Cars that go 5,000 miles between fill-ups, electric power plants you buy like appliances, a world with radically reduced pollution, and a better standard of living… Sounds like a sci-fi pipe dream – if it weren’t for all these automobile and power companies spending billions to make it real.by Jacques LeslieI’m at the headquarters of Ballard Power Systems in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, and my big fuel cell moment is about to occur. Following the example of the premier of British Columbia, the mayor of Chicago, and the chair of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, I am going to drink the exhaust from Ballard’s prototype fuel cell municipal bus. This is less foolhardy than it sounds, since the only emission from the fuel cell engine is water. For this reason, many people think that fuel cells can change the world. At Ballard, the exhaust-drinking routine has grown so tiresome that when I ask for a sip, Paul Lancaster, Ballard’s treasurer, doesn’t even offer me a glass: he suggests I cup my hands under the bus’s exhaust pipe. The pipe points straight down, presumably because its effluence is not a noxious gas that must be spewed into the atmosphere in hopes that it will dissipate.
I bend over, and, within a few seconds, I collect several teaspoons of warm, clear liquid. As I begin to drink, I try to imagine a mountain stream, but the water is disappointingly bland. “Like distilled water,” Lancaster explains, and I realize that what I’m drinking is, in a sense, exactly that – the pure product of the union of hydrogen, the element that powers fuel cells, and oxygen in the engine. In some engine designs, even the exhaust water becomes an asset, recirculated to aid in internal processes. One tenet of the coming hydrogen age, according to businessman-cum-fuel cell visionary Joe Maceda, is that “pollution is a measure of inefficiency, and inefficiency is lost profit.” After decades of unfulfilled promise, fuel cell momentum is now so great that its emergence as a predominant technology appears just short of inevitable. During the early 1990s, nearly every major car manufacturer in the world launched a program to build a fuel cell automobile. Then, in April, a stunning announcement by Daimler-Benz AG suddenly gave the fuel cell age a timetable. Mercedes-Benz’s parent company said it was investing US$145 million to buy a one-quarter interest in Ballard, the world’s leader in fuel cell technology, and $150 million toward a joint venture with Ballard to create a new vehicle fuel cell engine company.
The Essay on Hydrogen Fuel Cell Benefits And Limitations
What are some benefits or limitations of the alternative technology regarding economics? (What will it cost to purchase, re-fuel, launch, educate and distribute?) Benefits. No pollution: A great benefit of using Hydrogen fuel cells is that they give off no pollution, and in fact produce pure water as a byproduct. Even though currently engineers are concentrating on producing hydrogen from natural ...
Daimler-Benz also announced that beginning in 2005, the new company would produce 100,000 fuel cell engines annually. This is a remarkablefigure, considering that the company, the world’s 15th-largest auto manufacturer, makes only 700,000 cars a year now. “Daimler-Benz has a history of being one of the more conservative companies in the auto business, and arguably the auto business is one of the more conservative industries in the world,” says Bill Reinert, a Toyota mechanical engineer. “So when somebody like Daimler pours millions of dollars into a technology and comes up making a statement like that, you have to say this might be pretty serious.” Though Daimler’s fuel cell car will be powered by methanol, a hydrogen-rich derivative of natural gas, it is widely assumed that the use of fossil fuels to power fuel cells will be transitional, leading to an era in which hydrogen is extracted from sustainable energy sources. It is hard to overstate the implications of such a development: A drastic decline in air pollution, oil spills, acid rain, and greenhouse-gas emissions. An epochal geopolitical shift as global reliance on Middle East oil comes to an end and international trade balances are realigned.
The Essay on Fuel Cells Flywhheels and Hybrids
... a new power source, called the fuel cell. ?The fuel cell utilizes a special membrane to generate electricity through the controlled reaction between hydrogen and oxygen ... sort of mechanical batteries, storing energy by spinning. Friction, of course, is their enemy. In new flywheel technology plans are to create ...
