Associations provide industry coordination and outreach

Associations are subject to many of the same pressures as companies, and not surprisingly there is a steady stream of mergers and (occasionally) acquisitions.

In our August issue we report on the news of the recent merger of Fuel Cells UK with the UK Hydrogen Association, to create the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Association. Fuel Cells UK has been working since 2005 to coordinate activities and offer an authoritative point of contact for the UK’s fuel cell industry when dealing with national government and in Europe. It has also provided information on research, development and demonstration priorities in the UK.

The UK Hydrogen Association was set up the following year, to represent the shared interests of its mainly industrial members, and advocate a positive social, political and economic environment for the development of hydrogen energy in the UK.

This merger echoes the combination of the Canadian fuel cell and hydrogen associations at the beginning of 2009, when the Canadian Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association was formed by the merger between the Canadian Hydrogen Association and Hydrogen & Fuel Cells Canada (which started life as simply Fuel Cells Canada). That merger was intended to create a stronger, more influential association that represents the majority of the stakeholders in Canada’s hydrogen and fuel cell sector.

Such mergers highlight the inextricable nature of hydrogen energy and fuel cells, and industry associations around the world play a critical role in the nascent hydrogen and fuel cell sector. They recognize that there is a lot of work needed to develop and prove the various technologies, which can be facilitated by bringing together corporate, academic and government entities at all levels of research, development and demonstration.

Fuel cells are often seen as a disruptive technology, but often they are being introduced alongside and in combination with conventional approaches. Industry associations provide additional channels to communicate with established players and their proven technologies that currently dominate most potential applications.

This issue’s feature article reports on the activities of the principal hydrogen and fuel cell associations in North America: the US Fuel Cell Council and the National Hydrogen Association, both based in Washington, DC; and the Canadian Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association north of the border.

Together they represent and coordinate a significant number of the developers and users of these technologies, at both the national level and on the global stage. Their close links and synergetic relationship provide mutual benefits to their members, and they combine to provide a stronger voice in the clean energy debate.

Steve Barrett – Editor

Small to medium thinking

European efforts to focus research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) activities on the priority areas in fuel cells and hydrogen energy continue to make steady progress. This month’s feature article, on the 2010 action plan of the European Commission-supported Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU), summarizes the main topics to be targeted in this year’s funding round.

In the article I’ve extracted the key points from the FCH JU’s Annual Implementation Plan 2010, which outlines how €89.1 million (US$113 million) in funding will be distributed for research, technological development, and demonstration projects under the plan’s five main areas. These are transportation and refueling infrastructure, hydrogen production and distribution, stationary power generation and CHP, early markets, and cross-cutting issues.

The latter include topics such as socioeconomic modeling and planning, technology monitoring and assessment, and lifecycle analysis, as well as the strategic coordination of regulations, codes & standards (RCS) activities. There’s no indication that the ongoing economic slowdown will affect the funding for these activities, although the fact that industry is expected to at least match the EC funding commitment must be testing the nerve of participating companies.

One of the key aspects of EC programs is the determination to encourage small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which it sees as the lifeblood of a strong industrial sector. In Europe and North America, in particular, such companies form the very broad base of a substantial industry pyramid. The fuel cell industry is no different in this respect, with many of the leading companies counting as SMEs.

There is some international variation in how an SME is defined. In Europe ‘small’ is now generally taken to mean fewer than 50 employees, and ‘medium’ less than 250. But in the US these are defined slightly higher, at less than 100 and 500 employees, respectively.

I see from Wikipedia that Industry Canada defines a small business as one with fewer than 100 employees if it produces goods, or fewer than 50 if it provides services; a firm with more than these but fewer than 500 staff is classified as a medium-sized business. Presumably fuel cells count as goods, even at this early stage in their ongoing commercialization...

Steve Barrett – Editor

Marine applications

Social networking

Social networking provides a variety of ways for both experts and newbies to find out more about fuel cells and hydrogen energy, and is facilitating the increasing interest in and applications of these technologies.

While Facebook provides a channel for companies or organizations (so far, just a few in the fuel cells arena) to highlight their activities, it is probably the more newsy networking media that offer the most useful insight into how fuel cells and hydrogen energy are perceived among the interested masses.

Twitter has established a reputation as a medium for very fast, global dissemination of news and information, and this holds for fuel cells just as much as breaking headline news or showbiz gossip. FCB has a Twitter account (FCBulletin), which I use to provide brief headlines and links to topical news items that are posted on RenewableEnergyFocus.com (in the section on ‘Energy storage including fuel cells’). Sometimes these include hashtags such as #fuelcells, #fuelcell, or #hydrogen, which are labels included in the tweet that can help readers trawling the Twitterverse to pick out tweets of particular fuel cell interest. It must be said that being strictly limited to 140 characters certainly focuses the mind on what you want to convey…

And there is certainly plenty of interest in fuel cells and hydrogen energy, going way beyond those with a professional interest in research & development and commercialization. As well as a multitude of ‘normal’ people posting items on news and articles they have found, there are also posts from the likes of the California Fuel Cell Partnership and Fuel Cell Today. The latest news from the BC Hydrogen Highway in Vancouver comes via ‘PoweringNow’, which was tweeting fit to burst about fuel cell vehicles, displays and outreach activities during the 2010 Winter Olympics a couple of months back.

