Meanwhile the FCX clarity, the Mazda5, the BMW Hydrogen 7 and the GM Equinox continue to roll on...even though the compromised New York Times wrote and anti-Hydrogen hit piece on Honda's new fuel cell sports car which has been getting rave reviews by others.

Hydrogen can't be stopped by Grist, it's Democrat Bailout Buddies, and all the rest.

...if there are self made Purgatories, then we all have to live in them.
--"This Side of Paradise", TOS

Hydrogen cars have to get their hydrogen from somewhere: somewhere that uses the energy and produces the CO2 that they supposedly save.  I expect Grist readers to know that.

Where have all the horses gone?

A vigorous inspection and replacement program that allowed billing of replacement lighting, refrigerators and AC units through utility bills could free far more grid capacity than plug-in hybrids could possibly require in the short term. In particular retail and commercial buildings use far more power than strictly required due to the problem of leased buildings maintained on least-cost budgets.

It's past time to pick the low-hanging fruit.

Put the Carbon Back

Where the utility can be paid for energy savings less wire gets hung, fewer tons of coal go into the atmosphere and customers share in the savings. As an added benefit the utility no longer has an incentive to combat or delay integration of grid-tied micro-generation as they get paid for providing the grid as well as delivering power.

If the only way the utility makes more money is to sell more power then building massive coal or nuclear plants makes more sense than cooperating with some farmer who wants to tie his methane fired generator to the grid. Decouple the charge for grid service from the charge for power and utility gets an incentive to use distributed power sources and energy savings rather than big centralized plants. Big centralized plants mean coal, gas and nuclear for the time being; power sources that I would like to see phased out.

Put the Carbon Back

Real solution: socialize the electricity grid. Capitalism works on the way up. But not on the way down. (Why would people invest money in companies if there is little chance of return?) We already have good models for municipally-owned utilities, like carbon-neutral Seattle City Light. Reserve market-based approaches to industries that we want to grow, like green electrical generation.

There are similar lessons to be learned from companies dependent on soon-to-be-declining resources (like oil).

Good grief.  Less energy consumption means less fossil fuel (mostly coal in my neck of the woods) is being burned to generate energy. Fewer greenhouse gases.  Less mining is scarring our planet.  Less habitat is being disrupted and fragmented.  This is all good, good, good.

But you'd never know it from the WSJ.  The poor utility companies have their shorts tied in knots over the horrifying spectre of Americans learning to live with less -- perhaps permanently, and not just temporarily.

Oh the horror of it all.  Next thing you know, humans will be stabilizing their population and consuming less paper, gasoline, and freshwater.  The end is near, my friends.

Wall Street hates retail efficiency measures because they make it hard to calculate a return on energy production investment. Of course the risk-free investment market really isn't capitalism then but simply socialism for the rich.

Put the Carbon Back

Economic contraction might be death for some current ideas about capitalism--cowboy capitalism, eternal growth capitalism--but capitalism will survive.

Now, if the "economy" became completely steady-state, with no new inventions, no new building, then maybe capitalism would become useless. Not going to happen soon.

Where have all the horses gone?

Nevertheless, the only capitalism we have known has been underwritten by cheap fossil fuels. Can renewable energy systems come online quickly enough to forestall a net decrease in available energy? Thinkers like Richard Heinberg think not and believe that we will never see economic growth again. Economists like Jeff Rubin believe that the current crisis is a result of the last spike in oil prices. Petroleum geologists like Chris Skrebowski have totaled up the new oil projects and predicts a net decline starting in 2011, right around the time we might possibly get the economy growing again.

So I think we do have to weigh in our thoughts and plans the possibility that new economic models are going to be required to get us through to some kind of sustainable future. I wouldn't want to be doctrinaire about it, but I think that will entail a more sophisticated way of thinking about governments and markets. Surely we will need entrepreneurial thinking, but I think we ought to find ways to channel that energy into socially-productive directions.

In my view, it's not too early to be thinking ahead to confront these problems.

There's only so much energy that we can store in Li atoms and ions, and chemical storage really makes a lot of sense. We do need to get the hydrogen gas from a renewable resource, but thinking far-sighted, after that renewable energy is available, how will we transport the energy? Right now petroleum is a really nice store of energy -- easily transported, fairly dense (energy/unit mass), not extraordinarily flammable (like H2). Replacing petroleum with electric cars is not feasible because people don't want to pull over after 150 miles and wait for 3 hours. They want to pull over, take the kids to McDonalds, and fill up on something that they don't care where it comes from.

Hydrogen is the most promising way to keep our economy going (whether you like it or not).