I remember seeing something on TV about each home having a hydrogen generator that would provide power for the home and vehicles.

Wonderful! Now you just need to power the hydrogen generator...

It's been quite some time since I saw it but, if I recall correctly, a generator was powered by hydrogen and used to generate electricity for the home and vehicles. Maybe I shouldn't post immediately after waking up and maybe I am closer than I care to admit to being old and forgetful.

It isn't being framed in this manner but I think hydrogen needs to be thought of as a energy storage technology instead of an energy generation technology.

In every case so far it takes more energy to separate out the hydrogen than you get in energy from the hydrogen separated out. This allows you to store a good percentage of the energy, minus conversion costs, from a source in the form of hydrogen that could be used later as needed.

Too often I read breathless claims that somehow 'hydrogen' will solve all sort of problems. Most of these these reports are focused on the grand benefits of using hydrogen. But they are very light on explaining where you get the energy to extract the hydrogen from the water.

Plug Power , some nice folks in enchanting Latham, NY. A decade ago they were predicting imminent availability of a hydrogen fuel cell about the size of a Maytag washer, capable of powering a home. As others have commented, you gotta supply a whole bunch of hydrogen, which didn't work out too good for the Hindenberg.

Well, I suppose hydrogen can solve a lot of problems ... but it raises quite a few as well.

Generation is easy, and has an extensive history, but nobody talks about it. You heat coal, biomass, whatever, with water, in an oxygen-limited environment, and you get hydrogen plus carbon monoxide (and assorted impurities). There's your hydrogen source, and you can capture the carbon if you want to. (My guess: the hydrogen economy is through the electrical grid, via coal.)

Distritubiton, on the other hand, is a mean old bear with a sore tooth. The current pipeline grid cannot handle hydrogen. Because hydrogen is highly reactive (corrosive); it either eats the pipeline it's being carried in, or escapes through the physical structure of the plastic pipelines that contain methane with ease.

(Cool aside: all coal-fired power plants truck in hydrogen to serve as the cooling medium for the collosal alternators that keep our lights on. Hydrogen's properties provide the optimum cooling-vs-windage [resistance] properties for this application.)

So stay tuned. But IMHO don't wait for hydrogen distribution or storage.

I don’t see hydrogen home power happening any time soon. Solar power and wind power with batteries, inverters and lower power consuming appliances seems the best answer. And it’s available now.

That's the reason I've been given in the UK. Above ground they may be more likely to fail in a disaster, but they are quicker to repair, too. It's a trade-off.

I suspect it also depends on the type of disaster. It seems to me that over-head cables should be relatively resilient to earthquakes, even if the ground on either side of a cable shifts a few feet. An underground cable would likely get sheared.

Not that we get that kind of earthquake in the UK; we mostly just get a bit of shaking. We do get tornadoes, but they are very localised and it's easy to fix the local damage. We get floods, and above ground is good for that.

Well, after reading the posts and how complex this whole infrastructure issue is, looks like the wisest course of action is working towards getting off the grid as much as possible.

Oh, Samhain... wiser words were seldom spoken.

There is obviously little or no incentive to disasterproof the grid.

Apparently many of us ETS'ers in the Houston area still have $560+ leftover to pay for Rita... and then we can all bet that energy prices will go back down! (and lose that bet)

The article does not explain why I won't have to pay for Ike. Its practically an aside comment but to me its the most important line in the article. I'd be curious to know the reason and where the money is really coming from. But I don't have the time or the inclination to figure it out, I'm too busy finding alternative energy sources...