Clean fuels

Fuel cells are always touted as ‘clean’ power systems, especially those that run on hydrogen, but in many applications their energy source is at least partially derived from a fossil fuel. 

Completely ‘green’ hydrogen can of course be generated using electrolysis in combination with renewable energy technologies such as solar photovoltaic (PV) or wind energy. For example, last month we saw that Honda is using a prototype solar hydrogen vehicle fueling station at the Los Angeles headquarters of Honda R&D Americas. 

But there is increasing interest in running fuel cells on gases derived from other processes, either as ‘waste’ or as a byproduct. Some applications are better suited to such an approach, in particular large, stationary systems. 

In this issue we report on several fuel cell installations that utilize gas from at least indirect fossil fuel sources. For example, in Finland Wärtsilä is having some success running a 20 kW solid oxide fuel cell on gas originating from a nearby landfill. The WFC20 unit has been operating for more than 1500 hours, producing electricity for 10 households in Vaasa. The varying composition of the methane-rich landfill gas has been a key engineering challenge, which has led to the development of an efficient control system, as well as techniques to remove impurities such as sulfur compounds. 

Meanwhile, Ohio-based Technology Management Inc is gearing up to field-test its 1 kW SOFC system. The modular technology can run on a variety of fuels, and TMI is ultimately targeting distributed energy applications in developing nations. The company has engineered the SOFC to run on a wide range of locally available fuels, including methane, syngas, propane, ethanol, digester biogas, JP-8 kerosene, diesel, ammonia, vegetable oils, used cooking oil, corn oil, soybean oil, biodiesel, and jatropha oil. The flex-fuel capability allows farmers to grow or make their own fuel, and use it in the TMI fuel cell to produce electricity where and when they need it. 

Such applications are not just limited to SOFCs. NedStack in the Netherlands has signed a contract with the Solvay chemicals group to deliver a 1 MW hydrogen fuel cell power plant, which would be the world’s largest PEM fuel cell installation. The generator will be connected to the SolVin chlor-alkali plant at Antwerp-Lillo in Belgium. The PEM power plant will use the byproduct hydrogen from its chlorine production process, to generate electricity onsite. So although the fuel cell system is not running on a cleanly produced gas, it does utilize a fuel that might otherwise be regarded as waste. 

Molten carbonate fuel cells are also prime candidates for operating on biogases, as we reported in our January issue. In Germany, MTU Onsite Energy GmbH will supply a HotModule HM400 power plant to the automotive supplier Reich GmbH. This MCFC unit will use biogas from a nearby corn silage biogas plant. And in the US, FuelCell Energy has sold a fourth DFC300 MCFC unit to the City of Tulare, California to produce electricity at the regional wastewater treatment facility, running on methane as a renewable byproduct of wastewater processing. 

Steve Barrett

Not a decade of decay 

Well, it’s already 10 years since the calendar turned over to the 2000s, and what a rollercoaster ride it’s been for everyone – and especially the fuel cell sector. 

The atmosphere is still generally positive, and there are a number of fuel cells in commercial use, from the small – such as the direct methanol fuel cells from German-based SFC Smart Fuel Cell – to large installations such as the molten carbonate power plants from FuelCell Energy in Connecticut (and its German partner, MTU Onsite Energy). And there are plenty of other commercial and pre-commercial units coming very soon for public and industrial applications. 

One of the unsung but key aspects of monitoring and reporting on the evolving fuel cell industry is the never-ending changes in company names, and indeed watching out for companies disappearing and new ones being established. It’s a good sign that entrepreneurs and investment entities don’t see the fluctuating nature of the sector as something they can’t handle. 

So what were the big stories 10 years ago? GE Microgen in the US was apparently heading for market introduction of residential PEM fuel cell systems, manufactured by Plug Power. The GE joint venture has been discontinued for several years, but Plug Power has the promising GenSys^® residential system, which also comes in a high-temperature PEM flavor, as the GenSys Blue. As we heard in December’s feature on high-temperature PEM fuel cells, these units are currently undergoing field trials and certifications in preparation for widespread availability by 2012. 

The other front page story in Fuel Cells Bulletin 10 years ago reported on Corning developing catalyst supports for automotive fuel processing systems from Epyx Corporation. A few months later reformer specialist Epyx merged with De Nora Fuel Cells in Italy, to become Nuvera Fuel Cells – which is still going strong, and with many of the same enthusiastic personnel. 

It’s a mixed story for how the other companies we reported on 10 years ago have fared. Toshiba and International Fuel Cells (now UTC Power) haven’t made noticeable progress with the gasoline reformer/PEM fuel cell system they were developing for vehicles, although both are still very active in other fuel cell applications. Of the others Ballard, MTU, Johnson Matthey, Daimler, and NexTech Materials are still productive. But H Power merged into Plug Power in 2003, while Zevco in the UK (part of ZeTek Power), Canadian-based Energy Ventures Inc, and M-C Power in the US all disappeared early in the decade. 

