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Technology Stocks : Ballard Power -world leader zero-emission PEM fuel cells -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkeye who wrote (3351)	12/3/1998 4:30:00 AM
From: Sid Turtlman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5827

Hawkeye: You really should try to learn a little bit more about Ballard before you post on the subject. The buses in Chicago were made by New Flyer, to which Ballard added its fc engine. This contract, for a promised two year test (Whoops!) supposed to have started in 1996, was announced in 1995 before the company worked out its deal with Daimler. The ones to be tested in Mexico will be made by the latter, not New Flyer. I really wonder whether you were dozing off in your elementary school class the day they tried to teach simple logic. How does ERC's experience two years ago running a 2MW stationary power plant demo have any relation to Ballard's problems with its buses? IF ERC never sells a fuel cell and ultimately goes to zero, does that help Ballard if it can't get its own vehicles to run right even on tanks of hydrogen? Not that it should make any difference to someone reading a Ballard thread, but for the record ERC's fuel cells ran perfectly in Santa Clara until some bad glue used to attach some insulation outside the fuel cell turned to carbon and set up some short circuits. So you don't louse up the logic again -- even if it were the case that Ballard's fuel cells ran perfectly in Chicago but it was everything else about the bus that failed (my sources say that the fuel cells had problems too), this is a more serious failure than ERC's experience in Santa Clara. Why? Because the purpose of a stationary fuel cell is NOT to produce glue, while one of the jobs of a bus power plant IS to run all the electrical systems of the bus, from the A/C and heating to, yes, the windshield wipers. If there is some problem with the quality or quantity of the electrical output of the fuel cell, or if it can't handle the varying demands placed on it by the systems, whatever the cause turns out to be, then that is a more fundamental problem.