Hydrogen: Empowering the People
by Jeremy Rifkin
www.thenation.com

While the fossil-fuel era enters its sunset years, a new energy
regime is being born that has the potential to remake civilization
along radically new lines--hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most basic and
ubiquitous element in the universe. It never runs out and produces no
harmful CO2 emissions when burned; the only byproducts are heat and
pure water. That is why it's been called "the forever fuel."

Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil.
Switching to hydrogen and creating a decentralized power grid would
also be the best assurance against terrorist attacks aimed at
disrupting the national power grid and energy infrastructure.
Moreover, hydrogen power will dramatically reduce carbon dioxide
emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. In the long
run, the hydrogen-powered economy will fundamentally change the very
nature of our market, political and social institutions, just as coal
and steam power did at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Hydrogen must be extracted from natural sources. Today, nearly half
the hydrogen produced in the world is derived from natural gas via a
steam-reforming process. The natural gas reacts with steam in a
catalytic converter. The process strips away the hydrogen atoms,
leaving carbon dioxide as the byproduct.

There is, however, another way to produce hydrogen without using
fossil fuels in the process. Renewable sources of energy--wind,
photovoltaic, hydro, geothermal and biomass--can be harnessed to
produce electricity. The electricity, in turn, can be used, in a
process called electrolysis, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The hydrogen can then be stored and used, when needed, in a fuel cell
to generate electricity for power, heat and light.

Why generate electricity twice, first to produce electricity for the
process of electrolysis and then to produce power, heat and light by
way of a fuel cell? The reason is that electricity doesn't store. So,
if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing or the water isn't
flowing, electricity can't be generated and economic activity grinds
to a halt. Hydrogen provides a way to store renewable sources of
energy and insure an ongoing and continuous supply of power.

Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are just now being introduced into the
market for home, office and industrial use. The major auto makers
have spent more than $2 billion developing hydrogen-powered cars,
buses and trucks, and the first mass-produced vehicles are expected
to be on the road in just a few years.

In a hydrogen economy the centralized, top-down flow of energy,
controlled by global oil companies and utilities, would become
obsolete. Instead, millions of end users would connect their fuel
cells into local, regional and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs),
using the same design principles and smart technologies that made the
World Wide Web possible. Automobiles with hydrogen cells would be
power stations on wheels, each with a generating capacity of 20
kilowatts. Since the average car is parked most of the time, it can
be plugged in, during nonuse hours, to the home, office or the main
interactive electricity network. Thus, car owners could sell
electricity back to the grid. If just 25 percent of all US cars
supplied energy to the grid, all the power plants in the country
could be eliminated.

Once the HEW is set up, millions of local operators, generating
electricity from fuel cells onsite, could produce more power more
cheaply than can today's giant power plants. When the end users also
become the producers of their energy, the only role remaining for
existing electrical utilities is to become "virtual power plants"
that manufacture and market fuel cells, bundle energy services and
coordinate the flow of energy over the existing power grids.

To realize the promise of decentralized generation of energy,
however, the energy grid will have to be redesigned. The problem with
the existing power grid is that it was designed to insure a one-way
flow of energy from a central source to all the end users. Before the
HEW can be fully actualized, changes in the existing power grid will
have to be made to facilitate both easy access to the web and a
smooth flow of energy services over the web. Connecting thousands,
and then millions, of fuel cells to main grids will require
sophisticated dispatch and control mechanisms to route energy traffic
during peak and nonpeak periods. A new technology developed by the
Electric Power Research Institute called FACTS (flexible alternative
current transmission system) gives transmission companies the
capacity to "deliver measured quantities of power to specified areas
of the grid."

Whether hydrogen becomes the people's energy depends, to a large
extent, on how it is harnessed in the early stages of development.
The global energy and utility companies will make every effort to
control access to this new, decentralized energy network just as
software, telecommunications and content companies like Microsoft and
AOL Time Warner have attempted to control access to the World Wide
Web. It is critical that public institutions and nonprofit
organizations--local governments, cooperatives, community development
corporations, credit unions and the like--become involved early on in
establishing distributed-generation associations (DGAs) in every
country. Again, the analogy to the World Wide Web is apt. In the new
hydrogen energy era, millions of end users will generate their own
"content" in the form of hydrogen and electricity. By organizing
collectively to control the energy they produce--just as workers in
the twentieth century organized into unions to control their labor
power--end users can better dictate the terms with commercial
suppliers of fuel cells for lease, purchase or other use arrangements
and with virtual utility companies, which will manage the
decentralized "smart" energy grids. Creating the appropriate
partnership between commercial and noncommercial interests will be
critical to establishing the legitimacy, effectiveness and long-term
viability of the new energy regime.