The emergence of quiet, decentralized electric plants sized according to need – small enough to power your car (and perhaps, at night, your house); big enough to power a town of 15,000 people, or, in tandem, a city. The disappearance of the electric grid is a possibility; a makeover of the electric-utility industry is nearly certain. It is likely to take 50 to 100 years to achieve a mature “hydrogen economy,” but the impact of fuel cells should be felt long before that. Over the next decade, products are likely to emerge on the market that are both more efficient and more environmentally benign than their predecessors. The century-long reign of internal-combustion engines will almost certainly be challenged by fuel cell-powered cars and buses that are quiet and clean, and use energy far more efficiently than today’s vehicles. Naval forces in several countries are looking into fuel cells to run submarines and provide auxiliary power on oceangoing vessels; the US Army is building a backpack-sized fuel cell generator that can power a soldier’s electronics gear, from night-vision goggles to infrared heat detectors. Fuel cell-driven desalination plants may offer clean water cheaply, defusing a potentially critical 21st-century resource shortage.
Within a few years, fuel cells will probably power professional video cameras and many other products that now use batteries. Your laptop may eventually run on a fuel cell whose range is measured in days, not hours. To be sure, all this is heady stuff considering that no commercial products now use the technology. (The one quasi-exception is a 200-kilowatt power generator manufactured by International Fuel Cells of South Windsor, Connecticut. IFC has installed more than 90 units to power buildings ranging from hospitals to casinos to jails, but the US Defense Department subsidized a third of the $600,000 price tag for 70 of the units.) Nevertheless, fuel cells are poised to ride some powerful historical trends. For one thing, the trend in energy use over the last one and a half centuries has been toward reduced carbon consumption and increased use of hydrogen. Each predominant feedstock – from wood, through coal, then oil, natural gas, and, ultimately perhaps, renewables – has contained more hydrogen and less carbon than its predecessor, and each successive fuel has been cleaner and more powerful. In addition, just as computer telecommunications has promoted information decentralization and dematerialization, fuel cells promise to untie energy consumers from centralized power generators – you might say that energy wants to be free.
The Essay on Nuclear Power Technology
The discovery of nuclear power had brought mankind to one of its greatest success throughout history. Nuclear technology is considered as a “gift” from the Italian-American physicist, Enrico Fermi, who was given the title as the “new Promethean”, similar to the ancient Greek mythological figure. Extending this analogy, it was the Prometheans who gave the entire human race a type of fire within the ...
“The information revolution and the coming energy revolution are similar in that we are using human ingenuity to replace energy and raw materials,” says Joseph J. Romm, acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the US Department of Energy. “We can use information technology to avoid travel and transportation, and we can use energy technology to reduce energy consumption, pollution, and our use of natural resources. Both revolutions represent a fundamental transition to a world in which we are not resource constrained, yet we have a higher standard of living.” The irony is that for all of this technology’s potential benefits, the one thing it notably lacks is strong public support. As William Hoagland, president of the fledgling advocacy group Hydrogen 2000, points out, “There are a lot of political and other forces supporting the conventional fuel structure, and we don’t have a hydrogen industry or a public constituency asking for change.” The US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel cell research and development over several decades, but in recent years, as that investment hasfinally borne fruit, the public perception – well represented in Congress – is that fuel cells are a stagnant technology.
“The last few years have created a lag between what fuel cells can do, what funding ought to be, and what everybody’s understanding of them is,” Romm says. As the US Environmental Protection Agency’s newly toughened clean-air standards and the upcoming international meeting on global warming in Kyoto focus attention on combating pollution, the technology’s stature in the US is likely to rise. Indeed, Romm says it is understood at the DOE’s “highest levels” that fuel cells will be part of President Clinton’s evolving strategy to counter climate change. Nevertheless, more than one-quarter of the department’s current $16 billion budget is spent on nuclear-weapons management, while all fuel cell programs together amount to about $90 million. Sandy Thomas, a researcher at Directed Technologies Inc. who consults for Ford Motor Company’s fuel cell vehicle program, says, “If I could take 1 percent of the nuclear-weapons budget from the Department of Energy and put it into hydrogen fuel cells, that would probably take 10 years off hydrogen development. But the weapons budget is sacrosanct – you can’t attack it, even though we don’t build, test, or explode nuclear weapons any longer.” Compared with the internal-combustion engine (ICE), the fuel cell engine is a simple, if elegantly engineered, device. Its lineage dates to 1839, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s, when NASA began using the technology to power spaceships, that fuel cells found theirfirst application. Unlike an ICE, which runs on high-temperature explosions, most fuel cells rely on relatively cool electrochemical reactions. The fuel cell has no moving parts: as hydrogen feeds into the cell, the catalyst, a thin layer of platinum, induces the gas to separate into electrons and protons (hydrogen ions).
