Study Finds Electricity Beats Hydrogen for Power Storage/Delivery

[phantom power]

A new study finds that major applications for hydrogen envisioned in hydrogen economy scenarios could be more efficiently accomplished with technologies that use electricity directly. It concludes that in key roles envisioned for hydrogen as an energy carrier - namely transmission of remote renewable resources, storage of intermittent renewables or for use in vehicles electricity offers options that are more energy efficient and might preclude massscale emergence of hydrogen technologies.

The study - Carrying the Energy Future: Comparing Hydrogen and Electricity for Transmission, Storage and Transportation - was issued by the Institute for Iifecycle Environmental Assessment and was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation. It found that energy penalties incurred in manufacturing hydrogen place it at a competitive disadvantage compared with electricity.

EDIT

"Although hydrogen is seen by some as a medium to store energy generated by intermittent renewable sources such as sun and wind, making power available on demand, other energy storage technologies deliver comparatively more energy," says Mazza. "Hydrogen storage returns around 47% of original energy, while advanced batteries return 75-85% and established pumped hydroelectric and compressed air technologies return about 75%. A wind farm which stores at 47% efficiency would require 160 turbines to generate the amount of useful energy produced by a 100 turbines which store at 75% efficiency."

The study concludes that even though the use of hydrogen as clean vehicle fuel is the most prominent of its foreseen uses, relative inefficiencies of hydrogen compared with direct electricity play out in vehicle technology too. "Using electricity to charge electric vehicles (EVs) provides twice the miles per kWh than employing electricity to make hydrogen fuel," says Mazza. "While conventional wisdom has it that the EV is a technological dead-end, hobbled by limited range and extended recharging times, advanced battery technologies could substantially extend ranges and meet the needs of a more substantial share of the market than is commonly understood. Lithium ion batteries developed for portable electronics are now working in prototype EVs that go nearly 250 miles between charges."
http://www.aiada.org/article.asp?id=21814&cat=Hybrid

[htuttle]

1. This is what I've been saying

To hell with Hydrogen. We need to take that R&D money and put it into developing better batteries.

[phantom power]

2. efficiency isn't everything

Among other things, there's energy density, weight, safety and cost.

Mind you, hydrogen doesn't stack up that well with respect to these other factors, either.

I'd like to see more on this claim of an electric-car with a range of 250 miles. Is this a practical prototype, or is it another engineering stunt, filled to the gills with batteries?

[ParanoidPat]

3. The best of both worlds, hydrogen fuel cells.....

......that use an electrical current to turn a metal into a metal-hydride to store the charge and then liberate the electrons as you react the metal-hydride with a catalyst (platinum) and turn it back into a pure metal.

[Trillo]

11. Fuel Cell Stacks are costly

I ran accross this the other day, and judged it peripheral to the discussion topic I was engaged in. However, it fits here:

" The dilemmas that automakers must solve in order to eventually mass-produce hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are many, and it's no secret that chief among them is cost.

And solutions to making the environmentally-friendly vehicles affordable to consumers come at premium for automakers themselves. General Motors Corp. reportedly spends more than $500 million annually on hydrogen fuel cell research, but the component that could eventually break the bank might come as a surprise. Right now the fuel cell stack - where in one of nature's great wonders, hydrogen unites with oxygen to create electricity and power experimental vehicles - costs about 10 times that of an internal combustion engine. Platinum, a key ingredient in a fuel cell stack, trades at roughly $700 an ounce, or about twice the rate of gold."
more...
http://www.thecarconnection.com/index.asp?article=5978&sid=196&n=156

[Ready4Change]

5. One downside of batteries

I've been told that most batteries, especially the newer technologies, use substances that aren't kind to landfills. Since batteries have a limited lifespan, using them means using them and eventually throwing them away.

At least hydrogen, despite it's inefficiency, is relatively benign.

BTW, I'm on no particular side of this. I'm for any renewable that makes sense, and feel that as fossil fuel costs rise that more and more renewables are making sense.

[Massacure]

6. It depends on the batteries - some can be recycled

[Ready4Change]

7. Good to know.

Are these newer, more efficient types?

[Massacure]

8. Lithium-Ion batteries (the kind used in laptops) can be recycled

Lithium-Ion are ideal when you need a battery with high energy density. They can be recharged a couple of hundred times, and then they need to be recycled.

