago, that people were using toward EV's. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150425/0e313905/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 6466 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150424/194255cb/attachment.bin> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
