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Meeting Report:
2nd Annual Fuel Cell Investor Conference
March 26-27, 2002 — New York, New York
By Michael Chesworth
Author/Artist/7MS Webmaster
mike@7ms.com
I'll start with a confession: I was a rube
at the 2nd Annual Fuel Cell Investor Conference. What I knew
about fuel cells and fuel cell companies prior to Tuesday
could probably be taught to a chicken. Primarily because,
being an artisté by profession, I spend my days --
as any banker, CEO or scientist will tell you -- frolicking
through the sunlit glades with wreaths of bayberry in my flaxen
locks and not studying proton exchange membranes. But lo'
when I heard of this "fuel cell" which shall save
my forest from hydrocarbon pollution, I promptly (for an artist,
that is) dropped my pipes of pan and sprinted lightly to my
trusty Volvo and thence to the corner of 45th Street and Madison
Avenue in New York City. I am, after all, not just any fool;
I am an investor, too.
The President of the United States said, "The conservation
of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we
solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others."
His administration challenged the entrenched energy industrialists,
taking them to task for their stranglehold on the energy distribution
market. He embraced cutting edge technology; he was the first
president to ride in a state-of-the-art transportation platform.
Sounds like a great guy to have in the White House for the
fuel cell industry, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, that visionary leader was Theodore Roosevelt,
president in the beginning of the last century. His environmental
rhetoric saw expression in the founding of the National Park
System; the energy industrialist was Rockefeller and the Standard
Oil Trust; the state-of-the-art transportation was the automobile
and the airplane. At this conference, a lot was said about
the need for better government support (money) for fuel cell
development and the future implementation of infrastructure
for DPG (distributed power generation) and the fuel cell vehicle
world to come. Based on the recently proposed energy bill
from the White House's current resident, Teddy Roosevelt he
ain't. But for these two days in March, fuel cell developers
and investors at least had his namesake, the Roosevelt Hotel
— and nice hotel, too — a mere twenty-four blocks
from Teddy's boyhood home.
Whether the T.R. angle was just a fluke or not, Christopher
Flavin of the World Watch Institute, (whose 1994 book Power
Surge coincidentally and totally unbeknowst to him had
its cover designed by yours truly) launched the conference
in the Grand Ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel speaking eloquently
and convincingly about the global environmental need for fuel
cells. It's becoming apparent that releasing X tons of geologically
stored carbon annually into the atmosphere maybe should be
rethought. This opinion is not only held by climatologists,
atmospheric scientists, environmentalists, and many average
people but also by monster insurance companies nervous about
the displacement of seawater from the iceshelf in Antarctica
that just fell off. Global warming theory is becoming less
and less of a debate and more of a mandate to get something
going. But Flavin didn't stop with mere environmental catastrophe.
He coupled this compelling argument with two others: the continuing
political volatility of the oil-producing regions and (pay
attention, investors) the huge market — roughly two-thirds
of the world's population — that could use distributed
power generation. And fuel cells are especially suited to
providing remote targeted power generation without the need
for grandiose infrastructure support. In conjunction with
renewable source hydrogen generation, fuel cell plants can
work their own little grid, valley by valley. He noted the
"take-off" in alternative renewable power generation
industries such as wind (25-30% annual growth rate) and solar
(same pattern, nine years behind). Nothing like a pressing
need, a clean solution, and a huge market to spur on technological
applications.
What
Drives Fuel Cells
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