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The San Diego Union Tribune blogs about the new plan for Fuel Cell Cars & hydrogen fueling stations in California. The plan, which was released last month by the California Fuel Cell Partnership, anticipates by 2017 almost 50,000 fuel cell vehicles in California, supported by 36 fueling stations which are slated to cost $180 million. Check out the UT's blog post here, and follow it to the summary and the full report on the California Fuel Cell Partnership Web site.

The jury is still out on whether hydrogen will ultimately be our environmental savior, replacing the fossil fuels responsible for global warming and various nagging forms of pollution. Two main hurdles stand in the way of mass production and widespread consumer adoption of hydrogen "fuel cell" vehicles: the still high cost of producing fuel cells, and the lack of a hydrogen refueling network.

Enbridge Inc., its wholly-owned utility, Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc., and FuelCell Energy Inc. have announced the opening of the world's first Direct Fuel Cell - Energy Recovery GenerationTM (DFC-ERGTM) power plant. The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place at Enbridge Gas Distribution's Toronto headquarters. The plant, which produces 2.2 megawatts of environmentally preferred, ultra-clean electricity, or enough power for approximately 1,700 residences, is also the first multi-megawatt commercial fuel cell to operate in Canada.

ON a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a futuristic experiment posing as an ordinary fuel station may be bringing the world one step closer to the hydrogen age. From the moment engineers started dreaming about hydrogen as an alternative to oil, they faced a nagging question: What should come first - the fuel-cell car or the hydrogen pump?

Scientists have found that a polymer material is an excellent catalyst in a process to produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight and water. The material meets the basic requirements for an ideal catalyst -- including being abundant, easy to work with, and non-toxic -- and could help this "green" alternative-energy production method become mainstream. Creating hydrogen gas by splitting water (H2O) molecules with solar energy is a promising way of generating hydrogen fuel, which, by either being burned directly or used in fuel cells, can power many types of vehicles, including automobiles, buses, and even airplanes. The study's corresponding scientist is Xinchen Wang, a chemist affiliated with the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, and Fouzhou University in Fouzhou, China.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A U.S. scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night. A new catalyst produces the oxygen and hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity, while using far less energy than current methods.

China will put 60,000 new-energy vehicles-including fuel-cell vehicles, hybrid-electric vehicles, and battery-electric vehicles-into trials in 11 cities over the next few years to support the development of a fuel-efficient, alternative-energy auto industry, according to a report in sina.com.

That's what you get from fuel cells, as long as they're subsidized by generous grants By the time Hartford's Blue Hills Avenue reaches Bloomfield, it has turned into an economic-development director's fevered dream, with a parade of major corporations lining both sides of the wide avenue.

Hydrogen cars get no respect. A lot of people consider them the stuff of science fiction, a technology as vaporous as the stuff that drives them. But despite some hurdles even Liu Xiang couldn't clear -- creating a fueling infrastructure comes to mind -- Uncle Sam and the big automakers love hydrogen cars and are driving across the country in a fleet of them to prove they work. Even if they're occasionally hauled on trucks.

Chemists claim that by mimicking photosynthesis in the lab, they could revolutionize fuel production within five years. Katharine Sanderson reports. Dan Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, made a bold statement at the American Chemical Society's fall meeting in Philadelphia last month. He claimed that within five years he could build a device capable of producing locally sourced hydrogen gas, which could power all the world's houses, fill people's car batteries and revolutionize energy supply in the developing world. "I guarantee, in under five years, you'll see this," he said.

Hydrogen Garage LLC is just what it says : "a garage operation". Garage to Garage. An online business selling parts to make home made hydrogen cells, parts, circuits, etc. for the home mechanic/technical /experimenter. We do NOT sell consumer products, only parts for the genius in you. A simple add onto your existing vehicle and or gas powered generator. Might as well sell something that helps clean our car's emission, save MPG and clean up your engine and create more horsepower and help stop Global Warming from too much carbon monoxide posioning. Way better product that some of the stuff that people can sell online today. The more the exposure of "on board electrolysis" the better.

Sunrgi, a Hollywood-based start-up, came out of stealth mode this week claiming it can collect twice as much sunlight as other photovoltaic designs and convert it to electricity for 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, on par with fossil fuels.