A slew of interesting letters in today's Times newspaper continuing a debate on biofuels, renewables and hydrogen.  Rob Thring, a Professor of Fuel Cell Engineering, argues that;

" if all the cars in Britain could be converted to run on fuel cells using hydrogen from electrolysers using electricity obtained only from wind turbines, we would need only 20,000 wind turbines to do that. Britain could do that in 20 years, and then we would not need petroleum imported from politically unstable areas to fuel our cars."

On one level, it's not quite right because 90% of the UK's imported petroleum comes from a fellow liberal democracy, Norway - and since the demise of the Vikings in the 10th Century AD, they haven't been an external cause of instability to anyone. Britain's energy security issues are largely to do with gas, being at the wrong end of the European pipeline, the run-down of North Sea reserves, an inbuilt self-defeating prejudice against new energy infrastructure  and a much-strained relationship with Russia.

Leaving that aside, it's a fascinating concept to envision wind turbines as a dedicated resource for the hydrogen production - i.e. via electrolysis - for transport fuel. It's not entirely crazy. The UK's island grid would have a hard time (impossible at the current time) load-balancing 20,000 x 3 MW turbines or 60,000 MW. No wonder more research is going on into wind forecasting as this piece in MIT Technology Review makes clear. Depending on who you believe, the furtherest wind could be integrated today in the UK is between 10 and 15% which would equate to about 16,000 to 20,000 MW of installed capacity, compared to about 2,500 MW now and that's assuming you can get it all through planning.

Hydrogen production however, which would be tied directly to storage, is not time sensitive and if, and it's a big if, all the UK's vehicles were to shift to hydrogen-fuelled fuel cells, there would be a ready market for it. This hydrogen ambition is a throwback to the scientist, J. B. S. Haldane's 1923 speech, in which he proposed the UK should replace it's exhausted coal fields with a network of hydrogen generating windmills - allegedly the first ever proposal for a hydrogen-based renewable energy economy.

For all that the killer fact remains; fuel cells for vehicles are still vastly too expensive for widespread adoption. Show me the showroom where I can go and buy one? Obviously, you can't. The economics of wind-powered hydrogen will start to make sense long before fuel cells do for everyday vehicles.

For more information on this debate, see this article I wrote a few years ago, which still holds up pretty well;

The Hydrogen Economy; what price and when?