| THE HYPE ABOUT HYDROGEN Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate Joseph J. Romm John H. Gibbons (Fwd.) Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-55963-703-9 | ||||
| ISBN 1-55963-703-X | 238pp. | HC/GSI | $25.00 | |
| Page ix: | "We earthlings enjoy the fruits of diverse forms of energy in countless ways, especially now that advancing technology allows us to readily manipulate it." |
| Dr. Gibbons has constructed this sentence poorly, so that "it" appears to refer back to technology. (Also note that page numbering starts before the title page.) |
| Page xi: | "Romm's book transports the reader a hopeful (but nearly tearful) distance in coming to terms with energy realities and challenges for the twenty-first century." |
| Tearful? |
| Page 1: | "For most purposes, think of a fuel cell as a black box that takes in hydrogen and oxygen and puts out water plus electricity and heat, but no pollution whatsoever." |
| I would change the order of these terms: S/B "electricity plus water and heat". The reason is that water and heat are by-products. |
| Page 4: | "The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that coal generation will double between 2000 and 2030." |
| Lazy language: S/B "coal-fired power generation" or similar. |
| Page 6: | "Several major brokerage firms released their own 'analyses' repeating this myth [of rapidly growing electricity demand due to expansion of the Internet] and touting a variety of energy technology stocks." |
| It's amazing how pervasive self-serving "strong buy" recommendations have become in the last few years. |
| Page 11: | "For the previous decade, hydrogen research funding had languished in the $1-$2 million per year range, some one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the overall departmental budget—a penny in every $100." |
| So the budget for the entire DOE was $100 to $200 billion in those years? |
| Page 13: | "In 1993, DOE funding for PEM fuel cells was just less than $10 million." |
| Does this not contradict the funding estimate on page 11? |
| Page 24: | "For most purposes, you can think of a fuel cell as a "black box" that takes in hydrogen and oxygen and puts out only water, electricity and heat." |
| I would change the order of these terms: S/B "electricity, water and heat". The reason is that water and heat are by-products. |
| Page 24: | "The fuel cell is composed of a positively charged electrode (the cathode) and a negatively charged electrode (the anode) separated by an electrolyte." |
| Dr. Romm gets the names of these electrodes backwards. The anode gets the positive charge; the cathode is negative. |
| Page 38: | "A new energy technology (like every other new technology) seeking to break into a market already in the grasp of another, less expensive, technology will look for market niches in which its unique attributes provide a competitive advantage." |
| Extra comma: S/B "another, less expensive technology". |
| Page 42: | "Those who construct new industrial and commercial facilities are driven by the desire to have the lowest initial capital cost—not the lowest life cycle cost." |
| I question whether this is always true for new facilities. |
| Page 46: | "A small percentage of electricity in the United States is devoted to corporate computers, information technology, and the Internet, but it does not follow that more than a small percent of companies with computers need the kind of high-availability power that might come from fuel cells." |
| No, it does not follow. Why should it? The two premises are unrelated. |
| Page 80: | "Some environmentalists and former environmental regulators I have spoken to are reluctant to embrace a dramatic increase in methanol use, in part because it is used to make MTBE, a gasoline additive now being phased out in California because of environmental concerns such as groundwater contamination (although in fairness to methanol, which exists in nature and degrades quickly, MTBE, in contrast, is a complex, man-made compound that exhibits little degradation once released into the environment.)" |
| I don't understand why methanol is tied to MTBE this way. Could it have to do with the phaseout agreement (which as I recall was designed to prevent the MTBE makers from losing money)? Also, it's a clumsy and overlong sentence. |
| Page 120: | "In his 2002 book The Hydrogen Economy, Jeremy Rifkin comments, 'If just a small percentage of drivers used their vehicles as power plants to sell energy back to the grid, most of the power plants in the country would be eliminated altogether.' " |
| This is way too optimistic. Which, of course, is the reason Romm quoted it. He goes on to show why it is over-optimistic. |
| Page 134: | "Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly." |
| This sentence from a National Academy of Sciences 2002 study only seems equivalent to saying "The emperor wore no clothes when he was forced to disrobe." What it's getting at, I'm sure, is that a strong forcing function, during the (relatively long) period of its acting on climate, can bring about quick disturbances in temperature. (See e.g. Climate Crash by John D. Cox.) A reasonable analogy might be an electrical system which, when its input ramps up in a sawtooth wave for 10 seconds, produces much shorter bursts of noise at its output. |
| Page 136: | "Shell is positing dramatic increases in both renewable energy and energy efficiency for the next five decades. By way of comparison, in the United States, the 'new' renewables Shell focuses on, such as wind and solar power, currently represent less than 1 percent of electricity, and the U.S. federal government has been unwilling to enact a mandate that renewables account for even 20 percent of electricity by 2020. The efficiency gains under this scenario are equally remarkable." |
| In the highlighted sentence, "this" should be replaced by "Shell's", and the sentence should begin a new paragraph. |
| Pages 231-8: | The index is a very sloppy job. |
Some of the problems with it are:
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