CH4: The depth of your misinformation is indeed impressive:
"Santa Clara's two megawatt plant operated for 3,000 hours (125 days) and it rarely produced more than one megawatt of power before it fried itself." Santa Clara was only intended as a short term proof of concept demonstration. The fuel cell stacks worked perfectly; the problem with the unit had nothing to do with the fc technology. Someone made a disastrously stupid choice of a glue used to attach external insulation to the unit - over time it carbonized, became a conductor, and created a short across the stacks.
Very embarrassing, but no more significant than if one were trying to test a new car engine and the car crashed because a wheel fell off. All complex new technologies have that sort of thing happen. It will happen to GLE too whenever it gets that far. It is why experience makes a difference - it is called the learning curve.
"After 3 years of tinkering ERC has salvaged a 250 kilowatt unit (one eighth of the original operating power)." ERC's building blocks have always been 250 kW units. Put 8 of them together and you have a 2 MW plant. The 250 kW unit currently powering the company's main facility is a next generation design from the one used in Santa Clara - much more powerful, compact, cheaper to make, etc. The ones in Santa Clara worked fine, this one is much much better.
"M C Power demonstrated a 250 kilowatt unit in San Diego a year later in 1997 it only managed to produce 160 megawatt hours of power before being shut down for repairs." Irrelevant to ERC. M-C Power's design is completely different. Among other things, it requires an external reformer. I have no idea why that one didn't work, but that is M-C Power's problem, not ERC's.
"Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells cannot operate until it's electrolyte becomes molten (liquid) at 1,200 degrees F". So? They are not meant for cars, where the user wants to jump in the car, turn on the ignition, and drive off. (How long does it take a solid oxide fc to reach its operating temperature? And if a PEM fc is operating with a reformer rather than tanks of hydrogen, how long before the reformer heats up and produces enough hydrogen? These are negatives for all uses of fc's in cars.) Carbonate fc's are meant for stationary power. Because they are much more efficient than conventional generators or low temp fc's, it makes sense to have them on all the time, and bring in less efficient machinery for peak load needs. Since ERC's stacks are designed to be operating 24 hours per day for years on end, who cares if it doesn't turn on instantly on its first day of operation?
A general comment based on my several decades of investing in development stage companies: Early in this type of company's existence it must make some fundamental choices about which path to take. Sometimes a company is well down its chosen road before it runs into problems that make it realize it has chosen the wrong path - but by then it is too late to change, because others are well ahead on the better paths.
Every company realizes that this is a risk, and so often spends a lot of its collective energy justifying to itself and investors why its own path is the best. That often takes the form of pointing out the problems with the other paths. So a company working on solid oxide or PEM fc's will try to make itself feel good by bashing the prospects for carbonate, even to the point of making up and actually believing bogus "facts", such as you have posted.
But beliefs, no matter how fervently held, don't change physical reality. ERC's fc's work exactly as intended. All technical issues have been solved. Even the fundamental economic question - can the fc be made at a cheap enough cost? - has been "solved", in the sense that outside technology auditors, hired by the US DOE, have calculated expected costs to be at a very competitive level, once this current design is in mass production.
All that remains for ERC is an execution question - can the company get the orders, raise the money, expand the capacity, etc., to achieve its commercial goals? There is absolutely no guarantee that ERC will be successful - it may well screw this part up. But to claim that its technology doesn't work, when it so clearly does, is self delusion and wishful thinking of those who have chosen a different path. |
