The "Water Fueled Car"

[kandrathe]

Roughly ~4.5 kWh/NM3H2

or by looking at some product literature,

Hogan 40 series Hydrogen Generator specifications

It is more realistically 5.6 to 9.0 kWh/Nm3 H2 (14.7 to 23.6 kWh/100ft3 H2)

There is a ton of interesting research into how to generate new bio-friendly fuels with the least energy input.

Here are some interesting links;

Cracking Water
Nano catalysts convert Alcohol into Hydrogen
Interesting Brit page on transport fuels with all the scientific number crunching.
Lanny Schmidt's hydrogen reactor
Capstone Microturbine -- Convert Low Yield Biomass Fuel into Heat and Electricity

For those who are advocates for solar power, and I've tried to make this point here before... You will never get past the issue that the sun delivers in the best places on earth solar radiation somewhere between 125 and 375 W/m², between 3 and 9 kWh/m²/day and the best solar panels deliver 19 to 56 W/m² or 0.45-1.35 kWh/m²/day (annual day and night average), which would equate to 18,000 square meters / megawatt of solar panels at maximum efficiency. Wind power is a form of solar energy which can be captured a different way, but still the sun delivers the same amount of radiation to us each day.

Our current electricity generating power plants are in the 300 to 1000 Megawatt range, which means to replace the new fairly large 775 mW plant at Calpine it would have taken a minimum of 13,950,000 sq. meters of land or 5.39 sq miles, but realistically due to spacing of solar panel arrays for maintanence it would be double that.

I did some digging into world energy consumption which show a current demand for energy of about 500 quadrillion (500,000,000,000,000,000) BTU/hours per year (divided by 3,414,000 to get Mwh) or 146,455,770,357.35 Mwh. If we assume about 8700 (99% uptime) hours for all the power plants in the world then we need a minimum of 16,833,996.6 Mw generating capacity or 116,993.6 sq miles (or double that actually). For comparison, Britain is roughly 90,000 sq. miles in size, Libya is 679,362 sq miles. There are some big open land areas in the US, Asia, or Africa that might be appropriate to house some large solar array's.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't invest in solar in areas with lots of sun and space to devote to millions of acres of arrays, but I do believe it is more inefficent than chemical or nuclear energy production methods.