The BMW ActiveE Electric Car.

Electric cars could well be one of the answers to a sustainable future, but currently unless you can find a recharging station that actually uses electricity produced in a renewable way, like a wind-powered Sanya Skypump or a solar powered recharging station, you'll find the electricity which goes to charge your vehicle originates from the electrical grid.  As such, a good deal of that electricity is likey to produced at power stations which burn those nasty old fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

You could say hydrogen was a bit of an enigma. It is the most common atom, comprising about 75% of the known matter in the universe in terms of mass.  If we're talking purely in terms of the number of atoms in the universe, the ratio is even more impressive, with hydrogen atoms comprising an estimated 90% of the total number of atoms.

In a record breaking flight this week a solar powered plane successfully completed the highest and longest ever flight by a solar aircraft.  The huge wings of the plane, known as the Solar Impulse, and its horizontal stabilizer contain 12,000 silicon mono-crystalline solar cells. Energy from the sun is stored in lithium batteries and used to  provide the aircraft's 4 electric engines with the power they need to fly the plane. The Solar Impulse flew throughout the whole night for the first time during the evening of 7th July and morning of 8th July 2010.

In less than 20 years from now, driven by the oil crisis and global warming, hydrogen could become an almost regular energy source in our daily lives, potentially being used to power anything from mobile phones to heating buildings and all the way through to our daily transport.