Hopefully some of the survivors will still be alive and kicking when we reach the Twenty-Twenties, but one thing’s for sure: it will be another rollercoaster ride. Best of luck! 

Steve Barrett – Editor

Speed thrills

In late September a hydrogen fuel cell ‘car’ built by a team of engineering students at Ohio State University topped 300 mph (480 km/h) on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Buckeye Bullet 2 landspeed streamliner racer – powered by Ballard PEM fuel cells – recorded a certified average speed of 299.91 mph over the required two runs. The racer subsequently set an average speed of 302.877 mph, which is apparently still pending certification by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) before it can be called an official record. 

‘This record will hold for a long time,’ believes team adviser Giorgio Rizzoni, director of Ohio State’s Center for Automotive Research. ‘I can’t see who is going to take this away from us.’ No doubt there is feverish activity elsewhere aiming to do just that…

Ford set the previous fuel cell car land speed record, two years ago at Bonneville, with its Ford Fusion Hydrogen 999 car. Its 207 mph record is even more astonishing given that the car was a production-based vehicle, looking very much like a standard Ford Fusion subcompact. However, Ford has since backed right off on its development of FCVs for the road, preferring to concentrate on hybrid hydrogen internal combustion engine vehicles (other than its participation in the Vancouver Fuel Cell Vehicle Program). 

In terms of actually racing against others, the Formula Zero championship is bringing together teams in head-to-head competition. As with the Buckeye Bullet, these hydrogen fuel cell powered karts are being developed and raced by teams of engineering students. This year’s championship saw four university-led teams – from Imperial College, TU Delft, Leuven, and Zaragoza – battle it out during the scheduled four races of the Formula Zero European Championship. The competition raced on circuits in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, with a fifth ‘Zero Emission Grand Prix’ added in Turin, Italy in early October. 

The term ‘petrolhead’ is used to refer to people who enthuse about the power and performance of fast cars running on gasoline, but perhaps the increasing numbers of ‘hydrogenheads’ are starting to give them a run for their money – but with zero emissions… 

Steve Barrett, Editor

Energy storage

The intermittent nature of wind or solar photovoltaic energy sources is a significant problem, but using any spare power generation capacity to produce hydrogen via electrolysis of water is a relatively straightforward process. (Of course, these extra steps between the initial power generation and its ultimate use chisel away at the end-to-end efficiency, but I’ll leave that argument to others.) 

There are some interesting projects that combine renewable energy sources with electrolyzers and hydrogen fuel cells, including the Hydrogen Mini Grid System recently installed at the Environmental Energy Technology Centre in Yorkshire, UK, and the H2seed project at the Hebridean Hydrogen Park in the Western Isles of Scotland. 

Batteries – and, to a lesser extent, other electrochemical devices such as ultracapacitors – are another key energy storage technology that is often linked with fuel cells, in both mobile and stationary applications. 

Vehicles in particular see the benefit of hybridizing power sources in this way, to help overcome limitations such startup time or from subzero temperatures. Effectively all fuel cell vehicles are hybrid to some extent, as there will always be a battery or ultracapacitor somewhere in the system – the only real question is to how great a degree the system depends on the battery. 

Another advantage of the hybrid approach in vehicles is that it can allow the use of smaller fuel cell systems, which has advantages in terms of cost, system size and so on. The recently unveiled Riversimple ‘open source’ fuel cell car employs just a 6 kW PEM fuel cell, combined with an ultracapacitor. 

And the Microcab vehicles used on the University of Birmingham campus in the UK use 3 kW PEM fuel cells to keep the battery-powered propulsion system charged up, rather than seeing the batteries discharge and then need a long recharging session. 

One of the reasons why this comes to mind is that I am also now responsible for posting content on our Renewable Energy Focus website, in the section on Energy storage including fuel cells. I will be posting a lot more content there in future, starting with news items but also adding feature articles and other types of information. 

Check it out for yourselves… 

Steve Barrett, Editor

Fuel cells have a sporting chance 

Sport is providing an interesting variety of opportunities for fuel cell demonstrations, with applications at a wide range of scales and with a good international spread. 

Motor sport is perhaps the most obvious arena, given the very significant amounts of money that have been spent developing fuel cells for transportation applications. That said, the actual sporting manifestation is very much on the amateur side of things, with universities and colleges the most active. 

Formula Zero was founded in 2003, and is a zero-emission race class for cutting-edge open single-seaters, essentially go-karts. Last year the Formula Zero Championship was held in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, while this summer there are races planned for the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. 

The largest sport-related fuel cell activities so far have centered on the Olympic Games. Last year’s Beijing Olympics saw a total of 20 hydrogen fuel cell cars providing transportation services for VIPs, officials and media staff. The sedans were manufactured by the Shanghai Volkswagen Automotive Company joint venture. The fuel cell engines were designed and developed by Tongji University, Shanghai Automobile Industry Corporation (SAIC) and Shanghai Fuel Cell Vehicle Powertrain Co. 

Next year the 2010 Winter Olympics will be held in Whistler, British Columbia, and naturally this is being used as a showcase for the local fuel cell industry. BC Transit is preparing to operate 20 fuel cell buses, equipped with Ballard fuel cell modules, in what will be the biggest fuel cell bus fleet so far in operation with a single transit agency. 

