Hello Ruder Finn. Can you hear us Ruder Finn? If you are alive please blink your eyes. Are you sleeping? Or maybe you are busy working on the next photo shoot of the EV1 for its print ad campaign? or busy helping to spin wrenches and install one of the two packs a day of NiMh batteries in Don Devlin's car? Or updating the world on a new type of computer memory? Or maybe you are working out the ad campaign for USSC when they get panels on the Teledesic satellites wherein you will have a photo of Teledesic backers Bill Gates and Craig McCaw giving the high five to Stan O. and Dr. Guha? You are probably too busy, so don't let us bother you....
The April 24th edition of the Economist has one of their solid little Science articles devoted to "Fuel Cells hit the Road" on page 77. It is online at:
economist.com
And it is full of the Economist's own British-isms: "For instance, it takes only a few seconds to start a modern petrol-driven car, but, at least in cold weather, a fuel cell needs several minutes of warming up before it can produce enough power to drive off."
Geez, Ruder Finn i wonder where that power comes from for the several minutes of warming up? Must be a heck of a current draw.
Geez, Ruder Finn, the article says fuel cells cost $4000 per kilowatt. My electric car puts out 100 hp from the first revolution. (And mine is wimpy compared to Don's. Like so many things his is bigger than mine. Size Matters.) So golly, Ruder Finn does that mean I need a 75kw fuel cell stack at $300,000 in my EV? or is there some kind of gizmo that might supply the peak acceleration requirements and allow a smaller stack? if there was some doo-dad which could store say 4 kilowatt hours of power and dump it out at ridiculously high rates and cost say $8000, based on wildly inflated non GAAP accounting costs, why I bet it would lower the cost of that stack and speed the introduction of fuel cell vehicles.
Geez, Ruder Finn, i'd like to invent something where the motor would become a generator and would slow the car down. I think I would call this regenerative braking. And I guess that since the article doesn't tell me there is anything like that, or anywhere to store its energy produced, that we must run that juice backwards through the fuel cell stack and produce hydrogen? And then do we recombine that Hydrogen with oxygen and a few carbons and re-create methanol? Boy i wish i'd paid better attention in chemistry and physics. There must be a better way... maybe after I invent regenerative braking I could invent a device to store that energy in so I didn't need to get my hands dirty re-creating methanol.
There is a faintly oily aroma around all of this as Shell, Texaco, and Arco (mentioned in the article) take fuel cells unto their bosom. Hmmmm. Maybe there is a reason why the greener aspects of this technology aren't coming to light. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places. Oh well, keep hard at it Ruder Finn. The burgeoning media placements, increased analyst coverage and blossoming institutional ownership are really blowing me away. Whew! Keep getting our story told.... |
