The challenges facing Burns: fuel cell technology is still way too costly, engineers have yet to figure out how to squeeze enough hydrogen aboard a passenger vehicle to give it sufficient driving range and there's the tricky issue of how to safely store hydrogen in a car.
Servco, a local 100-year-old company that also owns dealerships in Australia and has commercial products distribution and private equity investments divisions, hopes that the availability of hydrogen to power passenger cars will spur sales of fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) on Oahu and eventually other Hawaiian Islands.
Though there are a number of potential impediments to the broad adoption of hydrogen fuel cells in passenger cars, major automakers expect to commercialize the technology in their vehicles by 2015.
All airships have four principal elements in common: a cigar-shaped bag, or balloon, filled with a lighter-than-air gas (usually hydrogen or helium); a passenger car, or gondola, attached beneath the bag; engines and propellers; and rudders to steer the craft.
A basic system (Mode A) operating solely from the output of a photovoltaic array was found to generate sufficient hydrogen to allow a passenger vehicle with a fuel efficiency of 8.5 l/100 km (33 mpg) to travel 613 km annually per kW of PV installed.
But when the occasion is Hawaii's first and only hydrogen filling station for passenger cars, a traditional island blessing makes perfect sense.
Hawaii Governor David Ige (left), Servco Pacific chairman and CEO Mark Fukunaga and Servco senior VP Thor Toma (right) look on as Kahu Bruce Ah Leong (in white) blesses Hawaii's first hydrogen filling station for passenger cars.
As for refueling, the vehicle has a hydrogen inlet, located on the passenger's side (where one would normally find the gas filler opening).
It costs up to 10 times more to take a bus passenger one mile using hydrogen rather than diesel.
The system levelized cost in the Mid Century scenario is 0.09 €/kWh for electricity, 2.4 €/kg for hydrogen and specific energy cost for passenger cars is 0.02 €/km.