[Ready4Change]

9. I didn't think they could be recycled.

I thought LI batteries have some poisonous components?

[Throckmorton]

12. "poisonous components" and recycling are not mutually exclusive.

Lead, widely used in lead-acid cell is very poisonous, but also highly recyclable.

[papau]

4. Thanks for find this interesting post ! :-)

Seems we need to get back to the Clinton-Gore 80 mpg car (we were at 70 mpg using off the shelve stuff and no hybrid when we found ourselves with Bush as the new leader).

A little electric power added to the Clinton-Gore concept car would make Ford a winner - rather than a winer over being excluded from the CA car pool lanes.

:-)

[Trillo]

10. Observations on this study:

This study makes a lot of sense. If you use an electricity generator, such as a wind turbine, to produce electrical power (primary conversion--wind to electricity), then use that electricity to manufacture hydrogen (secondary conversion), of course there's an energy loss in the secondary compared to storing the primary conversion.

I'd like to see an efficiency study of a solar technology that makes hydrogen directly, such as the Australian Titanium oxide ceramic cells in the other thread, or even using a solar hydrogen generator such as this one:
http://www.hionsolar.com/n-hion96.htm (this is probably older technology, the page isn't dated)

Here's how the efficiency study should be done to eliminate bias:
1. Use a solar hydrogen generator to make hydrogen to study hydrogen energy storage efficiency.
2. Use the wind turbine electricity generator or PV cell that makes wind or solar electricity to study electricity energy storage efficiency.

Then compare 1 (hydrogen) & 2 (electricity) to each other for relative efficiencies.

I would guess that if one mixes the technologies, inefficiency or loss of some degree would surface in the secondary conversion.

[Solartechnoid]

13. Poor "study" of batteries vs. hydrogen

Greetings to the board.

Hydrogen is often referred to as liquid or gaseous electricity, and as such it poses a serious threat to the entrenched battery industry, an industry that is ranked with leaders oil and coal as the historical source of environmental lead and heavy metal pollution. I would like to take this opportunity to caution readers against taking, at face value, arguments against hydrogen, which, made renewably, is the most environmentally friendly method of storing electricity. Hydrogen is currently under attack by special interest groups envious of the federal dollars going to it.

In regard to "Carrying the Energy Future: Comparing Hydrogen and Electricity for Transmission, Storage and Transportation", this is one of a series of extremely poor "studies" panning hydrogen that Amory Lovins may have been referring to when he said:

"Hydrogen seems closer or further away, depending on current fashion. At the moment, a number of, I think, rather poor reports are being published saying it’s very far away. They reached that conclusion by assuming inefficient cars and disintegrated implementation. The market is not constrained by that perception, fortunately. The people who are developing the technologies are continuing to do so with very good results."
Amory Lovins
President, Rocky Mountain Institute
Amory Lovins Fuels Hydrogen Solution
Jeff Karoub Small Times August 12, 2004
http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?section_id=93&document_id=8206

Frankly, I was surprised when I learned the MacArthur Foundation financed it. The "group" that conducted it is essentially a one man shop with a history bordering on lobbying for the battery industry. While I am all in favor of battery technology, and recognize it may be a practical solution for local transport applications, there still exist the cost and capacity problem of batteries that makes hydrogen a necessary and attractive method of storing electricity in greater volumes than batteries are capable of. This advantage exists because the expense of hydrogen storage rises much more slowly with volume than batteries, which demonstrate an almost linear rise. This fact, of course, was left out of the "study." These studies always make a big point of saying hydrogen production is inefficient. However, the goal of the hydrogen economy is renewable production of hydrogen by solar, wind and wave - which forces a redefinition of efficiency. Which is more efficient, clean hydrogen production or transporting oil from the other side of the world and burning it in the air we and our children breathe?

Market forces and probable government leveling of the economic playing
field, which presently hide the real costs of gasoline in income taxes disguised as military, economic incentive, environmental and health costs, will open the potential of many new renewable energy production arrays. Wind farms, presently the most cost effective of all energy production technologies, will begin incorporating hydrogen electrolysis, storage and fuel cells for "carry-through" in times of low wind. Remote farms, far from the grid, will produce hydrogen through electrolysis and feed it into natural gas pipelines to supplement and eventually replace diminishing supplies of natural gas. The more successful these projects are, the more encouragement they receive from the government and public, the less likely it will be to see an expansion of nuclear power and coal to replace diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas.

