| happydolphin said: So what's stopping us from making it happen? Also, can commercial airplanes run off hydrogen cells with today's technology? |
Cost, as you see from the Spain example being the first to force renewable energy has the risk of pricing yourself out of the market. This can only be done as a global effort or when oil becomes more expensive, although that might be too late to start the transition.
Hopefully oil, gas and coal prices will go up gradually enough to make the transition to alternative energy production and storage.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still really expensive to build, $120.000 to build one in 2015 according to Toyota. Hawaii is the new testing ground after Iceland went belly up. The biggest problem though is having to build the delivery infrastructure for H2 from the ground up.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/green-driving/news-and-notes/hawaii-the-testing-ground-for-hydrogen-cars/article1953437/
The battery alternative is great for city use, but who wants to wait an hour at a recharge station to wait for the battery to recharge. Another good thing about H2 production is it can take all the excess electricity that is now simply lost. Power plants over produce to make sure we don't have brownouts. A lot of energy is wasted this way. It could help with solar and wind too, store the excess during the day, feed it back to the net during the night to recharge all those car batteries.
Boeing doesn't believe in hydrogen for commercial airplanes yet, there are some plans for private planes though.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/news/4257294
You're right Quebec is great with hydro power, and Canada as a whole has almost 60% of it's power from hydro plants. However as my example shows you need to nearly triple electricity production to replace the use of gasoline. Whether you store it in batteries or in hydrogen doesn't make that much of a difference. The question is can we realize that in time before the lack of cheap oil starts to hinder us.
Some wild speculation about the future. Maybe futuristic cars can be charged while being propelled by magnetic propulsion on main roads. The same way maglev trains are propelled. That way the electric engines in the wheels can recharge the car battery while the car is being pushed along. My gut tells me that will be highly energy inefficient and requires a lot of expensive technology to be build under main roads. It would be cool though. Self driving cars that recharge while driving on main roads.
