he Holy Grail of power system technology appears to be fuel cells. Fuel
cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity, and the by-product is water.
Someone noted that since water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas,
fuel-cell cars might increase global warming due to their water vapor emissions. But the
natural evaporation from lakes and rivers in the U.S. produces about 1000 times more water
vapor than would come from a transportation system that was totally powered by fuel cells.
So the increased moisture in the air is pretty much inconsequential. In fact, fuel cells
are about as close to ideal as we can devise in a power system.
The biggest challenge of fuel cells is that they like to run on
pure hydrogen, which is difficult to carry on board a car. And theres no hydrogen
delivery infrastructure in place. But these problems are quickly being solved, and
production fuel cell cars are just around the corner.
To show you how fast this technology is coming along, I attended the
World Car Conference in Riverside CA in 1996. And at the time, there was concern that fuel
cells could be cut from PNGV because they couldnt be ready for production by the
2004 deadline. Well that was only about 4 years ago, and if you go out to Palm Springs
today, youll see production fuel cell golf cars running around. And theyll be
showing up in passenger cars pretty soon.
One of the most exciting developments of the past two or three years is the direct
methanol fuel cell.