Both parties to this point have done little more than lip service toward building a hydrogen economy. Industry, on the other hand, has been spending much more than government. It has brought the cost of fuel cells down from 100 times to 10 times the equivalent kW/h output cost from internal combustion engines. We will see fuel cell cars in a few years, and you will be able to operate two of them on the energy it takes to run one internal combustion engine vehicle today. These fuel cell cars will incorporate advanced batteries and ultra-capacitors. The battery industry would be better served by working toward this goal rather than by attacking hydrogen.

[Solartechnoid]

14. Lovin's Link (corrected)

http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?section_id=93&document_id=8206

[Solartechnoid]

15. Cut and paste lovins link

www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?section_id=93&document_id=8206

[Solartechnoid]

16. Lovins Link: Go here instead

http://www.ch2bc.org

Scroll down to the link below the quote.

[phantom power]

17. expense of hydrogen storage

Can you elaborate a little bit on why the cost of energy-storage with H2 grows more slowly? (I'm assuming you mean the cost of storing a given amount of energy with H2, versus storing the same amount of energy with batteries)

PS,
Welcome to DU!

[Solartechnoid]

19. H2 Storage is geometric

Why hydrogen storage becomes cheaper with large volume storage:

Using an example where you receive a constant feed of electrons, what is the most cost effective way to store them?



There are four practical methods of storing electrons that come to mind.

PUMP STORAGE - Using the electrons to run pumps that raise water into high basins. Later, the water pressure is allowed to run turbine generators to get a percentage of the electrons back. This storage process is essentially linear. If you want to double the storage capacity, you must submerge another high valley with approximately the same water surface area. An obvious drawback to pump storage is environmental destruction.

FLYWHEEL (mechanical) STORAGE - Using the electrons to spin up flywheels, then later draining the energy in their momentum to run generators. This process is linear. If you want to double the storage volume, you must install twice as many flywheels.

BATTERIES - Capturing the electrons in chemical or solid-state bonds. This is a linear process. If you want to double the capacity, you must double the amount of batteries. Another type of "battery" involves the storage of hydrogen in metal hydrides or a solution of sodium borohydrate. This is also a linear process.

HYDROGEN STORAGE (PRESSURE OR CRYOGENIC LIQUID) - Using the electrons to obtain hydrogen through electrolysis of water, then storing it in a large tank, and later using it to power a fuel cell or internal combustion engine generator to produce electricity. (For stationary applications, it is not necessary to use PEM fuel cells which require platinum. Much cheaper types of fuel cells can be used.) This process is geometric. If you want to double the storage capacity, you have the option of adding another similar tank (linear) or replacing the existing tank with one just a few inches in diameter wider (geometric). This is extremely cost effective compared to the other three alternatives, due to the geometric rise in storage volume as a function of tank diameter. This simple mathematical face guarantees that hydrogen will become the fuel of the future.

[phantom power]

21. You're being a little loose with the term "geometric"

The volume of a cylindrical tank grows as the square of it's radius. So, it's growth is quadratic, not geometric.

And, the growth is completely linear with respect to volume, which is a much more informative measure. So, H2 shows absolutely no growth-advantage over batteries. If you want to double the storage, you need to double the volume (all other things being equal). No different than batteries.

Regarding fly-wheels, the energy-storage grows quadratically with respect to rotational velocity. So, spinning a flywheel faster is preferable to adding another flywheel. Of course, you can only spin a given flywheel so fast, given it's tensile strength limits.

[NNadir]

18. I don't believe that hydrogen is failing as part of a "battery maker's"

corporate conspiracy. The "entrenched" battery industry could develop fuel cells as well as anyone; maybe they could do it better than anyone else. For the record, a fuel cell IS a battery, where hydrogen takes the place of (as is usually the case) a reduced metal as a source of electrons.

Hydrogen is failing because it's physical properties are problematic: It's an explosive gas. Hydrogen has one, and only one, advantage over other cathode material: It produces water when it oxidizes which is usually not toxic. There are other possible cathodes that also have one great advantage over other materials. Cesium metal for instance is the most electropositive of the metals, and one could obtain higher voltages than with any other material using minimal cells. However the metal is a liquid and it spontaneously explodes when exposed to air. It will in fact explode when in contact with ice at -150C. Therefore Cesium is not widely used as a anode. It's too dangerous. Fluorine would make an excellent cathode, being the most electronegative element in the periodic table. However it's a gas and moreover it corrodes almost all of the materials with which it comes in contact, with the exception of teflon, certain nickel alloys and platinum. Therefore fluorine is not used as a cathode.