The Essay on Ballard Fuel Cell Hydrogen Power Cells
THE BALLARD FUEL CELL The Ballard fuel cell is a power generating device which combines hydrogen (which can be obtained from methanol, natural gas, petroleum) and oxygen without the use of combustion in order to generate electricity. Since fuel cells operate very quietly and efficiently and their only emissions are pure water and heat they are expected to be the future of power generating ...
In the case of the proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell, the technology favored to power cars, the protons pass through a membrane to combine with oxygen on the other side, producing water. The electrons, which cannot pass through the membrane, are channeled along an external route through an electric motor, which the electrons drive. The process is two to three times more efficient than that of an ICE, and its only by-products are electricity, water, and a moderate amount of heat. “Fuel cells are much more natural,” says Joe Maceda, the visionary who this year formed Power Technologies Corporation, which, among other things, markets fuel cell-driven desalination plants. “Human beings, for instance, are basically electrochemically driven membrane processes. We take in oxidant and fuel, we change the form of it, things move through membranes, and we oxygenate our blood – that’s how nature works. Most industry is built on brute force: you start a process by increasing pressure or temperature. Nature changes free energy states much more gently, and, as a result, much more efficiently. So the next century is going to see a shift toward electrochemical processes and away from temperature and pressure systems.” Redesigning cars At the core of fuel cell activity is Ballard, a 325-employee company that has contracts with eight of the world’s nine largest car manufacturers.
The Term Paper on Hybrid Cars Gasoline Engine
The cars we use all over the world are detrimental to our Earth's environment. In the United States, air quality often fails to meet federal standards. Air pollution, water pollution, global warming, and ozone depletion are some of the problems we face each day that reflect the consequences of our actions. The cars we drive emit exhaust gas, whose harmful elements cause acid rain and global ...
(The lone exception, Toyota, is thought to be spending more than $700 million a year to develop alternative-fuel cars in-house.) Ballard is positioning itself as the Intel of the fuel cell industry: just as the Silicon Valley giant tapped a vast market by providing microprocessors for many computer brands, the Canadianfirm hopes to build fuel cells for a virtually unlimited array of electrical products. Financial markets like Ballard’s prospects: though the company still has no significant earnings, its stock is worth about six times what it was when the company went public three years ago. Founded in 1979 as a contract research and developmentfirm focusing on lithium rechargeable batteries, Ballard switched to fuel cells when funding for battery projects dwindled in the early 1980s. General Electric developed PEM fuel cells for the Gemini space program in the early 1960s, but when NASA found a related technology with superior characteristics for space applications, it shelved work on PEM fuel cells, and GE’s patents in thefield eventually lapsed. At the prompting of Canada’s Department of Defense, which was searching for an unobtrusivefield generator, Ballard took up where GE left off and made rapid advancements in intensifying PEM fuel cells’ power potential.
