If you live in Washington, DC, New York or Southern California and see a driver in a Chevy Equinox pointing and laughing as you pull into your local gas station to fill-up, try not to take offense. That driver may be one of the lucky few who are test driving one of General Motors’ new Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles, which don’t use gasoline and have no harmful greenhouse gas emissions. GM, a member of USCAP, is putting its research into hydrogen fuel cells to the test as part of “Project Driveway,” according to a recent video report by Reuters.
This is pretty cool technology. There’s plenty of research into hydrogen fuel cells happening in my home state of South Carolina at the Center for Hydrogen Research in Aiken and the South Carolina Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Alliance in Columbia, which recently collaborated to produce a hydrogen-powered Chevy Silverado. Speaking of SC ties, there’s the BMW Hydrogen 7 – wow. And Ford is developing a hydrogen fuel cell electric plug-in hybrid in addition to the fleet of 30 hydrogen fuel cell-powered Focus vehicles it’s currently road testing. Unfortunately, much of this research isn’t yet commercially viable – GM’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles, for example, currently cost about a quarter-million dollars each to produce, and GM confesses it wouldn’t mind a few government incentives to help make the vehicles more affordable for consumers.
I commend GM and other groups taking the bold leap to research hydrogen fuel cell technology. Rather than a reliance on tax dollars, I’d like to see market incentives like those made possible under cap & trade help these and other emerging clean energy innovations come to the marketplace.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, Oil and Gas, Pop Culture . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