Hydrogen will achieve wide spread use because it is technologically superior, or else it will fail because there are better options.

I would not be surprised if metal batteries - all of which are recyclable in an intelligent society - prove to be superior to hydrogen batteries (fuel cells).

[midnight armadillo]

20. Marketing uber merit

Hydrogen may well take hold due to the marketing momentum behind it in this country. There could be a situation wherein the US locks into a hydrogen based economy too early while the rest of the world moves to something technically superior like batteries and biofuels. Sort of like the whole US/Europe cell phone thing.

[phantom power]

23. Wasn't Iceland planning to migrate to a hydrogen economy?

I was looking forward to that as a test-case. They claimed they were going to try and make the move within 20 years, and that was a few years ago.

Anybody hear about how that's going? (if it's going)

[Solartechnoid]

22. Corporate conspiracy or business as usual?

If hydrogen technology is "failing," as you put it, it is "failing" in the sense airplanes and automobiles were failures in the 1800s.
Hydrogen energy is a "disruptive technology." If it becomes a market power, established technologies will lose market share. Lobbyists exist to preserve and grow influence of market leaders. This is just the way it is.

You seem to think hydrogen is more dangerous than natural gas, propane and gasoline. All data suggests otherwise. The property of hydrogen to escape upwards and disperse rapidly below the 4% mixing value with air necessary for ignition makes it safer than other fuels. In fact, a recent study of hydrogen car leaks in garages determined that there was NO safety hazard because the minimum air mix was never achieved. The fact that hydrogen, when mixed with air, is explosive - like natural gas, propane or gasoline vapor - simply demonstrates its ability to be used as a fuel. The explosive value represents the amount of energy contained in hydrogen gas. If it wasn't explosive, it wouldn't be very good for energy applications.

A very good read on the promise of batteries, hydrogen and the nanotechnology wild card is the Senate testimony of Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Smalley from last April:
-------------------------
Oversight hearing on sustainable, low emission, electricity generation - Full Committee Hearing

Date & Time Tuesday, April 27 2004
10:00 AM Dirksen 366

Witness Dr. Richard E. Smalley , Director , Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, Rice University

Testimony Testimony of R. E. Smalley to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; Hearing on sustainable , low emission, electricity generation, April 27, 2004

I appreciate the opportunity today to testify to your committee on this most important of issues.

We are heading into a new energy world. With economic recovery in the countries of the OECD and rapid development of China and soon India, huge new demands will be placed on the world oil and gas industry. Yet oil production will probably peak worldwide sometime within this decade, and the future capacity of natural gas production is unclear. Coal will be able to pick up some of the slack, but with current technology this will amplify the threat of massive climate change.

Energy is at the core of virtually every problem facing humanity. We cannot afford to get this wrong. We should be skeptical of optimism that the existing energy industry will be able to work this out on its own.

Somehow we must find the basis for energy prosperity for ourselves and the rest of humanity for the 21st century. By the middle of this century we should assume we will need to at least double world energy production from its current level, with most of this coming from some clean, sustainable, CO2-free source. For worldwide peace and prosperity it needs to be cheap.

We simply cannot do this with current technology. We will need revolutionary breakthroughs to even get close.

Oil was the principal driver of our economic prosperity in the 20th century. It is possible that Mother Nature has played a great trick on us, and we will never find another energy source that is as cheap and wonderful as oil. If so, this new century is certain to be very unpleasant.

However, I am an American scientist brought up in the Midwest during the Sputnik era, and like so many of my colleagues in the US and worldwide, I am a technological optimist. I think we can do it. We can find “the New Oil”, the new technology that provides the massive clean energy necessary for advanced civilization of the 10 billion souls we expect to be living on this planet by 2050. With luck we’ll find this soon enough to avoid the terrorism, war, and human misery that will otherwise ensue.

Electricity is the key. As we leave oil as our dominant energy technology, we will not only evolve away from a wonderful primary energy source, but we will also leave behind our principal means of transporting energy over vast distances. By 2050 we will do best if we do this transportation of energy not as oil, or coal, or natural gas, or even hydrogen. We should not be transmitting energy as mass at all. Instead we should transport energy as pure energy itself.