Along the way to leadership in the technology, Ballard got a couple of big breaks. One was a series of discoveries in the early 1990s by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Until then, PEM fuel cells had been considered too expensive for mass production because their catalysts required a substantial amount of costly platinum, but the Los Alamos scientists found a way to reduce the necessary platinum by a factor of 40. Suddenly, it was conceivable that fuel cells could compete with ICEs. Paul Lancaster, my Ballard tour guide, denies that the Los Alamos discoveries aided the Canadianfirm, but Shimshon Gottesfeld, the laboratory’s project leader, says Ballard officials visited Los Alamos regularly and showed deep interest in the lab’sfindings. Equally important, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) decided in 1990 to stimulate development of nonpolluting cars by requiring that zero-emission vehicles comprise 2 percent of annual statewide car sales by 1998 and 10 percent by 2003. Though CARB had battery-powered electric cars in mind, the batteries’ weight, uncertain durability, and short range have stymied the cars’ development.
The Essay on Hybrid Cars Gasoline Power
Hybrid Automobiles The technology of the electric vehicle has been around for a long time but faded as the gasoline powered engine became more popular. Now, the future of electric vehicles is very bright. Their impacts are very significant that ranges from the economic point of view and also from the environmental. Imagine driving a quieter, cleaner car with the windows down letting the clean ...
Fuel cell developers, however, were galvanized. Consultant Sandy Thomas says bluntly, “Without the zero-emissions program in California, I wouldn’t have a job.” When CARB dropped its 1998 requirement last year because battery-powered car development had stalled, Thomas and most other fuel cell advocates were relieved, since fuel cell cars now hadfive more years to prove themselves. The most vexing issue developers face is the selection of fuel to deliver hydrogen to fuel cell engines. It’s a choice with huge environmental implications. Automobile emissions cause more than 60 percent of air pollution in urban areas. The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that in the US alone, one kind of car emissions – fine particulates – causes 50,000 to 60,000 deaths a year; several other types of vehicle emissions are also thought lethal, but no mortality estimates exist for them. In addition, automotive use of fossil fuels accounts for 20 percent of the nation’s carbon-dioxide emissions, the most significant greenhouse gas. If the US vehicle fleet switches from ICEs burning fossil fuel to fuel cell engines using hydrogen derived from renewable sources – which may be possible within several decades – levels of both kinds of car emissions would drop to zero.
Even if the hydrogen is produced from natural gas, as is common now, vehicular air pollution would end and greenhouse-gas emissions would drop by more than 60 percent. The global consequences are even more extreme. The DOE estimates that in a mere 20 years – from 1995 to 2015 – the demand for energy will grow by 54 percent worldwide and by 129 percent in developing Asia. China and India, the world’s two most populous nations, are expected to satisfy an exploding demand for energy by tapping vast reserves of coal, among the dirtiest of fossil fuels; it is widely assumed that the pollution and climactic impact of such developments will be grave. The advent of hydrogen not only poses a dramatically cleaner alternative, but also offers developing countries a chance to bypass at least part of the expense of building a fossil fuel infrastructure just as industrialized countries are poised to turn to more advanced technologies. Yet shifting to hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars will not be easy. True enough, hydrogen is already used in all sorts of processing, from the hardening of fats and oils – hydrogenation – to, ironically enough, oil refining.
But hydrogen, like gasoline, must be manufactured: it bonds so easily with other elements that it doesn’t exist naturally on Earth in pure form. The trouble is that while gasoline is sold in 200,000filling stations across the US, the hydrogen infrastructure is minuscule. The result is a chicken-and-egg dilemma: What manufacturers will market hydrogen-powered cars if hydrogen isn’t available to drivers? What hydrogen producers will build more plants if hydrogen cars aren’t on the road? And without hydrogen fuel, who will buy hydrogen-powered cars? Hydrogen’s problems don’t end there. Though most experts believe that the element is at least no more dangerous than gasoline, the public perception, based on memories of hydrogen-bomb tests and accounts of the 1937 Hindenburg airship crash, is that it’s extremely unsafe. More worrisome, hydrogen can’t easily be stored in a car. If it’s stored as a compressed gas using current technology, the amount required to provide the range equal to 15 gallons of gasoline takes up four times as much space and weighs twice as much as afilled gas tank. If it’s liquefied, it must be kept below – 423 degrees Fahrenheit, just 36 degrees above absolute zero.
