California's reaction to fuel cell research: "Yes!" then "No!" then "Oh, all right."

California's reaction to fuel cell research: "Yes!" then "No!" then "Oh, all right."

They kinda flip-flopped back and forth. The latest decision is "Yes."

We shall see.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/reversal-on-fuel-cells-in-california/

My own feeling is that experimental reseach is good. But making the public pay for it is not. They should take that $43 million out of thier own R&D budget, not out of the pockets of the residents of the California region which they service.

April 9, 2010, 11:55 am <!-- date updated --><!-- <abbr class="updated" title="2010-04-09T15:39:02+00:00">— Updated: 3:39 pm</abbr> --><!-- Title -->
Reversal on Fuel Cells in California

<!-- Byline --><ADDRESS class="byline author vcard">By TODD WOODY</ADDRESS>

A month after an administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission proposed denying a request from two big utilities to install fuel cells, regulators reversed course on Thursday and approved the projects.

The two utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, had each proposed installing fuel cells that would generate three megawatts of electricity so they could study the impact of such technology on the power grid.

The administrative law judge, Dorothy J. Duda, [initially] found the $43 million cost of the projects, which would be financed by the utilities’ customers, to be excessive.

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clintl said:

It is coming out of their R&D budget. Where do you think think the money in their R&D budget comes from?

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If that's the case, then fine. But they'd darn well better not raise their rates because of this. This is an exercise in ethics.

I'm kinda leery of fuel cells because they are -- in test laboratories-- an energy sink hole that takes far more enegry to produce, charge, and maintain than the energy we get out of them. So, in a nutshell, we invest something like (let's say) 20 volts in producing one, we then expend 2 volts to try and charge one of those suckers full of a mere 10 volts, and then when we go to retrive that 10 volts a few hours or days or weeks later, we are only able to get 9.4 volts out of it (not the original 10 volts) because there is a net loss of voltage in the transfer of power from the cell into whatevr electrical appliance it is we're trying to power up.

But I am definitly in favor of research to see if we can try and either reduce that net loss, or else try to determine when a fuel cell is feasible and when it isn't. Fuel cells are ultimately only temorary holding devices which allow us to hang onto electicity that has already been produced but isn't needed just yet (in other words, it's a glorified battery). And as we all know, when batteries do nothing but sit around for prologed periods they always slowly lose bits of juice as time passes. Fuel cells do the same. There IS a benefit to our learning more and more about how to store electricy which has already been produced and merely needs to be stuck on a shelf for a while. But I do not see fuel cells as "an alternative energy source." They're nothing but a storage medium for energy that we already generated some place else.