Consider, for example, a vast interconnected electrical energy grid for the North American Continent from above the Artic Circle to below the Panama Canal. By 2050 this grid will interconnect several hundred million local sites. There are two key aspects of this future grid that will make a huge difference: (1) massive long distance electrical power transmission, and (2) local storage of electrical power with real time pricing.

Storage of electrical power is critical for stability and robustness of the electrical power grid, and it is absolutely essential if we are ever to use solar and wind as our dominant primary power source. The best place to provide this storage is locally, near the point of use. Imagine by 2050 that every house, every business, every building has its own local electrical energy storage device, an uninterruptible power supply capable of handling the entire needs of the owner for 24 hours. Since the devices are small, and relatively inexpensive, the owners can replace them with new models every 5 years or so as worldwide technological innovation and free enterprise continuously and rapidly develop improvements in this most critical of all aspects of the electrical energy grid. Today using lead-acid storage batteries, such a unit for a typical house to store 100 kilowatt hours of electrical energy would take up a small room and cost over $10,000. Through revolutionary advances in nanotechnology, it may be possible to shrink an equivalent unit to the size of a washing machine, and drop the cost to less than $1,000. Since the amount of energy stored is relatively small, there are many technologies that are being considered. One is a flow battery with a liquid electrolyte based on salts of vanadium. Another features a reversible hydrogen fuel cell which electrolyzes water to make hydrogen when it stores energy, then uses this hydrogen to make electricity as it is needed. Another uses advanced flywheels. With intense research and entrepreneural effort, many schemes are likely to be developed over the years to supply this local energy storage market that may expand to several billion units worldwide.

With these advances the electrical grid can become exceedingly robust, since local storage protects customers from power fluxuations and outages. With real-time pricing, the local customers have incentive to take power from the grid when it is cheapest. This in turn permits the primary electrical energy providers to deliver their power to the grid when it is most efficient for them to do so, and vastly reduce the requirements for reserve capacity to follow peaks in demand. Most importantly, it permits a large portion -- or even all -- of the primary electrical power on the grid to come from solar and wind.

The other critical innovation needed is massive electrical power transmission over continental distances, permitting, for example, hundreds of gigawatts of electrical power to be transported from solar farms in New Mexico to markets in New England. Now all primary power producers can compete with little concern for the actual distance to market. Clean coal plants in Wyoming, stranded gas in Alaska, wind farms in North Dakota, hydroelectric power from northern British Columbia, biomass energy from Mississippi, nuclear power from Hanford Washington, and solar power from the vast western deserts, etc., remote power plants from all over the continent contribute power to consumers thousands of miles away on the grid. Everybody plays. Nanotechnology in the form of single-walled carbon nanotubes (a.k.a. “buckytubes”) forming what we call the Armchair Quantum Wire may play a big role in this new electrical transmission system.

Such innovations in power transmission, power storage, and the massive primary power generation technologies themselves, will come from miraculous discoveries in science together with free enterprise in open competition for huge worldwide markets.

It would be useful to have these discoveries now.

America, the land of technological optimists, the land of Thomas Edison, should take the lead. We should launch a bold New Energy Research Program. Just a nickel from every gallon of gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, and jet fuel would generate $10 billion a year. That would be enough to transform the physical sciences and engineering in this country. After five years we should increase the funding to a dime per gallon. Sustained year after year, this New Energy Research Program will inspire a new Sputnik Generation of American scientists and engineers. At minimum it will generate a cornucopia of new technologies that will drive wealth and job creation in our country. At best we will solve the energy problem within this next generation; solve it for ourselves and, by example, solve it for the rest of humanity on this planet.

Give a nickel. Save the world.
------------------------------

[NNadir]

25. Talk about an entrenched interest.

Richard Smalley won the Nobel Prize for the chemistry fullerenes.

Just as an aside, most Nobel Laureates are besieged immediately after winning with offers on positions on "Scientific Advisory Boards" for which they are paid a great deal of money. Their presence on these boards enables the MBA's in venture capital groups (who are notorious for their indifference and lack of knowledge of science) to raise huge amounts of capital in order to sustain an enormous "burn rate," (in part paying consulting fees to Nobel Laureates and the like) during which the MBA's in the Venture Capital groups make lots of money (in fees and in inflating stocks and hype for IPO's). This has nothing to do with the merits of the companies by which they are being paid.

