Building a world of resilient communities.    The hydrogen dream
Last week I went to Longwy's university campus, the Institut
Universitaire de Technologie (part of the University of
Lorraine), for a conference on renewable energies and energy
efficiency. It was an event integrated in an InterReg project
for innovation, called Tigre, gathering institutions from
Lorraine, Saarland, Luxembourg, and Wallonie. It kicked off with
a session on tri-generation, and went on with parallel sessions
on waste biomass, and on hydrogen and fuel cells. I opted for
the latter, feeling really curious about the present state of
research on this field.  Cesare Marchetti proposed hydrogen (H2)
as a large-scale energy vector almost fifty years ago. The main
concern then was to find a simple way to feed transport systems
with what seemed to be a fountain of energy about to come from
the expanding nuclear park. The nuclear dream is largely gone,
but hydrogen lives on. Is this dream about to come true as a
piece in the transition puz