AS THE WORST! If you want to join the picketing, call 714-496-1567 for the location. An EV will be present. This may be combined with a RECALL DAVIS table.

Here are some startling facts about fuel cells, Hydrogen, and why Bush and the Oilies (and Davis) are pushing more dirty power plants to make the power to create the Hydrogen:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15316

"...we will harvest hydrogen from both renewable sources and fossil fuels, with the idea that eventually renewable sources can replace fossil fuels...One of the principal failures of the Bush plan is that the path it charts toward hydrogen does not lead simultaneously toward developing renewable energy sources; rather, it diverts funds away from them. According to the White House, only $720 million of the $1.2 billion Bush pledged for his hydrogen plan over the next five years is new money. The rest – roughly 40 percent – is comprised of funds redirected from the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency programs..."

TRANSLATION: Bush wants to produce "clean" Hydrogen from fossil fuels, with the idea of "eventually" moving to renewable sources to make the Hydrogen. But this will have, according to this article, the impact of increasing our energy bill by a factor of 10 times for the portion diverted to the Hydrogen Follies. Meanwhile, he's using the smoke-screen to kill renewables programs. Cheney is a big fan of more "clean" nuclear power plants, and there has been some movement in the federal bureaucracy to free up new nuke permits. This is not a joke, this is not a shuck. Talk about moving the pollution from the tailpipe to upstream polluters...instead of relatively less awful air pollution, asthma and death, Bush is proposing centuries, millenia, of contamination from nuke waste.

"'President Bush is merely playing a shell game with these funds," says...Union of Concerned Scientists...'The FreedomCAR is really about Bush's freedom to do nothing about cars today,'
says [nrdc]...." "Pure hydrogen...does not occur naturally; it must be harvested using electrical or chemical processes..."
"...using solar energy to produce hydrogen would cost about 10 times as much as using conventional fuels. Here's why: "The cheapest and most widely used method of harvesting hydrogen is called steam methane reformation, a process that involves extracting hydrogen atoms from natural gas...The problem is, extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels leaves behind carbon...

One of the problems of carbon detritus is global warming, of course; but also, carbon impurities are said to destroy the fuel cell stack.

One of the ways to look at solar rooftop power is that it allows you to make enough electricity on your own, independent of gas stations, power plants, or bureaucrats, to power super-efficient battery powered EVs over 3000 miles per month. The battle, then, is really that the bushies and oilies want cars to be inefficient, so that you cannot fuel up by plugging in. This may be why they made a big thing about "plugging in", as if people would be afraid.

So how to get this huge influx of power, if we are to move to super-inefficient fuel cells and hydrogen? Fuel cell efficiency is listed as "37% to 80%", but this is a phony numbers game. As
with gasoline engines, the big waste product with a fuel cell is WASTE HEAT. Entropy. So fuel cell proponents point out that if you capture ALL the waste heat, the efficiency can be as much as 50%. That's 3 times gasoline's max. In fixed installations, it might be possible to get "efficiency" as high as 80% or even more, if you count using the waste heat as being used, for example, to heat a nearby chicken coup or nuclear plant. Here is the rube goldberg idea: use solar and wind to generate power to electrolyze water for inefficient hydrogen! The problem
is that you no longer would have the capability to generate that much energy off your rooftop solar system:

"[as an alternative]...Electrolysis extracts hydrogen from water using an electric current, and if that current is derived from renewable resources such as solar or wind energy, the hydrogen-production process can be emissions-free...

"...electrolysis is considerably more costly than steam methane reformation – first, because of economies of scale, and second, because the cost of electrolysis is contingent on the cost of
electricity. According to...Stuart Energy, it costs between $1.20 and $1.50 to manufacture one kilogram of hydrogen (which is roughly the energy equivalent to one gallon of gas) using steam methane reformation...".

This is not including the cost of compressing the Hydrogen to liquid densities. Yet at the high-point of the recent oil price surge, the wholesale price of gasoline at the very highest never rose above $1 per gallon. Mostly, gaso is about $.40 cents per gallon. Yet here's the fantasy, using renewables to create H2 gas:

"Using...electrolysis...it costs about $1.65 to manufacture the same amount of hydrogen – provided that electricity costs just 3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh)...".

Rumor has it that we are paying 23 to 33 cents per kwh for San Onofre Nuke power, and 12 to 18 cents per kwh for blended power. A far cry from 3 cents! At 12 cents, Hydrogen would cost about $5 per gallon-gas-equivalent ("gge"). But that would increase the load on power plants, and increase pollution.

"Grid electricity in the U.S. typically runs between 6 and 8 cents per kWh. Wind energy can already be produced at around 5 cents per kWh, so it's feasible to have relatively cost-competitive hydrogen derived from wind..."

But wind resources are not sufficient for such a load.

"...solar electricity costs roughly 20 cents per kWh, so today it would cost about 10 times more to produce hydrogen using solar as it would using natural gas..."

To swing a significant amount of energy usage from gasoline to Hydrogen would involve some absurd consequences, and some that are music (CHA-CHING!) to the Oilies (and bush). It turns out that making Hydrogen, allegedly for clean air, might involve building a MASSIVE electric infrastructure, one that dwarfs Cheney's "power plant per week for 20 years" statement.
The real goal:

"...even in the long term, renewables [may] not be the only answer. 'There is no energy source that doesn't have environmental impacts,' says...an alternative energy expert at NRDC. 'You'd have to put up lots of solar and wind to provide hydrogen to power all vehicles and support all the electricity demand in this country.' In other words, a purely renewable-powered hydrogen economy could require wind mills by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and solar panels
covering millions of acres, a situation that could have adverse effects on the land..."

Or coal, nuke and NG power plants by the thousands, which is probably what bush is aiming at.

So the swing to Hydrogen is just one more attempt to increase our impact on the environment. Paradoxically, cleaning up the air by Hydrogen cars will involve more nuke plants, more NG plants, more "clean coal" plants, and provide lots of no-bid opportunities for Halliburton for centuries.

I like to point out that, if we now use 25% of global energy consumption, conversion to Hydrogen would mean upping our consumption to 50% of global energy usage!

Electric cars, however, are here, now. As we speak, General Motors and the other fell creatures of the "auto manufacturers alliance" are busy confiscating EVs and marking them for destruction. They were not able to do this until Davis forced his ARB to knuckle under. Some might well wonder if there was some sort of contribution by grateful oil companies. After all, they bald-facedly bought up the advanced NiMH battery patent, and are suing at least one company that tried to use them in EVs. That's right, Chevron owns the patent for advanced NiMH batteries, and is not allowing them to be used to make EVs, allegedly because "no one wants them". But those who try to get an EV are turned aside and refused.

Doug
714-496-1567

Back to T.O.C. 3