52 comments on Weekend Energy Listening: The H2 Economy vs the Electron Economy
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While I agree that hydrogen gas is a particularly bad idea for a fuel there's no such thing as an electron economy for two reasons:
Batteries store energy in chemical, not electrical form. Fuel cells differ from batteries in their consumption of reactant and release of waste product; batteries use a redox reaction which is completely contained within the battery. There's nothing in principle preventing you from discovering a fuel cell that's just as efficient as a battery given a good choice of reactants; doing so could eliminate a lot of dead weight by increasing the proportion of reactant to material needed to convert it into electrical power. If you've got some religious objection against storing electrical energy in chemical form like the interviewee in the podcast I suggest you ditch the battery in favour of the capacitor.
Using electron economy to describe electrical power is a misnomer. Electrical energy is potential energy created by separating positive an negative charges and is stored in the electric field between positive and negative charges, it is not an inherent property of electrons. Transmission of electrical power does not occur by sending electrons over to someones house via a cable where their energy is somehow consumed and the electrons sent back to the power station to be recycled; the electrons in an HVAC line just jiggle back and forth a very short distance at 60 Hz and never reach consumers. The conduction band electrons in a good conductor move in response to an electric field to exclude it from the conductor, which has as a consequence that they create a potential difference over the appliance that is to consume electric power.
As long as batteries, with proper maintenance, get only about a thousand recharge cycles it does not sound very promising.
Many of the new battery technologies go way beyond this, although in view of the vast expense these start up companies don't guarantee the long life they are seeing in their testing.
Altairnano, and 123 are amongst the lithium technologies with much longer life, whilst Firefly with their foam lead acid and also the combination of capacitors on regular lead-acid to avoid deep discharge also do this.
Lifetime for all these appears to be somewhere in the region of 5-15,000 discharges, at least in equivalent figures because the lead acid capacitor combination anyways avoids this.
Ample for V2G, and likely to be longer than the life of the car, in any case.