Carbon nanotechnology hype is intimately connected with hydrogen hype. Rather extraordinary claims were made for the future of fullerenes when they were finally isolated, from super conductors, to super strong fibers to, yes, hydrogen storage devices. All are still a long way off. That is not to say that the technology as a hydrogen storage device is absurd or impossible, only that it is not as simple as advertised in the science (fiction) press. Very often the actual value of a new technology is not even remotely appreciated by the hypemasters of the day. Computers for instance, for those of us old enough to remember the opening day of "2001" in 1969 are not really used today to send manned missions to Jupiter to check out extraterrestrials. Instead the power ordinary household devices for communication and pirating music.

The fact is that Dr. Smalley, just like an entrenched capitalist, undoubtedly has a profound financial interest in this particular hype.

I happen to think that many of his basic conceptions as described in this speech (where hydrogen is only peripherally mentioned) are perfectly valid, energy transmission and storage are key concepts in the somewhat questionable matter of human survival. It just so happens however that hydrogen, in spite of plenty of hype going back almost as long as the hype of 2001 (in 1970, not three years ago) is a particularly poor choice if one is seeking either to transport or store energy. While it may be true that hydrogen floats, it is also true that the gas has the highest molecular speed of any known substance, meaning it creates extremely fast explosive mixtures making it possible to create an explosive mixture with the entire energy load in a matter of a few seconds. It has very low viscosity as well. It has an extremely low heat of vaporization, and (again) an extremely low critical temperature, and an extremely low (volume) energy density. It is true that you can equally well cherry pick some positives, the combustion product (water), the high (mass) energy density (if you don't mind towing a blimp behind your Volkswagen) and the fact that in an open field as opposed to a garage or a tunnel on a windy day the flame, assuming you ignore the thermal energy of blackbody radiation, a large portion of the flame will be moving up as it torches you.

Since hydrogen is not energy, but merely a storage medium, it makes sense to choose a form of storage that is maximized (in a combinatorial sense) for all of the energy storage variables which include 1) Volume density 2) Mass density 3) Safety in failure modes 4) Ease and cost of transportation 5) flexibility 6) the cost of establishing infrastructure, 7) its effect on the environment, 8) it's toxicity.

On point one all liquifable fuels, including propane, beat hydrogen by a huge amount. On point two, hydrogen is competitive with other forms of energy on score but the advantage is not huge. On point three, hydrogen is a very poor choice in this area since the entire of inventory of energy can escape a containment vessel in seconds. On point four, hydrogen is an extremely poor choice in this area. Although millions of tons of hydrogen are produced yearly almost all is for captive use. No one anywhere on earth ships hydrogen great distances at costs comparable to other forms of energy. On point five, hydrogen is a mixed bag here, but it is infinitely inferior to dimethyl ether in this regard since dimethyl ether can fuel a) jet aircraft b)diesel engines, c) turbines engines, d) steam plants, e)household stoves, f) ovens, g) gas heaters and h) fuel cells. Hydrogen is not suitable for a, b, e or f. On point 6 hydrogen requires considerable infrastructure changes for almost all applications whereas dimethyl ether can replace propane where ever it is used. Using dimethyl ether in diesels would require infrastructure changes in new fuel tanks and changes to certain seals in certain old engines, but not on the scale requiring complete redesign of the automobile (or elimination of all storage) as is the case with hydrogen. Hydrogen and dimethyl ether are both variable on this score depending on how they are made. Hydrogen made from natural gas is actually less useful than the source material (except in synthetic applications, i.e. as a fuel). Hydrogen or dimethyl ether made from coal are environmentally disastrous. Hydrogen or dimethyl ether made from nuclear energy or from solar energy are much better, but both will have environmental costs. Hydrogen is superior to dimethyl ether on one score: It does not mix with water, although this is relatively trivial, since it is relatively easy to remove dimethyl ether from water. On score number eight, hydrogen is slightly better than dimethyl ether. Dimethyl ether in high concentrations has slight anesthetic properties, whereas hydrogen has no physiological interactions of any kind.

[Endangered Specie]

24. Of course, electricty doesnt have that big bulkyass proton to carry around

;)