Four Hummers

Cranes and flatbed tractor trailers were recently employed in my SMUD parking lot to remove the hydrogen fueling facility that SMUD placed into service in April 2008.

Remember Bush? Yes, that forgotten president and his famous "addicted to oil" and "we'll transition to a hydrogen economy?" Well, a mere nineteen months into our "new economy" we've abandoned it. The electrolyzer and hydrogen tanks were taken away, never to return.

SMUD built an 80 kW solar array to power the electrolyzer, enough for 14 hydrogen cars. Do you have any idea how expensive an 80 kW array is? Do you have any idea how expensive the whole hydrogen facility is? The solar array will remain above the parking lot, providing the important service of shading parked vehicles. Over those nineteen months, I never once witnessed a single hydrogen car being fueled up, but I've seen some paradoxical things in the shade cast by that array.

Consider this gem:


One of my co-workers. This single picture illustrates the massive, massive chasm between the fantasy of an alternative fueled society and the reality we live in.

Aside from parking like a prick (he'll sometimes take two compact spaces if the end space isn't available), the driver represents extreme forms of pride, excess, energy density and wanton consumption, underneath solar panels representing expensive, rarefied energy. I find the dichotomy quite interesting.

The direct energy consumed by just four Hummers driven 12,000 miles a year is equal to the entire annual energy output of this array. I haven't even mentioned the energy used to produce the array and the energy used to produce the cement pillars, the reinforcing steel rebar, the steel I-beam structure, or the alpha male building contractors. Cement manufacturing produces heroic volumes of CO2 while coal (coke) is burnt to produce steel. The two dozen or so contractors who built this array all individually drove F250s...not one of them arrived for work in a subcompact, Prius, hydrogen car, bicycle, or on foot.

I wonder -- can a guy driving a Chevy 3500 from his 3/4 acre horse property in Lincoln to construct a PV array in Sacramento still be considered a green collar worker, even though he'll burn through more fossil fuels than the supposed energy savings his job will create?


This photo demonstrates to me the impossibility of transitioning to an alternative powered society. We won't transition, in my opinion. Ever. We will instead choose to wage energy wars to keep our way of life going and we will allow our privileged culture to self destruct before we voluntarily reduce/constrain energy use.