Searching through the web, I ran upon a website by Area 51 guru Bob Lazar. His company is supposably researching and developing a solar powered hydrogen generator to power a hydrogen combustion engine. I thought the website was interesting.

United Nuclear

If your search the site, you will find their description of their technology; it is actually fairly straightforward.

1. Generate hydrogen with solar power. (5 80w panels for their system)
2. Store hydrogen in a metal hydride tank(s).
3. Combustion engine conversion kit installed in your vehicle.

They claim to have a '94 Corvette that has a range of 350 miles using 4 of their their standard tanks. However, thay also admit that it takes at least 2 days to generate enough hydrogen to fill one tankl I suppose if you have 8 tanks or more continously being filled that this system might be viable.

Regardless, it seems that they have the same problemas always: how can hydrogen be produced in a timely & efficient manner?

Of course I am skeptical about all of this, but I felt their honesty regarding the hydrogen production time deserved a little merit.

I can believe the range on the metal Hydride storage tank. Dr. Roger Billings who has been at a lot of the fore front in many Hydrogen fuel break throughs, used a metal hydride storage tank on the world's first Hydrogen fuel cell car "Laser Cell". It had a range of about 300 miles, and if you used the same amount of metal hydride (weight for weight) as lead acid batteries it would require to run the vehicle, it would have a range of over 1000miles! So metal hydrides really work.

Hydrogen availability though is a real problem when it comes to implementing fuel cells into vehicles. There is a tremendous infrastructure that needs to be built up first, and the place that I see Hydrogen fuel cells working really well short term is in generating power.

We could refine coal or natural gas into hydrogen and then use a fuel cell to generate power onto the grid. Fuel cells are about 3 times more efficient than conventional methods of producing power, and so we would only need 1/3 as much fuel to generate the same amount of power and we would only be putting 1/3 as much pollutants into the atmosphere.

Dr. Billings talks extensively about this in his book "Hydrogen World View" which is open for the public reading at www.billingsenergy.com/Research.html

You can also check out his other accomplishments on his website www.rogerbillings.info
I highly recommend it.