Introduction
“In addition to zero-emission, hydrogen has many advantages compared to Battery electric vehicle. Hydrogen allows to travel more miles with refueling times like those of standard engines cars. The road ahead is still long but in the future we will see a mix of technologies (including electric and hydrogen) without competition and without a winning technology. To see this type of vehicles on our roads, it is necessary to increase the number of filling stations. There are about 200 filling stations in the world today (70 in Europe), and Germany is working to install some by 2015″. These are the words of Massimo Prastaro, H2IT President, during the Festival dell’Energia, held in Florence in September 2011. The President goes on highlighting fuel cells as another way to use hydrogen and in the future they could replace natural gas boilers.
Today many Universities, research centers and R&D company departments activated many research projects (including at national level). Since there are many applications of hydrogen and fuel cells, the research focus areas are several: from transport, to microcogeneration, distributed energy generation, storage of energy produced from renewable sources and back up systems. The aim is to ensure that today hydrogen technologies can be in the future competitive and can gradually replace traditional technologies (not environmentally sustainable).
But the challenges are not only technological, in fact there are several projects whose objectives are applicative and demonstrative. This is important because, if we want to see hydrogen-related technologies established on the market, are also needed projects that seek to analyze the industry as a whole, including the hydrogen distributing infrastructure.
This newsletter wants to provide an account of the Italian hydrogen related projects status both on technical / scientific and demonstration / application side.
We would like to signal the event: FCH-JU 4th Stakeholders General assembly to be held in Brussels November 22, 2011 (here the preliminary program).
