Hydrogen vs Electric

[GeauxSioux]

Congress Forces The DOE To Take Hydrogen Funding

Even though Steven Chu thinks hydrogen cells are a lost cause for now, the Senate will force the DOE to spend $204 million researching fuel cells.

It looks like it comes at the cost of something near to Chu's heart.

The Secretary wants to create series of small labs across the country to study alternative energy. His model is based on AT&T Bell Labs, where he did the work that led to his Nobel Prize.

To build those labs, Chu wanted $280 million. Instead, he's getting $35 million to build one lab, rather than eight like he hoped for.

Energy Secretary, Congress Collide Over Hydrogen Car Funds

Energy Secretary Steven Chu wants to kill research and development on cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells, but a spending bill approved by the House this month and another scheduled for a Senate vote this week would restore funding for the program.

Mr. Chu has said that hydrogen fuel cells are an impractical technology for vehicles, partly because they would require the creation of a network of hydrogen fueling stations.

"The department's made a significant mistake here," Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) told Mr. Chu at a recent hearing of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development. Mr. Dorgan, the panel's chairman, has steered millions of federal dollars over the past five years to the National Center for Hydrogen Technology at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

[ScottM]

Some of the WSJ comments regarding the viability of hydrogen as a fuel are interesting. However, Dorgan looks like a pork barrel pig in that article.

[MplsBison]

If they can get the specific energy of batteries up enough so that a single charge can last for 250 miles or so, reliably in all reasonable weather, then batteries should be able to do it.

It's then a matter of either developing fast enough recharge times or developing some cheap way to swap out battery packs. Probably for the former is more plausible.

[Goon]

Some of the WSJ comments regarding the viability of hydrogen as a fuel are interesting. However, Dorgan looks like a pork barrel pig in that article.

That would be a very accurate discription of Senator "comb over" Dorgan.