Proton Energy is a Connecticut company that specializes in hydrogen generators and hydrogen control systems.  Currently, the company provides hydrogen fueling systems for utilities, but in the future, it  sees home hydrogen fueling stations as the only way to insure that hydrogen gets adopted as a green fuel for generators, cars and homes.

Proton Energy Systems produces proton exchange membrane (PEM) hydrogen generators that generate hydrogen from water by using electrolysis.  Electrolysis requires electricity which at the moment is primarily produced from coal or fossil fuel power plants.  Just like plug-in electric cars have no emissions, hydrogen powered cars and utilities have zero emissions as well.  The emissions problems come from the electricity that both hydrogen generators and electric cars use.

Proton Energy has generators that can be configured to work directly with solar, wind, hydro, and wave energy to produce the electricity that the system needs to split water into hydrogen.  Utilizing these other renewable energies for electricity generation, means that the hydrogen generated is completely carbon free.

Currently, “cluster strategies” have been suggested by car manufacturers and energy companies as the best way to provide a hydrogen fuel infrastructure for cars and homes.  Unfortunately, this strategy has not met with wide spread approval from the market.  Two major issues that exist today and would exist with the proposed cluster strategy are large scale hydrogen storage and long distance transportation.

What Proton Energy would like to see is other strategies proposed like home fueling stations (using Proton’s PEM technology of course).  This solution will resolve problems that are currently hampering the adoption of hydrogen as a preferred transportation and home fuel. 

With the home PEM hydrogen fueling station, “the large-scale storage and long-distance transportation pieces of the supply chain” are solved.  The home system would utilize water and electricity that are present in every home, at least in the industrialized world.  As alternate energy sources like solar, wind, hydro, and wave energy become more prevalent providers of electricity, the hydrogen created from home hydrogen generators would be completely CO2 free.

In order for Proton Energy’s idea to come to fruition, several things are going to have to happen.  First, producers of hydrogen energy systems are going to have to make generators that are easily affordable and appropriately sized for home use or at least neighborhood use.  Second, the hydrogen energy systems have to be easily installable in new homes and easy to install in renovations.  Third, these systems have to provide something that consumers don’t currently have and need or the systems have to be worth the consumers time and money to have installed.  In other words, if the systems don’t provide a good return on investment, people won’t buy them. 

Until hydrogen systems meet the above criteria, no one is going to purchase and install them.  So we are left with the classic chicken and egg problem.  Until there is a need for home hydrogen systems, no one will buy them.  On the other hand, producing hydrogen fueled cars and affordable hydrogen home energy systems isn’t going to happen unless consumers buy them.

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Entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 5:08 pm under Auto, Green Technology.

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