And the next Summer Olympics, in London in 2012, will offer an opportunity to demonstrate fuel cell technologies for the likes of Intelligent Energy, which is participating in a project to field a fleet of 50–100 hydrogen fuel cell taxis on the streets of London in time for the 2012 Olympics. 

Another prime sporting opportunity for fuel cells is in sailboats, and in this issue we report on the French Zero CO₂ yacht, the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell powered yacht with a fully integrated laboratory, which will be used to test pollution levels on a 10-month cruise around the Mediterranean starting next March. 

The now-defunct Voller Energy was an early fan of yachts as fuel cell demonstrators, with its fuel cell auxiliary power unit charging the batteries on board the company’s Emerald demonstration yacht in a transatlantic race in late 2007. 

And a rather unusual sporting application is a fuel cell powered ice resurfacer, developed by the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center, to smooth the surface of ice skating and hockey rinks. 

I look forward to further sporting applications of fuel cell technologies, as this niche market grows from such disparate beginnings… 

Steve Barrett, Editor

The big story right now – and the subject of this issue’s front page news story – is the major cuts in the US Department of Energy’s funding for fuel cells and hydrogen R&D. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of dissenting voices in the US fuel cell community, from the collective voices of the National Hydrogen Association and the US Fuel Cell Council to respected figures across the country. 

Highly respected Peter Hoffmann, with more than 40 years of reporting on this sector, hit back in a HuffingtonPost.com blog, provocatively titled, ‘DOE’s Chu wants to gut long-term/long-range fuel cell vehicles program in favor of short-term/short-range plug-in hybrids’. He concludes, ‘it seems the United States is once again proudly poised to slip behind.’ He worries that in 10 or 15 years’ time, the cry will be, ‘how could we let the Japanese and the Germans and the Koreans (and maybe the Chinese by then), get ahead of us? Didn’t anybody see this coming in 2009?’ 

For their part, the big non-US automakers seem unfazed by the uproar, A Bloomberg report said that Honda Motor Co and Toyota Motor Corporation – both of which have major hybrid vehicle activities, with Toyota also offering plug-in electric vehicles – will push ahead with development of hydrogen-powered vehicles. ‘Honda has a significant commitment to fuel cells, and we’re going to pursue it,’ it quoted Ed Cohen, the company’s vice president of US government and industry affairs. ‘We have a limited number of options to achieve transportation objectives which include less use of petroleum and reducing greenhouse gases. Hydrogen is one of them.’ 

And John Hanson, a spokesman for Toyota’s US unit in Torrance, California, added that ‘our program will continue unaffected by this.’ He continued: ‘The vehicles have been invented. The issues are infrastructure and how do we reduce cost.’ German-based Daimler is also gearing up for the pre-commercial launch of fuel cell vehicles, both cars and buses, in the near future. 

On home turf, General Motors still sounds bullish about fuel cell vehicles, notwithstanding its flirtation with bankruptcy. ‘Hydrogen is a key to solving the nation’s mid- to long- term issues of energy security, reduced petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as being part of the reinvention of General Motors,’ said Larry Burns, the firm’s vice president of research and development and strategic planning, in the same Bloomberg report. GM has invested some $1 billion over the past two decades on developing its technology, mostly without DOE R&D funding, and it will not want to let that commitment go to waste. 

Catherine Dunwoody, executive director of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, says the group will be lobbying for a restoration of federal funding for FCV research, this time with Congress. ‘The (Department of Energy) has made its proposal clear,’ she says. ‘So the opportunity is with Congress.’ 

Steve Barrett, Editor

Google’s recent extension of its ‘Street View’ facility to several more countries made me wonder how well Google Maps and Google Earth serve the fuel cell community. Not very, seems to be the answer at the moment.

Typing ‘fuel cells’ into the search box for businesses in Google Earth brings up plenty of markers, but it’s not at all easy to build up a reasonably complete picture of activities. As one might expect, North America and Europe produce plenty of ‘flags’, some of dubious interest to the fuel cell community, while in Japan, for example, there are some interesting photos flagged up.

But it would be very useful to have the ability to quickly and easily click in a box or type in something that would bring up markers for fuel cell installations, companies, research centers, field trials, demonstrations and the like – and preferably with some way of sorting the layers or types of information. I believe the word for this is ‘mashup’, i.e. ‘a web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool’, as Wikipedia defines it.

There are maps of installations and the like available, such as Fuel Cells 2000’s state-by-state lists of US companies or fuel cell installations and vehicle demonstrations, or a map of stationary fuel cell installations in California. But a multilayered global map of such activities, that you could drill down into in a wide variety of ways, that’s what I would really like to see…

And while I’m on the subject of how the latest information technology could be better used in terms of providing useful and ‘reader’-friendly information about fuel cells, it has occurred to me – as the owner of an iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone without the phone or camera (but very useful for long journeys) – that it should be possible to download from Apple’s Apps Store (or one of the other similar facilities for other companies’ gadgets) an animated demo of how a fuel cell works. There are plenty of these on the web – e.g. Plug Power, ReliOn, the Schatz Energy Research Center and so on – but how cool it would be if you could explain how fuel cells work to kids, your friends or your dog just by pulling out your iPhone or similar gadget and showing the animation on-screen right there…

I look forward to hearing from some suitably inspired geeks shortly!

