Don: You have identified, IMO, the biggest hurdle that fuel cells of all kinds must overcome - namely, the fact that conventional technologies are not sitting around waiting for fuel cells to take over.
In stationary power plants, you are right - natural gas powered combined cycle turbine units have been getting very efficient. If ERC turns out to be unsuccessful in its fuel cell power plants, it most likely will because it loses the competition to CTU's. The turbines are variants of jet engines, which have been the beneficiary of billions in R&D money over the years.
Nevertheless, if you look at your ABB link you will see some obvious drawbacks of CTU's versus molten carbonate fuel cells. First, although CTU's are smaller than coal, oil or nuclear power plants, they are still very large (the smallest ABB unit was 17 MW) compared to MCFC (ERC's initial commercial product should be 2 MW.) In addition, although ABB brags about low nitrogen oxide emissions, it doesn't mention sulfur oxide emissions or noise levels, which tells me that the figures are nothing to brag about.
So CTU's will have to be deployed much like existing power plants - away from the any major population center, with the extra expense (and energy loss) of transmission lines to bring the power to urban users. Fuel cells are so small, quiet, and low in pollution that they can be placed in buildings in the center of cities, where the demand is.
The potential utility customer will have to consider all the economic elements in deciding which system to buy: How much do they cost to buy? How much do they cost to run (labor as well as fuel?) How reliable are they? How much will it cost to meet pollution goals? How much must be spent to pacify neighbors? Two utilities could come to different decisions based on their own particular circumstances.
My guess about how all this will shake out is that urban utilities will go with fuel cells, while utilities out in the country, where pollution isn't as much an issue and where long distance transmission lines are required regardless of how the electricity is produced, may go with the CTU approach.
In any event, the market size is huge. Demand for electricity is growing, and over the next ten years many of the nukes will be closed down. There is room for both technologies to have billions in sales. There are many reasons why the stock market is ignoring ERC, but lack of a potentially competitive product or small potential market are not two of them. If ERC's management were as good at self-promotion as Ballard's, its market cap would be many times higher. There is more than enough potential to justify it.
Your idea, that fuel cells offer a smaller advantage over conventional technologies in power plants than in vehicles, may or may not be true, but the one figure you cited - energy efficiency - is just part of the picture.
At least the comparison is fairest in stationary power plants. ERC's fuel cells run on natural gas (and get about 50% efficiency before cogen, not the 40% figure you used;) CTU's run on natural gas, so comparing the efficiencies make sense.
Cars today run on gasoline. Ballard's fuel cells are much more efficient, in terms of how much of its fuel's potential power can be turned into actual, but its fuel is not cheap gasoline, but very expensive hydrogen. Methanol or natural gas just begs the question, because they have to be converted into pure hydrogen before the PEM cell can do anything with it. So comparing efficiencies is tricky. The Chrysler/Delphi gasoline powered fuel cell would allow for a fair comparison, one that would take into account whatever energy loss is required to convert the gasoline into hydrogen plus whatever else (and figure out how to dispose of the whatever else.)
From an economic point of view, society is often better off using a cheap raw material inefficiently than an expensive raw material efficiently. In other words, if fuel cell powered cars get 80 mpg, but each gallon of its fuel costs $15, people might prefer getting 20 mpg on gasoline. So efficiency is an important factor, but it is just one of many. And ten years from now conventional power sources will be a lot better than they are today, so both ERC and Ballard are aiming at moving targets.
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