Although the English term ‘‘hydrogen economy’’, to describe a system of delivering energy using hydrogen, was coined by John Bockris, a former professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University, during a talk he gave in 1970 at General Motors, scientific interest in the solar hydrogen economy goes back to 1912, to the famous paper of […]

Two billion chargers are sold each year through the mobile phone charger market. The travel charger sub-segment is the fastest grow­ing charger segment, with an estimated market value of more than €11 billion. A number of new fuel cell companies using hydrogen fueled fuel cells are now actively trying to establish sales in this market. […]

Hydrogen will soon be extensively applied in distributed systems of energy production that use new, reliable and sustainable hydrogen fuel cells to produce clean energy 24 hours per day, 365 days per year to meet the demanding needs of apartment blocks, office buildings, stores and neighborhoods. Recently, the US company Bloom Energy has installed 135 […]

Hydrogen can be used efficiently as fuel for thermoelectric power plants. In 2010, Italy’s largest electricity utility (Enel) opened the world’s first hydrogen power combined cycle plant near Venice (Figure 4.15). Hydrogen is supplied using specially built pipelines from the nearby Polimeri Europa petrochemical plant, where ethylene-cracking is carried out. The 12 MW power plant […]

With about 600 million passenger vehicles around the globe today – and currently with a worldwide production of approximately 55 million units per year – the automobile powered by fossil oil-based fuels is a major source of environmental pollution. Efforts to market hydrogen-powered cars, which started in the early 2000s, have generally failed. In 2010, […]

In addition to its indirect use in fuel cells, hydrogen can be burnt directly in air within an internal combustion engine, with remarkable advantages over gasoline engines, such as in the case of the BMW Hydrogen 5th generation vehicles equipped with a hydrogen tank (Figure 4.5).9 Curious as it may seem, the reciprocating ICE operated […]

4.1 Hydrogen Fuel Cell Engines Invented in 1839, the hydrogen fuel cell has been employed widely since the early 1960s in space probes to generate onboard electricity, water and heat. Indeed, in the fuel cell the controlled reaction of hydrogen with oxygen yields electricity, heat, and water, directly converting into elec­trical energy the chemical energy […]

According to the US National Academy of Engineering, the electric grid was the most significant engineering achievement of the 20th century.38 The interconnected series of transmission wires, metal towers, voltage converting substations and their associated control structure that make up the electric grid is of course existing infrastructure of immense value (Figure 3.26). It will […]