The Hydrogen Education Foundation has announced the official list of contestants for the $1 million H2 Refuel H-Prize competition. The H2 Refuel H-Prize, a competitive challenge to deploy an on-site home or community hydrogen generation system to fuel hydrogen-powered vehicles using electricity or natural gas, has accepted submissions from six contestants. The submissions of the six qualified contestants will now be evaluated by a group of expert judges to determine which contestants can advance to the finalist round. The finalist selection is expected to be announced in December 2015 followed by system construction, installation, testing and evaluation, resulting in the announcement of the winner of the $1 million prize at the end of 2016. The contestants are Ion Power Inc., Katsu Technologies Inc., Millennium Reign Energy, Reactwell, Simple.Fuel and Washington State University. More info: Million-Dollar Hydrogen Refueling Competition Under Way :: NGT News | The 2014 -2016 H-Prize Competition
Is there a Phase III ?? Maybe -Hydrogen lobby pays off CARB in order to bilk millions more, for the next 10 years? Phase IV ?? .
Hydrogen cars are now affordable. Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. Hydrogen is the here and now. Hydrogen is a clean fuel. Hydrogen fuels in only 3 minutes and plug-ins take many hours. Running a little low . . . Can we get some more politic free Kool-aid over here please? .
Because of the nature of said public bilking, you can't have this discussion honestly without noting the politics.
Yes, no, maybe. The 501 (c) (3) Hydrogen Education Foundation seems like a straight forward PAC. First item on their site is a link to washington fuel cell summit, they have templates to write your congressman and senator, its based in Washington. I don't see much political about this contest. I'm sure they understand that lack of home refueling puts hydrogen cars at a disadvantage to plug-ins for environmentally conscious and technology friendly initial adopters. Honda promised such a thing in 2008, but technically it is quite challenging to build something that can fill a 10,000 psi tank with any meaningful quantity of hydrogen over night for a competitive cost and still follow all the safety regulations. I hope they find someone that can figure it out. I'm doubtful though. No one could even remove the impurities from home natural gas lines and compress it for cng cars for a low cost, if you can't do that right for $5000, I am doubtful that you can make and compress hydrogen for less. Still someone might find some cheap technical solution.
