Hydrogen fuel cells are the answer to future's sustainable renewable energy. Innovations such as these help the preservation of energies and utilizing the form of energies that are self sustainable and the ones that do not get depleted over a period of time, as natural and renewable energy sources that are used to create a different kind of energy. And by the time the keys to the first hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles are handed over sometime in the near future, there are likely to be about 200,000 plug-in electric cars on US roads alone, and perhaps double that number globally. Meanwhile, Toyota has said that it envisions a market for thousands of its own hydrogen vehicles by 2020. By 2020, it's possible that 1 million plug-in cars a year will be coming off the world's assembly lines, or two orders of magnitude more.

Hydrogen is hardly alone in having infrastructure challenges. It remains very unclear if public electric-car charging has a business model, especially for the 240-Volt Level 2 charging that takes 3 to 6 hours to recharge most plug-in cars fully. But electricity is all over the US, and it's far cheaper to wire that last 50 feet than it is spend $1 million-plus to construct a hydrogen fueling station. And that's assuming a municipality has a zoning code under which hydrogen stations are covered; many don't, meaning zoning has to be altered before a station can be permitted. This week we covered some of the country’s solar power demo projects in the Arava region. Solar development in that area is expected to achieve 100 percent energy independence for the tourist city of Eilat and surrounding desert communities within a few years, with obvious implications for solar power in other desert environments around the globe.

The advantages of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles over battery electrics continue to be both longer range (up to 500 miles versus perhaps 300 miles) and quick refueling (5 to 10 minutes versus 30 to 60 minutes for a quick charge to 80 percent of pack capacity). The drawbacks, as always, are the lack of a widespread hydrogen fueling infrastructure, the cost of the fuel cells themselves (expected to come down over time and with volume production), and the carbon footprint of hydrogen production itself. And, as electric-car advocates point out, essentially every US citizen lives in a residence with electric power, meaning that battery recharging infrastructure is a last 100 feet challenge rather than the million-dollar-plus cost of establishing a new hydrogen fueling facility from scratch.

Today, it looks like small numbers of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles will start appearing in some markets around 2015, but volume production isn't likely to arrive for a decade or so. By that time, will plug-in electric cars (of all varieties) have become the established green technology? Or is there still a role to play for hydrogen fuel? We gotta wait and see.

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