Philadelphia Renewable

The Philadelphia area has several research universities in its backyard. This is very essential to being a city on the cutting edge of the latest developments in energy efficiency. The University of Pennsylvania has an Energy Research Group that is conducting extensive research on various methods of storing hydrogen for energy use. Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about electric cars and hybrid vehicles as they are finally available in marketable quantities. One other type of car that is receiving a lot of attention in the research industry is a hydrogen car.Using hydrogen presents greater challenges and requires more advances than many of the hybrid cars on the market already. However, when perfected, they will be a zero-emissions product with the only emission being water vapor. Hydrogen does not naturally occur on Earth and therefore must be separated from its other properties in compounds such as water or methane. When a car is fueled at a hydrogen station, the hydrogen is then burned in either a combustion engine or a fuel cell and can then power the vehicle. One of the large criticisms of the electric car is that even though the actual car burns cleaner, when you plug it into an outlet to be charged with electricity you are connecting to an electricity grid. Many of America’s power plants are still fired by coal making this process less environmentally friendly than it may actually seem. Even though they are not widely seen in the automobile market, there are already some hydrogen cars for sale. There are some hydrogen fueling stations in the US, most of which are in California, but there are not near enough to support significant amounts of these vehicles if and when this industry takes off.Hydrogen cars are definitely on the rise and it’s likely that before long they will be the new hot item in the green car market. The technology seems to be available; it is now a matter of building the infrastructure to support these systems.

No Comments »