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£10m prize to design green family car
Posted on Saturday, May 03, 2003 @ 02:01:59 UTC by vlad
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The Genesis HICEF would probably qualify but...I'm afraid it's just for the Brits!;-) Go for it our inventive friends...subjects of Her Majesty The Queen...
British inventors offered £10m prize to design green family car - By Severin Carrell (27 April 2003)
Britain's car makers and back-street inventors are being offered £10m in prize money in a race to design a new ultra-clean, planet-friendly car. The government-funded competition will be unveiled by the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, on Tuesday in the hope that it will lead to the discovery of a "green" car so cheap and popular it will rival sales of the Vauxhall Astra and Ford Fiesta.
Ministers want engineers to design the prototype for a mass-market family car that will be twice as fuel-efficient as today's average vehicle – and one that can be on the road within a few years.
The £10m in prize money will be split between a handful of winning designs over the next three years.
The competition is likely to promote research into highly advanced hydrogen fuel-cell cars, battery-powered vehicles, petrol-battery hybrids and engines that run on fuel made from straw, sugar beet and sawdust – "biomass" fuel.
It will be called the Ultra Low Carbon Car Challenge; winning vehicles must emit less than 100g of carbon dioxide per kilometre – much less than the 170g per km that the average new car releases.
The Department of Transport says its main goal is to design "an affordable ultra-low-carbon passenger car, capable of mass production within a near to medium time scale, at a competitive price".
Read the article in "The Independent's" News at:The Independent's News
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Re: £10m prize to design green family car (Score: 1)
by Rastahal on Sunday, May 04, 2003 @ 13:51:52 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://truthbells.com | Well, I believe this is a more focused effort than what's being done in the USA to come up with a truly "green"car but I'm thinkin...again, it's too little, too late.
I've heard others refer to a "Marshal Plan" to attack the problem of the current use of fossil fuels in transportation, and I believe they are right. I'm hoping the HICEF technology or something similar will give us the ability to quickly convert the present day internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen. This will solve our current problems at the quickest rate possible, as a relatively simple conversion to the vehicle would be all that's needed to make this happen.
This would give us zero pollution with the technology we're using NOW and would make for a great stepping stone to future power sources such as fuel cells, flux field generation, or something of that nature.
This would also breathe new life into the auto repair shops and local gas stations...whoever would be doing the actual conversions. I'm thinking there will be LOTS of money to be made there!
There's one down side...folks will be able to continue to drive those ridiculously large SUV's that's all the rage...oh, well...free will in action!
Bottom line is...while our own government and the auto industry happily tell us we can expect to have fuel cell cars with hi-tech delivery systems for hydrogen in 20 years or so, they are looking at the forest and not seeing the trees...that we don't have time to wait, we must start immediately, and that the technology exists now to give the the world a pollution free car with the engine technology we're already using. And we don't need gas stations converted to hydrogen dispensing stations to make it happen....we can make hydrogen on demand, it just makes so much more sense...just not to the oil companies!
(PS - Some folks claim they have been converting engines to run from "on board hydrogen from regular electrolysis long before the advent of the Genesis device )
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What makes you say GWE is not a UK company? (Score: 1)
by chipotle_pickle on Monday, May 05, 2003 @ 23:07:04 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://freehydrogen.blogspot.com | | Nobody's found them in the USA, maybe they are a UK partnership. Maybe we can get Crystal to chime in on this article as well. |
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Hydrogen's Dirty Secret (Score: 1)
by vlad on Sunday, May 18, 2003 @ 01:55:32 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | ...What Bush didn't reveal in his nationwide address, however, is that his administration has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent -- and potentially as dirty -- as the one that fuels today's SUVs. According to the administration's National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90 percent of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels -- in a process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. The remaining 10 percent will be cracked from water using nuclear energy...
"All the emphasis was on how the process would benefit traditional energy industries," recalls Nicklas, who sat on a committee chaired by an executive from ChevronTexaco. "The whole meeting had been staged to get a particular result, which was a plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and not from renewables." The plan does not call for a single ounce of hydrogen to come from power generated by the sun or the wind, concluding that such technologies "need further development for hydrogen production to be more cost competitive."
... The administration's plan lays the groundwork to expand that infrastructure -- guaranteeing that oil and gas companies will profit from any transition to hydrogen. Lauren Segal, general manager of hydrogen development for BP, puts it succinctly: "We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business." ...
... As hydrogen gained momentum, the oil companies rushed to buy up interests in technology companies developing ways to refine and store the new fuel. Texaco has invested $82 million in a firm called Energy Conversion Devices, and Shell now owns half of Hydrogen Source. BP, Chevron-Texaco, ExxonMobil, Ford, and General Electric have also locked up the services of many of America's top energy scientists, devoting more than $270 million to hydrogen research at MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. ...
... Even if the rest of the world switches to hydrogen manufactured from water, says Nicklas, "Americans may end up dependent on fossil fuels for generations." ...
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Way to go my fellow Americans! Read the article at: http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2003/19/ma_375_01.html
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