The Edison of our age?

摘要

"The ages of mankind have been classified by the materials they use-the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Age of Silicon. We are at the dawn of the Hydrogen Age." So proclaims Stanford Ov-shinsky, co-founder of Energy Conversion Devices (ecd), a company based near Detroit, Michigan. "What is more," he says, "the hydrogen economy is happening already." There have been plenty of grandiose but unsubstantiated claims made over the past five years about the potential for hydrogen to replace fossil fuels as an energy carrier, so some scepticism is certainly in order. In particular, President George Bush and the big carmakers have been trumpeting hydrogen fuel cells-electrochemical devices that turn hydrogen into electricity and water vapour—as the replacement for the internal-combustion engine. But the date of commercialisation seems forever slipping just beyond the horizon.