Yes and no... you always need power to do anything, including daily routine things. Where that general power comes from varies alot.

For instance, here in Quebec, we are fortunate to have hydroelectricity, which is one of the most environmentally friendly sources of energy. Nuclear is somewhat environmentally friendly… then you have coal which sucks, etc, etc.

Going back to hydrogen… you have to see hydrogen as storage of energy, and not a source of energy. So you have to use energy and store it as hydrogen. Now ideally, we would store that energy using renewable sources to begin with, like solar or wind power for instance.

The beauty of hydrogen is that you can transport it and use it later in big things (i.e. to power towns or whatever; note that we are very far from that) or that you can put it into smaller things like cars.

Now think about it… solar or wind power cannot be efficiently used in a car since cars are too small. But if we could efficiently use solar or wind power to store hydrogen, and then putting that hydrogen into cars, then we would have succeeded. Remember that hydrogen is only a mean to an end.

Personally, I believe that BMW did its part, in the sense that you cannot expect them to solve the whole equation! Car manufacturers are responsible of providing vehicles that can run on hydrogen! It’s up to energy & environmental companies to solve the storage problem!