Both the safety and storage problems are considered surmountable, but they have discouraged some car manufacturers from embracing pure hydrogen fuel. A transitional solution may lie in fuel cells’ flexibility: they can run on any hydrogen-rich fuel, including gasoline. Chrysler, in fact, is developing a “fuel-flexible” fuel cell engine that can run on a variety of fuels, from gasoline to hydrogen. The engine will include a reformer that can convert gasoline and other fuels to hydrogen, neatly bypassing hydrogen’s infrastructure and storage problems. The trade-off is in efficiency and environmental benefits. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that a fuel cell car using gasoline would provide at best 1.5 to 2.3 times higher fuel economy than the same ICE car burning gasoline, while a fuel cell car running on hydrogen scores 2.8 times the gasoline-powered car’s performance. Emissions of pollutants by fuel cell cars running on gasoline would drop substantially but would not equal the zero level of hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars. Chrysler’s success may hinge on its ability to devise a gasoline reformer small and efficient enough to be placed inside a car.
Sandy Thomas calls that job “an extraordinarily difficult technological challenge” comparable to installing a miniature oil refinery in a car to convert crude oil to gasoline. Daimler-Benz has opted for a middle path, choosing methanol as its fuel. Methanol is usually produced from natural gas, but it can also be derived from feedstocks as diverse as coal and renewable plant material. Like gasoline, methanol requires an onboard reformer, but its fuel economy, 2.5 times that of an ICE using gasoline, is higher, and its emissions are lower. Methanol’s biggest advantage is that it’s a liquid at room temperature, which means that it can be transported and handled much more easily than gaseous hydrogen. However, it, too, suffers from a small infrastructure. Ford’s fuel choice is the most daring and potentially most beneficial choice: hydrogen. Ford is banking on the validity of studies by Sandy Thomas and Joan Ogden, a Princeton researcher, suggesting that hydrogen’s infrastructure problem could be solved by using excess refinery hydrogen and supplyingfilling stations with reformers capable of converting natural gas to hydrogen. These reformers probably would be much more cost effective than the ones Chrysler wants to install inside cars: they would not have to meet onboard miniaturization and durability requirements, and they could operate nearly constantly, serving all of the cars that patronize a givenfilling station.
Once demand for hydrogen grows to a substantial level, hydrogen refiners presumably would be prepared to build additional plants. To cope with the hydrogen-storage problem, Ford has designed a car that is similar in performance and safety to a Taurus but with an aluminum body and other lightweight features. Weighing only 2,000 pounds – compared to a Taurus’s 3,300 – Ford’s car can travel farther on less fuel, meaning that less hydrogen needs to be stored onboard. Ford’s solution understandably has gained the support of some environmentalists, who fear that if Chrysler or Daimler-Benz succeeds, the incentive to move to fuel cells using hydrogen from renewable sources would disappear. Chris Borroni-Bird, an advanced-technology specialist at Chrysler, disagrees. “If you can commercialize fuel cells in thefirst place by using gasoline, there will be an inexorable trend toward cleaning up the fuel, because that will improve vehicle performance.” From an environmental perspective, the best transitional fuel may be the one that leads most quickly to the use of fuel cells using hydrogen from sustainable sources. “No matter which fuel we use in the near term, we need to keep our eyes on the prize: that it’s a renewably powered fuel cell vehicle that ultimately deals with transportation challenges,” says Jason Mark, a transportation analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“A gasoline fuel cell is at best a stepping-stone to something better. It’s my hope that it becomes only a stepping-stone and not a roadblock.” Of course, a major innovation in the nascentfield of fuel cell technology could upset these calculations. One possible example is the claim announced last December by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston. They say they used graphite nanofibers to increase current hydrogen storage capabilities by a factor of 10. If true, the discovery means that a car could travel 5,000 miles on a single hydrogen cartridge; the empty cartridge could then be recharged or exchanged for a full one. Since afilled cartridge could potentially be delivered to the driver, there would be no need to establish a hydrogen infrastructure, and the two greatest obstacles to use of hydrogen – lack of infrastructure and onboard storage problems – would be removed. However, many specialists are skeptical of the Northeastern claim, particularly since the researchers have not revealed enough information to allow outsiders to confirm theirfindings. “If it works, it’s going to change everything,” says Robert H.
