Lately, everybody is so enthusiastic about building electric car charging stations around the world that they forget there are alternatives to that which need to be developed for a fair competition to exist.
Hydrogen, for example, doesn’t have the disadvantages that batteries do, like pollution-creating manufacturing lines, or long recharge times, and for that reason, hydrogen may also be something worth trying – in parallel with batteries.
Italy, on the other hand, seems to be the perfect place for a hydrogen infrastructure to develop in Europe. Acta, an Italian company, has plans to install their new hydrogen refilling stations throughout the country. They use solar power to perform electrolysis on water and extract the hydrogen. There are only 10 hydrogen-fueled cars in Europe, for the moment, but creating refueling stations for them is like seeding the need for hydrogen cars, not only the 10 Honda FCX Clarity.
Known for the incentives in the field of solar power, Italy has a powerful retail network of solar panel distributors. Girelli Bruni is the company that contracted the agreement with Acta, being their only distributor of solar cells and the only company authorized to deploy the hydrogen refilling stations across Italy.
The Italian legislation requires all new fuel service stations to install a minimum quantity of photovoltaic generation capacity and to provide a gaseous fuel alternative to gasoline and diesel. These requirements vary in figures from one region to another, but the basic law in itself encourages the deployment of hydrogen, because once the solar power system is installed, hydrogen is only one step away, and Acta wants to fill in that blank.