Friday, April 16, 2010

East Coast Hydrogen Highway Planned by SunHydro

In January 2010, I had first talked about the East Coast Hydrogen Highway system being developed by SunHydro. The New York Times has now added a few details about the plan including the company’s founder and how the plan is to be financed.
In my last blog post, I roughly calculated the farthest distance between the 11 hydrogen fueling stations that run from Portland Maine to Orlando, Florida as being 145 miles apart. In the NYT article it states, however that according to Wired.com the stations, “…will be strategically located from Portland, Me., down to Miami, Fla., to account for the 300 mile range that state-of-the-art hydrogen cars are capable of traveling.”
When I checked the Wired article, however, this is not stated in the article itself but from someone commenting on the article. Why this is important is that if the 300 mile distance between stations is indeed accurate this would exclude the Honda Clarity and many other hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that do not have a 300 mile range. So, I’m checking on the details now about this one point.
SunHydro is a startup company that was founded by Tom Sullivan who made $544 million in sales last year from the other company he founded Lumber Liquidators. Another company called Proton Energy Systems was put up for auction and Mr. Sullivan paid $10.2 million for this company. Proton Energy Systems is building the electrolyzers for the 11 hydrogen fueling stations which will use solar panels and water to create clean energy for the hydrogen vehicles.
Mr. Sullivan expects to put $15 – $20 million into the building of the 11 hydrogen fueling stations along the East Coast Hydrogen Highway network. Mr. Sullivan has now secured most of the land he will need for this project and the first station is set to go online June 2010 in Wallingford, Connecticut at the Proton Energy Systems headquarters. Read more.

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