Steve Barrett, editor

The initiatives to pump vast sums of money into some of the world’s largest economies – in particular President Obama’s $825 billion commitment to stimulate the US economy – are naturally attracting pleas from the renewable energy sector to receive some of that money. 

The US Fuel Cell Council is certainly banging on the door of the new administration, making its case to invest $1.2 billion in fuel cells, hydrogen and infrastructure – simply by fully funding existing programs of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT) at levels Congress has already approved for fiscal 2010, and use of other authorized funds. This level of investment ‘will put hundreds of fuel cell vehicles and up to 100 MW of fuel cell power into customers’ hands.’ 

The USFCC has provided a slightly more detailed breakdown of how it wants such funds invested. It wants to see $100 million invested in wider deployment of fuel cells, both directly by purchases by federal agencies, and through federal policies and funds to support public and private sector purchases and leases of fuel cells and infrastructure. This deployment would need an enhanced supporting fueling infrastructure, through a further $65 million in federal grants and tax credits. 

In addition, two major application areas for investment would be learning demonstrations ($375 million) and fuel cell transit ($180 million). In the former, early commercial and advanced experimental systems would be put in the hands of government and private sector users, who would help evaluate the systems even while enjoying their real-world benefits. 

And in transit terms, fuel cell buses have proved their capability in revenue service operation in several field trials around the world. Transit operators in the US have expressed interest in additional deployments, so any stimulus should include the purchase of at least 100 fuel cell buses, and funds for relevant infrastructure investment. 

The manufacturing industries are in particular need of economic stimulus, and the USFCC is calling for $100 million to build American fuel cell manufacturing capacity. Fuel cell companies and suppliers need to invest in manufacturing capacity, but money from banks and investors is difficult to find. Federal grants and tax credits for investment in manufacturing infrastructure would maintain jobs and industrial capability, stimulate the supply chain, and reduce unit costs. Significant support would allow manufacturers to begin upgrading and expanding their capacity immediately. 

Industrial strength needs effective R&D, so the USFCC wants $350 million to accelerate research in partnership with industry. Fuel cell and hydrogen research would retain and expand jobs both at universities and national labs and in the private sector, and accelerate commercialization. 

Basic research is needed in advanced materials, catalysis and other relevant fields. Applied research should focus on improved performance and reduced costs, and on improved availability, storage and utility of hydrogen and other fuels for fuel cells. 

Time will tell whether any of this is taken on board by the Obama administration, but such support has the dual benefits of supporting industry and accelerating the development and application of cleaner energy technologies. 

And this is a message that should be heeded around the world, with both developed and developing nations looking at the current economic slowdown as an opportunity to really take things forward in terms of developing and using clean energy technologies much more widely. 

Steve Barrett, Editor

‘My fellow citizens... We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.’ 

So, President Obama did mention alternative energy in his inauguration speech, although without specifically referring to hydrogen or fuel cells. His predecessor didn’t mention energy in either of his inaugural addresses, but he has been very supportive of both hydrogen and fuel cell R&D over his two terms in office. It is clear that energy policy will be a key concern for the Obama administration in the coming years. 

President Bush has been very encouraging towards the hydrogen and fuel cells sector over the course of the last eight years, with his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, FreedomCAR, Advanced Energy Initiative, DOE’s Hydrogen Technology Program and so on. I’m aware that cynics put this down to his support for Big Oil and Big Auto, but – as far as I’m aware – the former was not a significant recipient of federal funding in this field, and the automakers have certainly invested large sums of their own money in driving forward the technology for fuel cell vehicles. 

And the benefit to many small and medium-sized entities has been significant: there are a very large number of companies participating in federally funded projects to develop fuel cell technologies and a viable hydrogen fueling infrastructure. 

There are a few more details of the new energy and environment policy on the White House website. The New Energy Plan will ‘help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next 10 years, to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.’ 

While the focus in transportation appears to be on increasing fuel economy standards – which are amazingly low, even now, compared to European and Asian standards – and hybrid plug-in vehicles, there are also commitments to ‘advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure’ and ‘promote development of commercial-scale renewable energy.’ 

And the President’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan calls for ‘doubling the production of alternative energy in the next three years.’ These all offer hope for continued significant support for the fuel cell industry. 

Energy has been a topic of great interest here at Elsevier recently, possibly because they both start with a prominent capital E. And as the in-house ‘fuel cell guru’ (i.e. the only one who knows more than a little about fuel cells), I’ve been involved in much of the brainstorming and development work behind the scenes for the past year or so. 

One of the most high-profile results of this activity so far is the imminent launch of energylocate (www.energylocate.com), which is intended to bring together information about all of Elsevier’s numerous energy products and services into a one-stop community website for energy scientists and professionals. When complete energylocate will feature online books, journals, magazines, conferences, news, RSS feeds, social networking, an energy experts forum, a citation database, videos and more. Someone mentioned podcasts, but they met with an unfortunate accident... 

