Just think of it — sitting at the Balboa/Convoy traffic lights in your car — no sound, not even from the truck beside you. The lights change and all you can hear is the quiet humming of your and other electric motors as the traffic swiftly zips away. Stop at the methanol station and fill up. Your next fill-up will be 250 miles later. Your car is a mobile generating plant. Maybe you go fishing on the weekend, take your television, VCR, electric grill and some lights to the campground, plug them in to the car, then cook and eat your fish while you watch a football game or movie. For home electrical power there's a solar array and a small fuel cell unit hooked up to a gas line. These two inexpensively pump out all the power you need. Grid failures are a thing of the past. If everything else fails, just plug your car in to your house. Not only is the environment quieter, but the atmosphere is cleaner: there's no smog. Energy utopia? Perhaps. But much of the technology is under development, some is close to production, and the major manufacturers of internal combustion engines, cars and trucks are very, very interested in it, investing billions of dollars in various aspects of fuel cell development. San Diego, situated in smoggy Southern California, is well-positioned to be a national and world leader in the development and adoption of clean energy for vehicles, ships, aircraft, residences, office buildings, schools and stores. Ever more stringent air quality regulations will encourage both the development of new vehicles and power plants that use cleaner fuels and new, more efficient methods of tapping nature's solar and wind energy. Fuel cells create electricity in a chemical reaction with hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of a catalyst, and on pure hydrogen the only residue is water. The hydrogen can be made on board from a variety of fuels, such as methanol, ethanol (renewable), natural gas, propane, and with some low-level emissions, gasoline and diesel fuel. More than 630 million vehicles worldwide belch almost 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, the 190 million vehicles in the United States contributing about one-third of that. Total "bad stuff" emissions from the world's vehicles amounts to 6.5 billion tons per year, a staggering amount. After years of resistance and denial, and energized by new science suggesting the deterioration of our climate, the major carmakers, oil producers and power companies are joining with local, state and federal governments and environmentalists in a major effort to develop cleaner power sources. The California Fuel Cell Partnership (members: California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission, Ford Motor Co., Daimler/Chrysler, Ballard Power Systems, Arco, Shell, Texaco, and recently Honda and Volkswagen) has been set up to investigate and promote the use of fuel cells in automobiles and buses. New mandates, such as the California Air Resources Board requirement which decrees that 10 percent of all automobiles sold in 2003 shall be emission-free, are being passed. There is considerable doubt about the automakers' ability to meet this particular deadline, but there appears to be no question this is the beginning of a new era for auto and power makers. A fuel cell company that many consider to be the world leader in the development of the most advanced fuel cell engines for automobiles is DBB Fuel Cell Engines of Poway, the U.S. division of DBB Fuel Cell Engines of Nabern, Germany. The company’s efforts are behind what is known as a Proton Exchange Membrane, or PEM, cell system. Rick Cooper, managing director of the DBB office here, says the introduction of fuel cell cars using the PEM is near: "Our goal of putting 40 fuel cell cars on the road by 2003 is not too aggressive, we expect to meet that goal. It will likely take 10 to 20 years before we see a significant penetration by fuel cell cars into the internal combustion-dominated market. Hybrid cars (battery powered electric motors with a small internal combustion engine to recharge batteries) similar to those being offered by Toyota and Honda will be an interim alternative to fuel-engined cars." This is an energy revolution, as critical to the human condition as the industrial revolution of the 1800s. The revolution will target our use of carbon-based fuels, the internal combustion engine and our fossil fuel power plants. These are all sources of the carbon dioxide emissions which many scientists across the world believe are creating the greenhouse effect, trapping the earth's heat and causing major climate changes. The massive investment in the gasoline/diesel delivery infrastructure, however, and the 100-year investment in the internal combustion engine, are not going to be easy to dismantle or change. Yet it is an inefficient system. After all the time and money spent on refinements, the internal combustion engine still consumes five gallons of gasoline to get one gallon's worth to power the driving wheels. The rest dissipates into the atmosphere in lost heat and air pollution. The Solar Option The world has ventured into alternative fuels, with mixed results. Already tried are nuclear energy, clean except for a nasty habit of emitting life shortening radiation; and solar energy, which although expensive to collect and store, may still have a part to play in the clean energy future. In fact, the earth receives as much energy from sunlight in 20 days as is believed to be stored in its entire reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. Collecting this energy and storing it for later use is the technical challenge facing scientists. Much progress in solar collection has been made in the last few years with new thermal and computer technology. For vehicles and homes, solar energy probably will become quite useful as a secondary source of electricity, saving fuel. Horizon Industries of Escondido has installed photovoltaic solar panels in some 700 homes in San Diego and Baja, Mexico. In residences located in areas beyond the power grid, all the power needs are served by these solar panels. In some instances where wind is available, solar panels and wind generators are coupled; the solar panel supplies power when the weather is good, and the wind generator when it is bad. For those residences served by the grid, the solar panel installations contribute to the residence needs and lower the cost of power. Barry Butler, vice president and manager of SAIC's Solar Energy Products Division in San Diego, says that SAIC's new solar concentrator system