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By
Allen Gibson
Oct 2004
Slowly,
but surely, the infrastructure, research, and the evidence necessary to make
alternative energy sources economical and practical is being put in place.
Already, many states have discovered that renewable energy initiatives,
despite initial fears of being too expensive, have in fact either paid for
themselves or even generated savings to the utilities involved.
And
the markets are noticing, particularly with the recent surge in oil prices.
Suddenly, renewable energy stocks are hot. The new WilderHill Clean Energy
Index has already jumped 12 percent since it starting trading on AMEX
in August, which officials say is uncommon for a new index.
And
while the high oil price has spurred investment in drilling, as Alan Greenspan
recently suggested it would, it may also be spurring investment into
alternative fuels that have a greater chance now of attracting customers and
competing in the marketplace. In this article, we’ll look at several
examples of where those customers are coming from, and what technical
innovations are beginning to make fuel cells a more viable energy source.
Innovations that were fueled by the last big round of investor interest in the
sector, which poured over a billion dollars into fuel cell companies in the
late ‘90s, which resulted in lowering the price of fuel cells by fifty
percent. Much more work, however, remains.
DaimlerChrysler has committed to putting a hundred
fuel cell vehicles on the road this year. It has 33 ‘Citaro’ fuel cell
buses here, and in
Europe,
Japan,
Australia
and
Singapore. And it will soon add a
vehicle at LAX, which is building a hydrogen ‘gas station’ as part of
California’s push for a network of such stations across the state.
In
spite of its vehicle rollout, however, Chrysler engineers are still saying
that fuel cells are too expensive to be practical for cars, mainly due to the
cost of platinum. According to Chrysler, it requires about $4,000 worth of
platinum to build a fuel cell powerful enough for a car.
Both
Chrysler and GM suggest that the
need for platinum will be reduced by several factors over the next few years
due to their research, but obviously neither company has considered Astris Energi, who have been in the game for two decades, and who
recently improved their Alkaline
Fuel Cell (AFC) so that it uses no
platinum! Stacks of their cells have been successfully deployed at a major
industrial site in Ontario, Canada, and more are being built at
their plant in
Europe. The cells are also being
used to run a prototype golf cart.
Astris’s
technology directly descends from the space program, where AFCs were the choice cell because of their higher fuel efficiency. Now, the
company says it has also overcome the other major drawback of today’s more
common Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM)
cells, which is running in cold weather. Chrysler is working to solve that
issue with the DOE and DuPont in an
attempt to improve extreme
temperature performance in the thin proton-passing
filter at the heart of a PEM system.
Many
other companies are racing to do the same thing. SRI spin-off PolyFuel has
produced a proton membrane capable of working within a broader range of
temperatures and producing more power output through using nanoengineering to
align the membrane’s molecules. PolyFuel has so far only succeeded in the
lab, but says the results are so promising that a test engine could be built
within 2-5 years.
Forecast
demand for fuel cells is expected to surpass $30 billion annually worldwide by
2011, representing a projected compound average annual growth rate of 62%! Who
will own that market is anyone’s guess, as companies and countries around
the world strive to become the
dominant name in fuel cells.
Helping drive the
transformation … governments
Whichever
fuel cell technology ends up in global use, there is no doubt that the push
towards alternative, less-polluting energy sources is picking up global
momentum, partly due to government policies. Countries around the world are
announcing new initiatives.
In
January of this year, for example,
Germany
made new laws that guarantee
solar-power producers a fixed return on the electricity they produce. A
guaranteed minimum price is paid for power from renewable energies if it is
fed into the general grid. Investors have the security that they can sell
their electricity at a fixed rate for 20 years. The new law has
resulted in such a demand for solar systems – not only for domestic homes
but large megawatt plants – that the industry struggled this summer to keep
up with demand for materials. German companies have started buying up
producers in Sweden and other
countries to take advantage of the demand.
And, in Colorado, the
citizens…
Is
the German model about to catch on?
After
its state legislature failed three times to create a framework for mandating
renewable energy supplies, the citizens of Colorado have taken matters into
their own hands, with a proposal, known as Amendment 37, which would require
Colorado retail electric providers to produce 10 percent of electricity from
renewable energy by 2015, up from less than 2 percent today.
While
solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, small hydroelectricity, and hydrogen fuel
cells would all count, the amendment seems to favor solar power, providing a
potential boon for solar energy companies like Kyocera, one of the world's
largest suppliers of solar energy products.
The
amendment would mandate utilities pay a portion of the capital costs for solar
equipment by offering a rebate of $2.00 per watt up to $200,000 for customers
that install solar systems on their homes. If customers produce surplus
electricity then utilities would also have to buy back this power at retail
rather than wholesale rates.
Meanwhile,
in Texas, a state committee has draft recommendations that would boost
renewable energy production to 10 percent of the state’s power by 2020. In
Nevada, where the utility companies first claimed their costs would rise by
$300 million, they have since reported to that, in fact, the renewable energy
initiative has so far saved them $15 million!
Texas,
who faced similar resistance to its 1999 initiatives to develop wind power,
has since become one of the country’s biggest wind power producers. And in
California, renewable energy has become cheap enough that the utilities have
not had to tap public funds for its generation!
Plus the military.
On
Cape Cod ,
the Coast Guard's third-largest air station runs on power from a stack of fuel
cells which protect the base from a sometimes-erratic electrical supply. The
stack puts out 80 percent of the electricity used by a dozen buildings at the
air station, including the radar tower. It uses technology that processes
natural gas inside the stack into hydrogen. Heat from the stack also warms
3,000 to 4,000 gallons of hot water a day, enough to supply the barracks and
cafeteria.
Just
this month Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide unveiled a high
performance, fuel cell off-road vehicle at the annual meeting of the
Association of the U.S. Army. The "Quantum
Alternative Mobility Vehicle” provides significant benefits to troops by
providing almost silent operations, faster acceleration than a gas or diesel
engine, and a convenient electrical supply to power their gear in the field.
With
advantages like those, is there any doubt that fuel cells will be driving our
HumVees as soon as practicable? Especially since lack of acceleration has been
identified as a real source of danger by the troops in Iraq ?
Allen
R. Gibson
Allen R.
Gibson has over twenty-five years of experience in media and corporate
communications. He has been a reporter, television producer, and
marketing communications consultant for public companies in both the US and
Canada.
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