Focus on Verizon fuel-cell building in Garden City

Verizon Communications' Long Island headquarters building in Garden City is garnering considerable attention these days, but not because of its architectural grace or style.

[Forest]

I see some negative assumptions about hydrogen here. I believe hydrogen is the right way to go. I would like to provide some cut-and-paste of some well-known postings of others, on the internet, which counter some of the points against H2:
“Hydrogen beats batteries, biofuel and all other vehicle power solutions:
A. Hydrogen can be made at home and requires NO NEW INFRASTRUCTURE. Anybody who says it can’t be made at home or work is either a shill or completely out of touch with reality and technology. You can make it for free, at home, all day long and all night long. The production can be powered by solar, wind, microbes and other free sources. The volume of H2 produced “IS” enough to charge solid state H2 containers. The metrics quoted by the anti-hydrogen crowd are just lies to protect their competing business interests.
B. It now costs less to make hydrogen from water than any known way to make gasoline and it continues to get cheaper every month: The GE Noryl system, The R4 processor and over a hundred different systems can do this NOW; with many more expected next year.

[Brian Albert]

It was pleasant to hear about Verizon's switch to fuel cells as a means to provide electrical power for their facility. However, I would like to point out that although fuel cells are "extremely clean and efficient" in operation, they are not an energy source. Because hydrogen does not exist naturally in necessary concentrations for fuel cell usage, it must be created, a few of which ways include:

1. electrolysis of water which is very energy intensive and therefore, expensive,

2. gasification of carbon-containing materials such as petroleum, coal, or biomass, a process which produces significant amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide,

3. reformation of natural gas, which also produces carbon dioxide, as is the case for Verizon's facility.

Hydrogen is effectively an energy storage medium or "energy carrier", somewhat similar to a battery which must first be charged before it can be used. In the case of hydrogen, it must first be created. Other types of energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and fossil fuels are true energy sources."

Still, the push for hydrogen fuel cells does have its benefits. Fuel cell cars will eventually displace cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) which poorly convert gasoline into useful energy. While the production of hydrogen will require an energy source, that source can be an large electrical plant with greater energy conversion efficiencies than that of a car's ICE.

While the move to hydrogen is encouraging, the source of energy to produce hydrogen must change. A focus in solar, nuclear (which is cleaner than coal even on radioactive basis), wind, and geothermal energy sources is required to ensure both future energy security and environmental responsibility in this country.