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

To: Rickmas who wrote (4167)	5/12/1999 2:27:00 PM
From: Sid Turtlman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5827

Rickmas: The idea that a fc car can provide power to the house when it isn't being driven is a pleasant fantasy, but nothing more than that. The reason is that a car fc is extremely light duty compared to a stationary power fc - ask Ballard about that, if you don't believe me. A car is expected to have a useful life of at most 200,000 miles, or 5000 hours life at an 40 mph. If you were to use the car one hour every day and try to power your house with it for twelve hours between when you come home from work and head out the next morning, for example, then your fc will have to be replaced almost every year (5000 hours life divided by 13 hours per day equals 385 days.) That would certainly blow away any savings on your electric bill, if there even were any. Stationary power fc's, on the other hand, are built to last. I can't imagine there even being any market for them at all unless buyers could expect a lifespan of at least 10 years operating 50% of the time (43,800 hours), and they probably expect several times that. If a car operating about one hour per day is expected to last 15 years, and the owner also wants to use the engine for 12 hours a day as a generator, then the car's fc engine will be running for 71,175 hours during those 15 years. If the owner does not hook the car up to his house, and uses all those hours just as a vehicle, then his car will last 2,847,000 miles (71,175 hours times 40 mph). If we assume that the average person drives about 15,000 miles per year (also derived by multiplying 1 hour per day times 365 days times 40 mph), then that means that the fc car buyer who does NOT try to turn it into a stationary generator will be able to keep running his car for about 190 years. Maybe I am cynical, but I have a hunch that the car companies are not terribly interested in producing cars that only need to be replaced once every couple of centuries. I think they will produce cars that wear out in the usual amount of time, and using your car as a house generator will definitely count against that time.