Williams, a senior scientist at Princeton. “We don’t know if it’s going to pan out, but I think it shows that if we take hydrogen seriously, there are all kinds of surprises in store for us.” Meanwhile, Ballard is providing fuel cells for all three kinds of engines – for Chrysler, Daimler-Benz, and Ford. Accordingly, Ballard is agnostic in the fuel dispute: its chief hope is that one of the strategies works, enabling the company to ride the technology’s success to riches. To reinforce its position, Ballard has secured 91 patents, with another 104 pending; together, these patents cover 61 inventions. Ballard still faces competition from major US oil, electronics, and chemical companies – Exxon, ARCO, AlliedSignal, Motorola, 3M, and DuPont all have launched their own fuel cell-related programs. Many of these companies investigated the technology in the 1960s and 1970s and gave up; now, with interest in fuel cells renewed by the Los Alamos discoveries and deepened environmental concerns, they have gotten back in. Last May, Delphi Energy & Engine Management Systems, a General Motors division, announced an alliance with Exxon and ARCO to develop an onboard-vehicle processor to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels such as gasoline and methanol.
John Robbins, Exxon’s program manager, declines to say whether the oil company foresees shifting from marketing fossil fuels to selling pure hydrogen if a transition to a hydrogen economy occurs, but Patrick Grimes, an energy consultant and former Exxon researcher, says, “The oil companies are in the fuel-providing business, and they’ll provide any fuel that enough people want to buy.” The biggest imponderable in the future of fuel cell vehicle technology may be its ultimate cost. A 1994 study prepared for the US Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment estimated that these cars would cost $4,000 to $7,000 more than comparable ICE cars. Sandy Thomas believes that in early production runs, Ford’s hydrogen-fueled cars will cost no more than $1,500 to $2,000 above their ICE equivalents. Paul Lancaster maintains that Ballard and Daimler-Benz together know how to design cars that will carry no premium at all. Given the current unwillingness of car buyers to pay a higher sticker price for greater fuel economy and lower pollution, the projection by Ballard/Daimler-Benz may have to be correct if fuel cell-powered cars are to catch on.
Lancaster believes that a combination of technological advances and economies of scale from mass production will make fuel cell engines competitive. For example, even though Ballard has already reduced the amount of platinum in its engines by 90 percent, Lancaster says the company is already testing another tenfold drop in the platinum load. Its researchers have also found significantly cheaper ways to produce the engine’s membrane and the graphite plates surrounding the membrane, he says. If Ballard’s projections are accurate, the expectedfinancial benefits of owning a fuel cell car – lower maintenance costs because of the absence of moving parts and lack of need for oil changes and smog checks – will be a bonus. Transforming the utilities market Just as environmental regulations stimulated fuel cell vehicle technology, deregulation is about to do the same thing for fuel cell power generation. Specifically, the impending deregulation in the electric-utility industry will create many opportunities for fuel cell power plants, which will reach market years before fuel cell cars. Recent legislation has ended utilities’ monopolies in many respects, enabling consumers to buy electricity from remote providers.
As a result, the established practice of building huge central power plants in anticipation of future demand, while reflecting their construction costs in current electric rates, may no longer work. Instead of building large plants whose capacity will not be fully tapped for years, suppliers will probablyfind it cheaper to augment central electricity supplies with power from modular fuel cell units located near the point of consumption. These fuel cell generators, which emit no noise and only trace pollution, can be placed close to consumers without violating local noise and pollution ordinances. Deregulation will also prompt electrical “productization” : instead of having to rely on electricity from the grid, consumers will be offered varied qualities of electricity. In particular, users who now deal with grid outages will have access to the more reliable electricity supply of fuel cell generators. Though the cost per kilowatt of these generators is likely at first to be much higher than that of conventional power plants, their superior reliability and quality should attract many buyers, including an array of high tech manufacturers for whom dependable power is critical.
