Skip to main content

The Hydrogen Revolution - Marco Alverà ***

The idea of using hydrogen to aid our move to green energy is gathering pace. At one point it was described primarily as a replacement for petrol in fuelling cars - though Marco Alverà does mention this still as a possibility for some vehicles, the far bigger picture is for hydrogen's role as a potential replacement for natural gas and as a means to store energy to enable to it to be transported from solar-rich locations, or to hold energy for use at time when renewables aren't delivering, such as in winter in many European locations.

Despite portraying the seriousness of climate change's impact, Alverà is relentlessly upbeat about the capability of hydrogen in sorting out our problems. It ought to be said upfront (and perhaps isn't explored enough in the book) that Alverà is CEO of an energy pipeline company that is moving into hydrogen in a big way, so to say that he has a potential conflict of interest is, if anything, understating things.

This doesn't mean that some of Alverà's thoughts and suggestions aren't interesting, but it does mean that the way he brushes over the pitfalls and potential barriers is perhaps a little unbalanced. For instance, reading this, you would think that the US and China were doing great things on the climate front, rather than failing to deal with the situation. You would also think that the EU is a paragon of climate change action, when, for example, Germany's disastrous action on nuclear has resulted in a heavy use of coal.

Similarly, while it probably is a good idea in an ideal world to generate solar energy cheaply in the Sahara, say, and transport that energy as hydrogen rather than high voltage DC, Alverà underplays the concerns about putting Europe's energy future in the hands of potentially unstable countries and doesn't even mention threats from terrorism etc. In fact you'd think mostly hydrogen was a harmless substance without a track record of explosions - there's even a suggestion we might return to using hydrogen airships. That went well last time.

Alverà makes good technical points about the comparison of battery and hydrogen technology for long distances and heavy goods vehicles, though the comparison is very much dependent on today's battery technology and doesn't give any allowance for the speed at which this is developing. There is also some remarkable political naivety in a comment on the speed of China's development of hydrogen fuel cell capability saying 'One of the reasons why China is so good at making things happen is its economy is centrally planned...' - neither the Soviet Union nor China historically have shown that central planning is exactly a great way forward.

I don't want to be too hard on this book. It has genuinely made me more positive about hydrogen for some applications, notably energy storage to level out peaks and troughs in renewable supplies, though I'm still pretty certain I wouldn't like to travel in a vehicle sitting on a big hydrogen tank. It's also good to discover a climate change book that isn't all doom and gloom. But anyone reading the book does need to be aware this is a written from the perspective of someone whose company needs hydrogen to succeed and is perhaps talking it up beyond what may be realistic.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more