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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.
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?
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.