I have been describing, thus far, the implementation of hydrogen
power mainly in industrialized countries, but it could have an even
greater impact on emerging nations. The per capita use of energy
throughout the developing world is a mere one-fifteenth of the
consumption enjoyed in the United States. The global average per
capita energy use for all countries is only one-fifth the level of
this country. Lack of access to energy, especially electricity, is a
key factor in perpetuating poverty around the world. Conversely,
access to energy means more economic opportunity. In South Africa,
for example, for every 100 households electrified, ten to twenty new
businesses are created. Making the shift to a hydrogen energy
regime--using renewable resources and technologies to produce the
hydrogen--and creating distributed generation energy webs that can
connect communities all over the world could lift billions of people
out of poverty. As the price of fuel cells and accompanying
appliances continues to plummet with innovations and economies of
scale, they will become far more broadly available, as was the case
with transistor radios, computers and cellular phones. The goal ought
to be to provide stationary fuel cells for every neighborhood and
village in the developing world.

Renewable energy technologies--wind, photovoltaic, hydro, biomass,
etc.--can be installed in villages, enabling them to produce their
own electricity and then use it to separate hydrogen from water and
store it for subsequent use in fuel cells. In rural areas, where
commercial power lines have not yet been extended because they are
too expensive, stand-alone fuel cells can provide energy quickly
and cheaply.

After enough fuel cells have been leased or purchased, and installed,
mini energy grids can connect urban neighborhoods as well as rural
villages into expanding energy networks. The HEW can be built
organically and spread as the distributed generation becomes more
widely used. The larger hydrogen fuel cells have the additional
advantage of producing pure drinking water as a byproduct, an
important consideration in village communities around the world where
access to clean water is often a critical concern.

Were all individuals and communities in the world to become the
producers of their own energy, the result would be a dramatic shift
in the configuration of power: no longer from the top down but from
the bottom up. Local peoples would be less subject to the will of
far-off centers of power. Communities would be able to produce many
of their own goods and services and consume the fruits of their own
labor locally. But, because they would also be connected via the
worldwide communications and energy webs, they would be able to share
their unique commercial skills, products and services with other
communities around the planet. This kind of economic self-sufficiency
becomes the starting point for global commercial interdependence, and
is a far different economic reality from that of colonial regimes of
the past, in which local peoples were made subservient to and
dependent on powerful forces from the outside. By redistributing
power broadly to everyone, it is possible to establish the conditions
for a truly equitable sharing of the earth's bounty. This is the
essence of reglobalization from the bottom up.

Two great forces have dominated human affairs over the course of the
past two centuries. The American Revolution unleashed a new human
aspiration to universalize the radical notion of political democracy.
That force continues to gain momentum and will likely spread to the
Middle East, China and every corner of the earth before the current
century is half over.

A second force was unleashed on the eve of the American Revolution
when James Watt patented his steam engine, inaugurating the beginning
of the fossil-fuel era and an industrial way of life that
fundamentally changed the way we work.

The problem is that these two powerful forces have been at odds with
each other from the very beginning, making for a deep contradiction
in the way we live our lives. While in the political arena we covet
greater participation and equal representation, our economic life has
been characterized by ever greater concentration of power in ever
fewer institutional hands. In large part that is because of the very
nature of the fossil-fuel energy regime that we rely on to maintain
an industrialized society. Unevenly distributed, difficult to
extract, costly to transport, complicated to refine and multifaceted
in the forms in which they are used, fossil fuels, from the very
beginning, required a highly centralized command-and-control
structure to finance exploration and production, and coordinate the
flow of energy to end users. The highly centralized fossil-fuel
infrastructure inevitably gave rise to commercial enterprises
organized along similar lines. Recall that small cottage industries
gave way to large-scale factory production in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries to take advantage of the capital-intensive
costs and economies of scale that went hand in hand with steam power,
and later oil and electrification. In the discussion of the emergence
of industrial capitalism, little attention has been paid to the fact
that the energy regime that emerged determined, to a great extent,
the nature of the commercial forms that took shape.

Now, on the cusp of the hydrogen era, we have at least the
"possibility" of making energy available in every community of the
world--hydrogen exists everywhere on earth--empowering the whole of
the human race. By creating an energy regime that is decentralized
and potentially universally accessible to everyone, we establish the
technological framework for creating a more participatory and
sustainable economic life--one that is compatible with the principle
of democratic participation in our political life. Making the
commercial and political arenas seamless, however, will require a
human struggle of truly epic proportions in the coming decades. What
is in doubt is not the technological know-how to make it happen but,
rather, the collective human will, determination and resolve to
transform the great hope of hydrogen into a democratic reality.


This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021223&s=rifkin


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