- There will be a permanent undersea city.
- Companies will have workers aged from 18 to 75 due to the late retirement age.
- We won’t need to eat meals. We’ll take nutritional pills instead.
- Everybody will buy e-books or audio books instead of paper books.
- No one will smoke.
- We will be able to control the weather.
- People will take space holidays on the Moon – if they can afford it.
- 3D TV will be the norm.
- There will be one currency used throughout the world.
- All edible fish will have disappeared from the ocean.
- Super-planes will cut travel times by half, and there will even be flying cars.
- Organ donors will no longer be necessary. We’ll be able to get an artificial heart, liver or other body part if needed.
- The ageing process in humans will be stopped.
- Everybody will be driving a hydrogen-powered vehicle.
To have a peek at how close some of the above-mentioned advances are, watch this video which I think I discovered on English on Target.We miss you, Irma.
Today I'm making history. I'm driving from the Midlands to the Isle of Wight. Ahh, I hear you say, nothing very historic in that. But just hang on a minute. I'm doing it in the world's first commercially available hydrogen car. By the end of this year, we will be able to lease Hyundai SUVs like this that are powered entirely by hydrogen. And the Isle of Wight connection? Well that is the UK's biggest green energy collaboration project EcoIsland. Now to get to the Isle of Wight I'm going to run entirely on hydrogen so I'm going to need to top up which is why I'm in Nottingham where the University of Nottingham has bought a mobile hydrogen refuelling station from ITM Power in Sheffield.
Gavin... Hello...
Hi Quentin.
Now you are a professor of Sustainable Energy here at Nottingham University. Tell me about EcoIsland. 'cause that's a really significant project.
This is a huge set change in the hydrogen infrastructure development in the UK. On the Isle of Wight they're looking at four times the size of this refueller providing sustainable hydrogen for a local fleet of vehicles that the community can all use.
In the next few years, Hyundai will be rolling out ten thousand of these ix35 SUVs every single year. ITM Power can pluck down hydrogen refuelling stations literally wherever you want. So that means we won't just be getting cheaper, cleaner fuel, we'll also be able to light and heat our houses with hydrogen. I'm off now to the Isle of Wight to have a glimpse at the future. And what's it going to mean, this EcoIsland project for the Isle of Wight? Well, there is the small question of 400 new jobs. 142,000 people here, that it'll directly influence, plus 60,000 homes. And let's not forget this is a globally big deal, so much so that it's attracted the attention of the UK Minister for Energy, who I'm going to pick up from the ferry terminal right now.
Hello... Good to meet you...
Good to meet you, too.
So perfidy to the orthodox: utterly carbon neutral. You can fill it up in three minutes, like a petrol car.
And how long will it run for?
300 to 350 miles.
And how expensive to run?
On renewables, it's half the price of petrol.
Really.
So convincing the consumers, you don't have to try and talk to them about saving the planet. You just talk have to tell them, it's going to cost you only half the price.
Yeah, that's why I asked.
And you can use platforms like this which is a conventional Hyundai that would have had an internal combustion engine and put the fuel cell in it.
Welcome everybody. This is the first global EcoIsland summit where island communities all over the world are coming together to find a long term solution to the greatest human challenges of the day.
We are deploying 100-kg-a-day refuelling station and a 15-kg-a-day refuelling station on the island and we'll have its fleet of 20 vehicles, including marine vehicles.
The ITM Power technology is groundbreaking. It's not just about just turning water into hydrogen and oxygen, it's about the portability of it. I mean, they walked up here in the middle of the week with a couple of small containers, they plug it in and they played. And here we have a generator unit that has now got enough juice in it to run a fleet of say ten cars. And once you get to that stage, you can put it anywhere.
I believe this project deserves the support which you've given it and it will certainly get my support, too. Thank you so much.
EcoIsland means that the Isle of Wight, by 2020 will be completely sustainable when it comes to energy. And this is hugely important. I've just come out from the Minister's keynote address, the Minister for Energy, John Hayes, MP, said that this is quite simply the most advanced sustainability project in the entire world. And hydrogen is going to play a major, major part. The Isle of Wight, we wish you well.
