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Fuel Cells Promised For Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in today's New York Times, fuel cells for portable consumer electronic devices will start appearing next year. First for laptops, and later for smaller devices like cellphones. Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device." The article mentions the Toshiba cells demonstrated at CeBit, and -- no surprise -- Japan is likely to be the first market for these tiny fuel cells.
Is it just me or doesn't news about fuel cells imminent arrival pop up every year and have so for some years now?
I just say no to that open source bussinessmodel!
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Listen to more bullshit about fuel cells comming real-soon-now once again.
4: Profit!
Fuel cells have been mentioned as becoming mainstream power sources for about 10 years now. My patience is being tried as a consumer to the point when it really does arrive I'll be skeptical about it.
They have a long way to go in the marketing aspect of fuel cells, because we can already see the obligatory posts about fires and such. Power sources have the potential for fires and explosions, yes. I've heard ordinary computer power supplies blow up when the capacitors overheat, and we all know about lithium + water. For fuel cells it will be no different, so we'll just have to make sure that the designs are sound before welcoming them onto our laps and pockets.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Now for high-end applications, this would no doubt be a godsend, no matter what the fuel cartridges would cost...but for general consumer use, even if they DO last 30 times as long as batteries, it's still going to be costing more, since chances are you won't be able to recharge them yourself. And as for standards...if they're going to replace As Cs and Ds, sure. But the article mainly talks about applications where the batteries people are already using are non-standard. We might end up seeing something akin to the ink/toner market, with something being made non-standard just so that it can be priced at some ungodly margin.
Also, I'm no expert, and I don't even follow this topic very closely...but every article I'd read previously about fuel cells mentioned that they get pretty hot. I mean like broil a roast hot. How hot are these tiny little fuel cells going to get, and would that worsen the already tricky problem of heat dissipation in notebooks?
Now, if they were inventing the car, they would create special fuel bags that could only be bought from the maker of the car or somesuch.
Exclusivity would only work until one manufacturer decided not to play that game.
Refull Anywhere would be a powerful marketing and usability tool. Once one manufacturer doesn't go the inkjet (gouge on the ink) route, the others will have to follow or get left behind.
Also, its not like methanol is really exclusive/exotic. You can pick it up at the hardware store for a paint thinner/solvent. It just isn't as widely available as ethanol.
Test your net with Netalyzr
The future of power is mostly about power, not about the minutia of which energy storage device will be used. Fuel cells are good and fine, but not much use without one hell of a lot of extra electricity production. Hydrogen is expensive to make, store and use. And sure, we could spend a lot of time and money and probably crack some of those nuts, but the time and money would be much better spent on simply making more electricity.
Moving everything to hydrogen fuel cells requires that hydrogen, a product that needs to be made with lots of electricity, be pulled from the already taxed US grid. The only answer to that new problem is having to build a whole hell of a lot more power plants. And the truth is, that NIMBY (not in my back yard) will largely prevent any new nuclear reactors from being built in the US. So in order to move to fuel cells on a large scale, or even a modest percentage of the nations automotive fleet, we'll have to at least double the existing number of fossil fuel burning power plants. These will mostly be built out in the countryside where NIMBY isn't as much of a problem, pumping electricty into the cities to make all this hydrogen.
So all that's accomplished by quickly adopting hydrogen fuel cells is moving existing pollution from the cities and into the countryside, remote emissions at it's finest.
I have long suggested spending big money on fusion power research. Because once you crack the fusion nut, the little matters of localized power storage for automobiles and laptops and everything else will mostly solve themselves. Because if electricity is as cheap as air and doesn't pollute, who's going to want to pay for petrochemicals? Sure, fusion may not be quite that cheap, but compared on an environmental cost and given the benefits of near total energy self sufficiency, fusion would be so very much cheaper.
Solve the power problem and the free market will figure out the best storage devices, maybe it will be fuel cells, maybe not.
I work for a small rural telephone company. I can't wait until fuel cells are economically feasible.
We often have to spend $10-20k to get the power company to run power to our cabinets that use less than a kW of power. It would be great to have a fuel cell generator and a 500 gallon propane tank to power sites like this.
I don't believe most of the 'digital divide' propaganda, but to the extent such a thing exists being able to have power where we need it (inexpensively) could make a difference.
Yet another prime example of the automotive industry being paid to ignore a new technology. Who could possibly believe that we can get battery-sized fuel cells with all their issues (power-to-weight, sufficient storage, complex systems for byproduct management, power management for spike loading) but not get car-sized engines for another decade?
Really, is there no one in the industrial world with the brass balls to just say no to oil money? - or is it a case that if you say no then they just pay the government, and the regulators stomp on it instead?
Last good report I saw was MIT students (I think) producing a fuel-cell powered electric scooter....I wonder how long that lasted before the lab's financial sponsors got 'leaned on' and told the lab to kill it.
"By contrast, the fuel to power internal combustion engines costs roughly $50 a kilowatt."
Silly mistake. $50 is the price of a kilowatt of internal combustion engine, not that of a kilowatt of fuel. There is no such thing as a kilowatt of fuel.