International Fuel Cells’s success in selling its generators seems to confirm this assumption: although the units’ subsidized price – $2,000 per kilowatt – is substantially above the $500-to-$1,500-per-kilowatt range of conventional power plants, IFC has sold 140 units and has received orders for 185 more. Fuel cell manufacturers are counting on continued technological innovations and economies of scale to bring about huge price reductions in generators, just as in fuel cell cars. These next-generation generators may be particularly popular in developing nations, where capital for large conventional power plants is in short supply and debilitating air pollution is widespread. Joseph J. Romm, the DOE’s acting assistant energy secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, says, “Just as some countries are bypassing a nationwide system of telephone lines and leapfrogging to cellular, we’ll see countries bypass a nationwide system of big central-station power plants and extensive power lines and leapfrog directly to distributed power” provided by fuel cells. That, in turn, could alter political relationships, strengthening remote areas and weakening central authorities.
“The market for stationary fuel cell applications is potentially bigger than the car market,” says Lancaster. Indeed, H Power, a Belleville, New Jersey, fuel cell manufacturer, estimates that sales of on-site fuel cell power generators will reach at least $2 billion by 2005. To feed that market, Ballard is developing a 250-kilowatt generator, big enough to power a small hotel or strip mall, that is slated for commercial sales around 2002. Energy Research Corporation of Danbury, Connecticut, plans to put a 2.85-megawatt fuel cell plant, which can power 1,500 homes, on the market within a year or two after that. “Power plants are going to be just like furnaces,” says Joe Maceda of Power Technologies. “They’re going to be appliances.” One day you may be able to drive your fuel cell car during the day, then connect the car’s engine to your house to provide heat and electricity at night. Alternatively, electricity generated by the engine could be fed to the grid in return for credit. Thanks to the fuel cell engine’s efficiency and reliability, an asset that usually sits idle for all but an hour or two a day could become a steady income earner.
Even if this scenario doesn’t become reality for several decades, the links between automotive and stationary fuel cells suggest a strong synergy. “The car industry and the stationary power industry are both so huge that if one of them adopts fuel cells, it will pull the other one into the market,” says Toyota’s Bill Reinert. “It is probably too early to say that fuel cells will be a climax technology, but it sure seems like they will.” Building the Hydrogen EconomyIn April 1997, Daimler-Benz announced a US$295 million investment in fuel cell technologies. Toyota is spending an estimated $700 million a year to develop alternative-fuel cars. Last May, ARCO and Exxon announced a multimillion-dollar fuel cell-related research alliance with Delphi Energy & Engine Management Systems, a division of General Motors. These are just a few of the big players migrating toward the hydrogen economy. You may recognize some of the others …ExxonFordChryslerWestinghouseDuPontGeneral MotorsSandia NationalLaboratoriesToyotaTexacoDaimler-BenzLawrence LivermoreNational LaboratoryRocky MountainInstituteRenault3MHondaSiemensNissanVolkswagen Jet PropulsionLaboratoryFluor DanielLos Alamos NationalLaboratoryBMWPSA Peugeot Citro?nSchatz EnergyResearch CenterAlliedSignalMazdaMotorola VolvoARCOFire vs. Water; Cool vs. HotThe traditional internal-combustion engine (ICE) runs on high-temperature explosions – fuel is burned, producing heat, which is then converted into energy. In contrast, most fuel cells rely on relatively cool electrochemical reactions: hydrogen feeds into the cell through channels on the flow field plates, and a platinum catalyst ionizes the gas, splitting each molecule into electrons and protons (hydrogen ions).
The protons pass through a membrane to combine with oxygen on the other side, producing water. The electrons, which cannot pass through the membrane, are channeled along an external route and harnessed to power an electric motor. The fuel cell process is two to three times more efficient than that of an ICE, and its only by-products are electricity, water, and a moderate amount