This new gateway isn’t limited to fuel cells, though. All forms of energy are covered – including renewables, hydroelectric and nuclear – and not just in terms of science and technology, but also policy, economics and environmental issues. 

The website will evolve with feedback from users. At the forthcoming World Future Energy Summit – taking place 19–21 January 2009 in Abu Dhabi – my colleagues in Elsevier’s S&T Journals division will be presenting demos, and recording podcasts and videos for energylocate with some of the key contacts in the field. If you’re attending this major energy event (www.worldfutureenergysummit.com), please call in at our booth in the exhibition, and find out more about energylocate. 

Another forthcoming new product is an online productivity solution focused on alternative energy, and based on Elsevier’s illumin8 platform (www.illumin8.com). This web-based tool provides access to web content, Elsevier’s large pool of scientific content, and worldwide patents, combined with powerful semantic indexing technology to provide a clever way to find useful technical information. The internal proto­type I’ve been playing with looks pretty cool, although at this early stage it only contains about 10% of the total planned content. I’m not sure when this goes public, but you heard it here first... 

Steve Barrett, editor

It may just be one of those peculiarities of the English language, but I sometimes wonder why pretty much every other language (that uses the Roman alphabet) explicitly refers to combustion or burning in their term for ‘fuel cell’, whereas that link is more equivocal in English. 

For example, in Romance languages one has ‘pile à combustible’ (French), ‘pilas de combustible’ (Spanish), ‘celle a combustibile’ (Italian) and so on, which clearly refer to the presence of combustible materials. In the Germanic languages you have ‘brennstoffzelle’ (German), ‘brændselscelle’ (Danish) and ‘bränsleceller’ (Swedish), for example, where the first part of the word in each case refers to burning. 

In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) there are various meanings of the word ‘fuel’, including ‘material for burning, combustible matter as used in fires etc.’ But more specific senses of the word relate to food as energy, and nuclear material to support a chain reaction, neither of which involve combustion. The most relevant sense is a ‘material which reacts with an oxidizer to produce thrust (in a rocket engine) or electricity (in a fuel cell)’. So fuel cells are specifically mentioned in the OED’s definition of ‘fuel’, without referring to combustion. 

Surprisingly, the OED gives the earliest published reference to the term ‘fuel cell’ as 1922, in the Transactions of the Faraday Society. This is much later than one would expect, since Christian Fridrich Schoenbein is credited with discovering the fuel cell effect in 1838, and Sir William Grove with inventing the first fuel cell in 1845. Schoenbein referred to the effect (in the English-language Philosophical Magazine, in 1839) as ‘voltaic polarization’, while Grove called his device a ‘gas voltaic battery’. [Ulf Bossel’s book, The Birth of the Fuel Cell, 1835–1845, has much more on the history of these developments.] 

One last thought on the subject of words. In his closing keynote at the recent Fuel Cells Science & Technology 2008 conference in Copenhagen [www.fuelcelladvances.com], Søren Linderoth noted that the ‘fuel cell constant’ is ‘5–10 years’, which struck me as an amusing variation on ‘fuel cells will be commercial in 10 years’ – which seems to have survived more or less unscathed in my decade in this sector... 

Steve Barrett, editor

With ‘green’ all the rage these days, it caught my attention recently when I came across the expression ‘green collar jobs’ (www.urbanhabitat.org/node/528).

There, Professor Raquel Pinderhughes of San Francisco State University defines green collar jobs as ‘blue-collar work force opportunities created by firms and organizations whose mission is to improve environmental quality’. She provides a fairly long list of examples, covering a wide variety of jobs, but unfortunately there’s no mention of fuel cells. Perhaps if this came from one of the universities further up the West Coast in Vancouver...

That said, most jobs in the fuel cell industry right now are probably not exactly ‘blue collar’; I would guess that most are either in R&D or business development, with plenty of PhDs and MBAs in the mix. That said, from past visits to fuel cell companies it’s fair to add that there are quite a few technicians beavering away in the background.

This month’s front page news story is on the latest 2007 Worldwide Industry Survey, prepared by an experienced and well connected team at PricewaterhouseCoopers for a group of industry associations, led by the US Fuel Cell Council. For 2006 – the latest full year for which they have figures – there were 8647 people in fuel cell specific employment, up nearly 1600 on the 2005 figure.

One hopes that this total keeps rising at 20% or more year-on-year, but the current economic climate can’t be helping companies that are already making big quarterly losses, and rapidly running down their reserves. In the 10 years or so that I’ve been reporting on the fuel cell sector I have seen a lot of companies come and go, but on the other hand, there seems no end to the number that keep starting up or spinning out from universities and research institutes. Most months I come across an established company that I’ve never heard of before, which makes it difficult to provide comprehensive news coverage. But it offers hope that the enormous amount of research – and, increasingly, product development – being carried out worldwide will be able to maintain its steady progress, quickly enough to start making a financial return to keep the wolves from the door...

Steve Barrett, Editor

The British motoring journalist Andrew English recently went public on his belief that ‘the next landmark car will be electric – but not in the way you might think.’ He was speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, which is sponsored by The Daily Telegraph, and in his column in that newspaper. English is a respected and experienced motoring correspondent, and has probably driven more FCVs than anyone.

