“YES, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it…will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light…Water will be the coal of the future.”
The words of Pencroft, Jules Verne’s visionary engineer in his novel The Mysterious Island, were science fiction in 1874. But today a new band of prophets is predicting once again that hydrogen will achieve the unimaginable. This new fuel, they say, will finally end our love affair with hydrocarbon fuels and shift energy production from the big and centralised to the small and dispersed – a process they call “re-globalisation from the bottom up”.
“The convergence of new energy regimes and new communication regimes comes at pivotal points in world history,” says Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Washington DC-based Foundation on Economic Trends, and one of the most prominent in the group of hydrogen advocates. Think of the emergence of writing and agriculture in Mesopotamia, the printing press and coal in Britain, the telegraph and oil in the US. Rifkin believes that the planet is on the cusp of another such revolution, and that the World Wide Web is just waiting for its own energy partner – hydrogen.
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For the evangelists, one of the great benefits is that if powered by renewable sources, using hydrogen as an energy carrier moves us away from large-scale centralised power generation and towards dispersed, small-scale generators. With solar panels on the roof or a wind farm down the road generating hydrogen that will feed a stationary fuel cell in your basement, you can generate sufficient power where and when you need it without the infrastructure and waste associated with transporting electricity long distances.
Rather than relying on a few large power plants, we would share energy with each other like internet file swappers, relegating the power companies to the role of energy coordinators rather than producers. And as with the evolution of the web, Rifkin says, the corporate giants might not have it all their own way. “The interesting thing about the web is that the big companies didn’t win,” he says.
This concept of a network of small producers is an important part of Rifkin’s vision. He sees the car of the future as a power plant on wheels. While it is sitting in the garage or outside the office, you plug its fuel cell into the mains and sell the electricity it generates to the grid. So all the time you are not using your vehicle, it earns you money. “It doesn’t take many people doing that to put coal and nuclear out of business,” says Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank based in Snowmass, Colorado. If the entire US fleet of 200 million vehicles converted to fuel cells and plugged in, they would generate four times the grid’s current capacity. A very similar scenario is outlined in the UK government’s white paper on energy published earlier this year.
According to Rifkin, though, the big winner in the hydrogen economy will be the developing world. “The reason people are powerless is literal: they don’t have power,” he says. For him, globalisation has been a failure because it has only involved 1 in 5 of the people on the planet. He believes the combination of hydrogen and web communications will usher in a more egalitarian era in which energy is generated and owned locally.
It’s a heady vision and certainly decades away. But some observers worry that hyping hydrogen’s potential in this way will only lead to disappointment. “Hydrogen may be more of a belief than a scientific issue,” notes energy systems expert Detlef Stolten of the Research Centre Jülich in Germany. “We can be very taken by the picture of power to the people,” agrees David Baldock, director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy in London. “Hydrogen does not deliver a decentralised system on its own. We have to avoid overselling hydrogen as a panacea.”
