In past posts, I talked about hydrogen and the electric future. You can read them here:

1. The promise of plug-in hybrids.
2. The future is electric.
3. Fuel cells will power the electric vehicles of the future.
4. The hydrogen that powers those fuel cells will be in solid form.
5. Where does the hydrogen comes from?

Talking with futurist Garry Golden in a coffee house in South Austin, he takes a sip from his cup and continues with our discussion. “Hydrogen is interesting. But ultimately we need to get beyond hydrogen to the real revolution.” He puts his cup down slowly and contemplates it a bit before continuing. “That would be distributed electricity generation. That’s what will change everything.”

Let me explain. Currently, energy is mainly delivered via a vast patchwork of wires strung across the country called The Grid.

The dirty little secret, according to Golden is that, “The grid is going to take billions of dollars to maintain.” This comment is in stark contrast to our everday perception of electricity: we flip the switch and the light goes on. So the grid must be reliable, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. Here’s a suprising little Reuters news piece from February 27, 2008: “Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency”. Texas gets more power from wind than any other state, primarily from wind farms in West Texas. This is generally a Good Thing. However, as this lightly read article points out, ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the organization that controls the grid in Texas, went into the second stage of an emergency plan when the plausible happened: the wind died one evening in February.

EMERGENCY?

Because the wind died?!?

Aren’t all the ways Texas generates electricity (wind, coal, natural gas, hydro, etc.) flexible enough to ratchet up and down to meet demand, even if the wind dies? Sadly, no. Indeed, coal and natural gas fired plants weren’t designed to ratchet up and down that much.

The same article pointed out that earlier that day, Florida had to cut power to a million customers for up to four hours because of grid problems.

So, the grid isn’t as reliable or cheap as we may think; it’s is more brittle than most customers realize. If we can solve the hydrogen storage problem by using carbon nanotubes as a solid substrate; and if we can solve the hydrogen creation problem (most likely first via methane, but ultimately via water); and if we can bring the price of fuel cells down by using cheaper materials for their membranes, then there’s a real possibility that we won’t need the grid. We could generate all the electricity we would need via hydrogen powered fuel cells that sit outside our houses as appliances, much like how our air conditioners currently do. Like this:

According to Golden, fuel cells can pretty much scale up or down in size. It’s fairly straightforward to create one to generate the electricity needed for a house. Hydrogen could be created regionally and then distributed via a retail channel, maybe in a way like bagged ice is produced now. If you have the fuel cell and the hydrogen distribution system in place, then you don’t need the grid. Of course, a best case scenario would be to be able to create hydrogen locally from solar power & water, but that may be a longer term goal.

This isn’t going to happen overnight. Nor, do I suspect, will we completely eliminate the grid. However, it does open up intriguing possibilities. It also challenges our underlying assumptions, which are:
- we will always need the grid
- the grid is reliable

The larger trends are diversity and decentralization. We’re going to live in a diverse energy future; we’ll drive vehicles that run on gasoline; hybrids; biodiesel; battery electrics; super capacitor electrics; super capacitor/battery/hybrid electrics, etc. But to fully realize decentralization of the fuel supply, we may need to modify the patent licensing process for hydrogen creation and storage that are currently being developed at government laboratories like the DOE’s Renewable Energy Lab, Argonne National Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory etc. in such a way to allow anyone to build systems to create hydrogen and/or store it without fear of patent infringement lawsuits.

But that’s for another post. For now, imagine what we could do if we didn’t need to be tied to the grid for energy. We could simply put energy where we needed it; like a village in Africa for water purification; or a village in remote parts of Pakistan to power lights for a school. Or anywhere. That’s the real revolution. Of course, we don’t want to substitute one centralized power distribution system (the electrical grid) with another centralized power distribution system (a retail hydrogen chain run by a few companies). The point is to promote a diversity in the ecosystem of hydrogen suppliers so that total system is robust and uses real competition to keep the price of power in check. The right approach to patents and the right approach to open standards will be the key. We’ll be more successful as a society if we look at open source software and a creative commons license as a model for facilitating the creation of a hydrogen infrastructure than we will if we continue the same way of doing business, but in a new energy field. More on that later.