With several carmakers focusing on plugin hybrid vehicles, he points out the collective blindness about where the electricity they require comes from. Most electricity is not carbon-free, being normally generated by burning fossil fuels; and nuclear energy has its disadvantages. He asks: where will the recharging infrastructure come from, and who’s going to pay for it?

Of course, the fueling infrastructure is also a critical concern for hydrogen FCVs. English believes that in this case ‘the fuel will be supplied by a diverse market competing on cost and carbon footprint.’ Hydrogen can be sourced from waste materials, from renewable energy, and from fossil fuels.

This will cost a serious amount of money. But he points out that, historically, the US has spent vast amounts on programs like its railroads in the 1880s, Eisenhower’s interstate highway network in the 1950s, and the space program in the 1960s. Simply securing the oil industry infrastructure is likely to cost $200bn in the next few years.

With 10 years’ experience in the fuel cell sector, I myself know the ‘next year’ mentality of when fuel cells will finally reach the mainstream. Several years ago, in a feature by Mike Hollinshead et al., we looked at the accelerating speed of market penetration of new technology [FCB, December 2005]. English makes a similar case, that technology adoption is getting faster – cars, video recorders, PCs, cell phones – but it still takes time, and he implores us to be patient.

He closes by quoting GM’s Dr Larry Burns: ‘Hydrogen will change the way we think about and do everything… Just think how much disruption there will be when this happens. If you sit on the sidelines and you don’t seek to be involved in creating this change, you will not have access to this technology – and that could be a very dangerous place to be.’

Hopefully fuel cells will be in the mainstream before I reach 20 years…

Steve Barrett, Editor

Carbon footprinting is a hot (globally warmed?) topic at the moment, whether for individuals or for companies, government agencies and other organizations. But what do the generic online calculators really tell you about your impact on the planet?

I thought I’d calculate mine the other day, so I tried www.carbonfootprint.com, as that was top of the list that Google gave me. My result put me somewhat above the UK average, which was disappointing. But taking out my anticipated flights this year – to the Fuel Cell Expo in Tokyo, the European SOFC Forum in Lucerne, our own Fuel Cells Science & Technology 2008 in Copenhagen, the US Fuel Cell Seminar in Phoenix, you see a pattern here – brought me back under the national average. Phew, I feel very slightly better.

But then, the only reason I’m taking these flights is because I’m active in the ‘clean energy’ field. I mentioned this to my colleague David Hopwood, who is the other co-editor of our Fuel Cell Focus magazine, as well as his day job as editor of the Renewable Energy Focus magazine. He suggested that we should qualify for a ‘moral offset’, since we’re helping to push forward the development of clean energy technologies through the medium of our publications. Of course, this novel concept also applies to everyone else working in the renewable or alternative energy field, so feel free to make use of it yourselves.

But before you berate me for my energy-guzzling attitude, I’d like to point out the inaccuracies in these generic calculators. These days I turn down the heating in winter, turn it off early in spring and on again only when fall has properly arrived, wear a jumper or two if I feel cold, turn off almost all electrical devices at night, use those energy-efficient light bulbs that take a while to light up the room, and generally feel I’m making a modest sacrifice. And my garden is full of plants with leaves!

So when my carbon footprint calculation basically comes down to whether I eat a lot of meat, organic and/or locally produced food, plus the obvious things like how many miles I drive (and sometimes, but not always, in what car), and my gas and electric bills (in money terms, not energy units), the scientist in me detects that this might not give the most accurate figure...

A further point about carbon emissions that came to me recently is an interesting article posted on BusinessGreen.com by another editorial colleague, Danny Bradbury, about plans for a Google-based carbon monitoring tool. The Nasa-sponsored Project Vulcan is developing an emissions map that could be combined with Google Earth and provide 3D emissions data at a building-by-building level. There’s a video on YouTube that shows a new, high-res interactive map of CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels in the US.

One thing that comes to mind when watching the animation is the great clouds of CO₂ heading out over the North Atlantic towards Europe, or northwards over Danny in Canada. How do we all still manage to breathe? Yikes!

2008 looks like being a transitional year, when ‘significant’ numbers of fuel cells reach the hands of consumers. (‘At last!’ I hear you cry.) Of course, these are pretty special consumers, like the lucky few in southern California who will be driving the new Honda FCX Clarity. Or the other Americans who will be driving a Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell car as part of General Motors’ Project Driveway [FCB, December 2007]. Imagine if a very lucky family managed to join both field trials – what an opportunity for a real-world comparison…

Buses and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also look like moving beyond a tiny handful of vehicles, if the multiple news items in this issue are anything to go by. In the last issue there was a rush on forklift news. And before that, auxiliary power units in vehicles, micro cogeneration, marine applications, and so on. There seems to be a perception in some places that because fuel cells haven’t yet taken over the world – as promised numerous times in the past – then the whole darn thing is a waste of time. But no ‘disruptive’ technology has ever broken through quickly on as many fronts as fuel cells have the potential to do. The commercial breakthroughs are coming, in niche markets, which generally look promising enough to sustain fuel cell companies as they continue developing technologies that could serve the mainstream. Watch this space…

The almost simultaneous announcements from Ballard and Hydrogenics, regarding their withdrawal from automotive fuel cell development and fuel cell test stations, respectively, mark further disappointment for the Canadian fuel cell industry. In the summer the alkaline fuel cell firm Astris sold off its assets [FCB, June 2007], and late last year SOFC developer Fuel Cell Technologies shut down [FCB, December 2006]. However, despite these setbacks, the federal and provincial governments in Canada are still very supportive of the industry, and other companies are picking up the baton to continue the race to fully commercialize fuel cell technologies. Go Canada!

