You mean like the little propellers in the tram tunnels at the Denver airport?
Like electric cars, there are a couple of problems with wind and solar that don't get considered. Even with free wind and sunshine their power costs more than that from power plants. This is due to the expense of the wind and solar farm equipment plus the cost to build transmission lines to locations where the maximum wind and sunshine are (usually in the middle of nowhere). That's why you only see renewables constructed and maintained when government subsidies are available.
More importantly, their output is not controllable, so it doesn't match in real time with customer demand. Since AC power can't be stored conventional plants have to pick up the slack when wind and solar generation quits. In the end, solar and wind generation does not actually displace conventional power plants (or the costs to build, operate and maintain them), it just causes them to have to respond to faster and more sudden load changes when they do run, and to run less overall (lower capacity factor).
More and faster startups results in more wear and tear, higher maintenance costs, lower overall efficiency, and higher emissions (startups are dirty compared to on-load operation). Staffing requirements tend to go up with more startups/shutdowns, so when you combine the higher maintenance costs, lower efficiency, and higher staffing costs with lower capacity factor (less revenue because you didn't make as much power to sell) you end up with very much higher cost/kw hour.
When cap and trade finally comes it will drive out existing coal plants and may end construction of new ones. These plants will have to be replaced, plus others added to deal with the uncontrollable nature of all the wind and solar that was added to the system. These new plants will most likely be fueled with natural gas, which we have allot of but don't want to drill for. So, we'll import it in the form of LNG - further increasing our energy dependence on others. Oh, and natural gas still produces CO2 when burned.
Hydrogen would be a very clean motor fuel, but its very dangerous to store and handle. It also takes allot of electricity to produce as already been said. I can't imagine how Joe Public would manage to fuel, maintain and occasionally wreck a hydrogen fueled car without blowing himself and other us at regular intervals.
On the other hand, I can see a fleet of commercial trucks or taxis with professional maintenance programs and drivers, and industrial grade fueling stations operating safely. The heat capacity of hydrogen is probably too low to work for long distance trucks or trains (the tanks would have to bee too large), but for local delivery where frequent refueling is available maybe it could work, displace allot of gas/diesel usage plus reduce emissions in metro areas.
But where to get the hydrogen at a reasonable cost? Nuclear generating plants don't like to increase and decrease load frequently. So even if we decide to build more (and I hope we do) they may have a problem in a grid heavy with wind and solar. So, we build a hydrogen electrolysis plant alongside each Nuclear plant. During high customer demand periods, the power goes to the grid. Durning low customer demand periods, we make low cost hydrogen. All with very zero air emissions.
This makes allot more sense to me that an electric car that has very short range, increases total emissions due to losses in getting the electricity from the plant to the batteries, in making the batteries, and in disposing of the batteries. Unfortunately, such a change would require we had some kind of energy policy driven by objective thinking - which isn't likely. Maybe if the government created a new department to deal with all this we could sort it out. We could call in the US Department of Energy. What do you think?
