Good morning, again, on Sunday 8/24/03! Saturday's lead editorial from the Des Moines Register. Another good energy one! Lyle Editorial: So who needs a power grid? Go ahead and fix it - but move quickly toward a new age of energy. By Register Editorial Board 08/23/2003 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Last week's big blackout focused attention on the need to modernize the nation's electric-power grid. While we're at it, Americans might also begin planning for a future when the grid won't be needed anymore. Those big high-voltage lines carrying electricity across the country could someday vanish from the landscape, replaced by pipelines carrying hydrogen. Huge coal and nuclear generating plants could disappear, replaced by millions of small generating stations in neighborhoods or even in individual homes. Some visionaries see such things happening in the not-too-distant future. The key is the switch to hydrogen and the perfection of fuel-cell technology. A fuel cell is a device in which electricity is produced when hydrogen and oxygen are mixed. This takes place without combustion. Fuel cells are virtually silent and have no internal moving parts. In theory, they could last forever without wearing out. The only byproducts are water and a small amount of heat. One scenario has a fuel cell in each home. Hydrogen could be piped into homes - as natural gas is now. Each home could generate its own electricity and use the waste heat to provide hot water. Another scenario has larger fuel cells supplying entire neighborhoods with electricity. Either scenario would have electricity being produced in innumerable fuel cells close to its point of use, rather than generation taking place in large, remote power plants with the electricity shipped many miles over high-voltage lines. This distributed generation would be far less susceptible to regional blackouts. Outside the home, fuel cells are widely expected to replace internal-combustion engines in automobiles. Perhaps you could pull into your garage after work and refuel your car from the hydrogen pipeline to your home. Alternatively, you could pull into your garage, plug your car into the house and use the electricity produced by your car's fuel cell to run the lights and appliances in your home. Out in the yard, your garden tractor would have a quiet fuel cell instead of a noisy gasoline engine. It would be a portable electric power plant. You could plug your electric hedge trimmer or electric leaf blower directly into your tractor. At work, your car could be plugged into a socket in the parking ramp, and the electricity generated by your car could help supply your company's power needs. Instead of you paying to park, the parking ramp would pay you. No one knows whether these things will actually happen. New technology leads down unpredictable paths. The exact shape of the future cannot be known, but a few basics seem clear: The internal-combustion engine is nearing obsolescence in everyday use, hydrogen is the fuel of the future and distributed generation of electricity would be better than big power plants. The electric grid will still be around for a while - certainly long enough to warrant upgrading it to prevent blackouts. So let's do that - and also get busy ushering in the hydrogen age. Do one for the present and the other for the future. ********************* Lyle R. Krewson Sierra Club Conservation Organizer 6403 Aurora Avenue #3 Des Moines, IA 50322-2862 515/276-8947 515/238-7113 - cel [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Make your voice heard! Find out how to get Take Action Alerts and other important Sierra Club messages by email at: http://www.sierraclub.org/email