The use of fuel cells for auxiliary power units (APUs) looks a promising early market, in particular for less high-profile applications such as motor homes and marine craft. I recall a conversation I had during the Grove Symposium in London with Stephen Voller, of the eponymous ‘energy’ company. We were standing in a demonstration motor home equipped with a PEM fuel cell unit, which is used to keep the batteries charged. The ticket price for this sort of luxury recreational vehicle is £100 000 (US$200 000) or more, but apparently there is a huge demand for them across Europe, as well as in their spiritual home of North America. Compared with the overall price, the relatively modest premium to equip such a vehicle with a fuel cell could be easily justified in buyers' minds by the numerous benefits of a fuel cell, such as its quietness, greatly reduced emissions, and efficiency. And fueling isn't an issue, because Calor Gas or LPG is already on-board for cooking etc.

Sailing vessels offer a similar opportunity, and Voller's fuel cell-equipped Beneteau 411 yacht Emerald has just crossed the Atlantic in the ARC Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, from Gran Canaria to St Lucia in the Caribbean. Congratulations to all involved in the successful crossing.

Vicki McConnell, our North American Correspondent, has written another excellent feature, this time on military unmanned aerial vehicles. This niche market is surprisingly active, and there are plenty of civilian applications for such long-duration flights.

Steve Barrett, Editor

Grove X is now almost upon us, and I’m gearing up for listening to the latest updates on what's happening at many of the key demonstration programs currently going on around the world. Elsevier has a stand (G14), where you can find out about our numerous fuel cell ‘products’. I don’t think that term does any justice to all the hard work and long hours that go into getting our various publications, books and events out to our audiences, but that's probably why I’m still in the thick of it and not managing director. I like it down here – the people are more friendly…

This time of year sees a real peak of conference activity – in most scientific areas, not just fuel cells – but there's no way anyone could attend them all. Looking at last month's Events Calendar, I see that there are 20 events in September and October alone (and there are probably some missing from that list). Unfortunately I really can’t find the time to attend the European Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform's Technical Review Days in early October. This would be an excellent opportunity to see for myself what European industry – and the more industrially aware research institutes – are working on, or planning to collaborate on.

Instead I’ve decided to go to San Antonio for the US Fuel Cell Seminar and Exposition. I couldn’t face the very long haul to get to Honolulu for last year's event, but this year I’m looking forward to catching up on two years’ worth of US activity. I see that this year the promotional materials are emphasising that ‘and Exposition’ – I gather that the exhibitors have been agitating for some time that they warrant a higher profile in this leading event.

But it's a real shame that this year the Seminar is taking place so close to Grove – it's almost a month earlier than normal. The proximity of two of the biggest fuel cell events must be making a lot of people in the industry choose one or the other, instead of stretching to both. The real problem nowadays is lack of time, and you do need to catch up a bit in the office from time to time… Have a great show, whichever one you go to.

Steve Barrett, Editor

It's been a long time since I wrote an editorial for FCB, but with more than 100 issues under my belt I'm no longer a ‘newbie’. In the nine years since we launched FCB the industry has clearly become more of a proper industry, even if it hasn't yet quite pushed oil & gas completely out of the way. And where's my fuel cell car? No chance of a free sample there, I suppose…

I'm again involved in organizing the Tenth Grove Fuel Cell Symposium, taking place 25–27 September in central London (www.grovefuelcell.com). Grove is a major part of Elsevier's fuel cell portfolio, and of course our team will be there, so come along to our stand (G14) and see what else we do, from newsletters (my specialty) to magazines (in particular our relaunched Fuel Cell Focus), from journals to books. These aren't just ‘products’ to us – we put in a lot of time and effort to provide our readers with useful information. We'd appreciate your feedback, so we can bring you more of what you want or need.

In this issue I've started clustering the news items by topic, rather than forcing readers to look through the whole news section. I liked to think that this helped you to see what was happening in applications or technologies outside your specific interest. But time is money – now more than ever – so now the items are grouped to help you focus more easily on what really interests you.

Of course, there's no way a monthly newsletter can compete head-on with the multitude of online news services now available, even in the niche-within-a-niche that is fuel cells. (Here I'd like to recommend my friends at Fuel Cell Today.) But I aim to put the key developments in a useful context, and to extract the key message from among the self-congratulation and hyperbole that news releases often contain. We're also working on greatly improving our website, so keep an eye on it.

And you will have noticed the color photo on the front page – FCB is now printed digitally, so we have a bit more flexibility. And it's good to see CFC Solutions installing another carbon-neutral HotModule for a real customer.

Steve Barrett, Editor