creates electricity for feeding a region's power grid with clean electrical power. These also are suitable for generating clean electricity for communities and countries outside the United States that do not have access to a distribution grid. A number of these units are operating in the United States, and Butler notes that "the solar option could be very valuable in San Diego County; the deserts around San Diego are ideal for solar power." The question is when. "Solar technology will be in the energy mix," says Butler. "How quickly it will be adopted depends on the community's sensitivity to environmental issues. At 6 cents a kilowatt hour into the grid it will be a little more than fossil fuel grid power at today’s fuel prices." A Prolific Power Source The most prolific source of clean energy on this planet is hydrogen, which can be obtained from renewable and other fuels. Hydrogen can create electricity through the use of fuel cells. This method of powering electric motors onboard vehicles promises efficiencies of up to 60 percent in low-power driving, such as around town, which means that out of five gallons of hydrogen or methanol consumed, some three gallons get to the driving wheels. Electric motors are ideal for powering moving vehicles or portable devices; they are quiet, smooth, do not need expensive variable speed transmissions and do not pollute. They are virtually maintenance free and do not leak oil on the highways and your driveway. How to store electrical energy on the vehicle for powering the electric motors is the conundrum which must be solved in a practical and inexpensive way before widespread use of electric motors becomes a reality. Batteries, which have been under development for up to 100 years, are just too large, heavy, expensive and inconvenient to be practical. Metallic Power of Carlsbad has developed a new and intriguing idea, the use of a zinc/air fuel cell for small engine applications. The fuel cell runs on zinc pellets which generate electricity when zinc combines with oxygen in the presence of a catalyst to form zinc oxide, commonly used in skin creams. The trick is recycling the zinc oxide back into zinc pellets in a recycler powered by a wall outlet. This is a method of compact, nonflammable, nonpolluting storage of electrical energy in hydrogen form. "It’s an entirely closed-loop system, with nothing to add, nothing to discard and nothing wasted," says Jeff Colborn, Metallic Power's chief executive. "This completely safe fuel cell has three times the energy efficiency of a gasoline engine, and it reuses its zinc and electrolytes over and over." Metallic Power has codevelopment arrangements with Briggs and Stratton, manufacturer of small engines; Textron Turf Care, a market leader in industrial equipment and the manufacturer of Cushman products; and Toro. All are planning to develop zinc/air quiet fuel cell engines for leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, lawnmowers, etc. Colborn says golf courses are prime potential customers. "Golf course mowing in the early hours of the morning before golfers start playing is a noise problem for residents close to the courses. We see an almost completely silent fuel cell-powered lawnmower as solving this problem. We are teaming with lawnmower manufacturers to develop such a unit." On the question of suitability for automobiles, Colborn says, "We are a few years behind the PEM fuel cell in an automobile application. However, I think we have some advantages which will become apparent. Our fuel cell system is much cheaper to produce, and it (the zinc pellet) is a non-flammable fuel not dependent in any way on carbon-based fuels such as gasoline or methanol. We do recognize, however, that creating a zinc refueling infrastructure may take a long time and will probably be expensive." Tom Page, the former chief executive of San Diego Gas & Electric, is a member of the Metallic Power board. Page says that with San Diego County's population expected to grow substantially in the next 10 to 20 years, citizen resistance to extending the power grid through neighborhoods, along with the costs involved in serving new developments, may well provide a market for "distributed generation," stand-alone generators for which the fuel cell is well-suited. "As the cost of locating new transmission lines keeps going up (all costs, including social cost) you must look at alternative energy sources, and dropping a microturbine or fuel cell generator into place at a residence or substation begins to look more attractive," Page says. San Diego’s high electric rates also help make the local case for distributed generation as an alternative to power grid extension to all newly populated areas. Other fuel cell activities in San Diego include a fuel cell demonstration power plant at the Miramar Air Station. Al Figueroa is president of VFL Energy Technologies, Power Industry Services Division in San Diego. Figueroa, who worked at SDG&E for 20 years, noted during a recent fuel cell conference here that a 250-kilowatt fuel cell power generation project demonstration, installed by SDG&E, M-C Power (manufacturer of fuel cells) and the military at the Miramar Air Station, provided power for the air station for 6,400 hours between 1996 and 1999. The unit was shut down in December 1999. VFL Energy Technologies, an engineering, consulting and services company with an office in San Diego, managed the operation of the Miramar unit. M-C Power plans to restart the plant in the future. To Make It All Happen During the recent Business Case for Fuel Cells conference in San Diego there was a healthy recognition of the technical, regulatory and economic problems to be overcome before alternative energy sources become our major sources of power. Costs have to be reduced. Regulatory agencies in transportation and utilities need to encourage continuous development and implementation of new energy sources by setting new realistic requirements for clean air, thus inducing the major commercial players in these fields to comply. At the same time regulations and building codes need to recognize the introduction of the new technologies with appropriate changes to allow installation of solar and fuel cell power units in residences and other buildings. San Diego likely will benefit from the advent of the power and energy revolution, first as a producer of fuel cells and solar devices, second as a user of clean energy, and third, from the clean air and quieter neighborhoods, roads and freeways.

Home | Features | Info | Cover Story | About Us | Back Issues | Search