On Tuesday my own paper for Azure (www.azuredynamics.com) was scheduled to be in session 5E. I attended an author’s breakfast to meet the session co-chairs and fellow authors. Our table was split with session 6A and I had a chance to catch up with one of its co-chairs, Rex Luzader of Millennium Fuel Cell (luzader@millenniumcell.com). Their specialty is the use of sodium borohydride as a hydrogen carrier. Luzader updated me on progress. While there have been a number of vehicle demonstration projects, he was finding, like others, that a valuable niche was developing for Millennium in telecom and remote stationary applications.

I had arranged to meet Allan Cooper (ACatCorfe@AOL.com), a consultant to the Lead Development Association International, to discuss his update on his work on controlling Hawker Cyclon cells in a Honda Insight. Although Cooper’s battery weighs in at 50kg, as against the 28kg of the Insight battery, the lead battery community is optimistic that the required life can be achieved. I listened to Cooper’s paper and was delighted to find that is was followed by a classic Li-ion paper from Jet Shu of the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan (Jpshu@itri.org.tw).

The editor had kindly asked me to cover my own presentation. As a consequence it was relaxing to be able to sit through all the papers of session 5E. Best of all, co-chair Dennis Davis from GM’s hybrid team thoughtfully asked the authors to sit with the audience, the better to see the slides. Arun Jaura of Ford (ajaura@ford.com) described the thinking behind the fuel storage systems for the Ford fuel cell and hydrogen engine hybrid vehicle programs. He outlined his down selection process and discussed the relative merits of sodium borohydride, liquid hydrogen, metal hydrides and gaseous systems before focusing on the selected gaseous storage system. Jet Shu talked about the performance of the vehicle for which he had discussed the excellent Li-ion battery we had seen him describe earlier.

Paul Scott (pscott@isecorp.com) of ISE Research in San Diego, California, outlined the approach and benefits of preceding fuel cell hybrid buses with hydrogen-engined buses using a larger Ford hydrogen engine. Scott was discussing the buses around 30,000lb GVW. I gave, more or less, the same story for the Class 2 vehicle market, which is 6,000 to 10,000lb GVW, assuming numbers from the engine described by Arun Jaura and the Ballard HY80 fuel cell. With three papers describing the hydrogen engine as a near-term step to hydrogen, it was no surprise when the questions focused on this topic.

Passing through the exhibit area I saw that I had missed a relatively low-cost non-aqueous carbon ultracapacitor being shown by Michael Choi of Nesscap Co. Ltd. (http://www.nesscap.com/prod/prod.htm). His stand provided me with a final photograph.

The conference dinner was definitely “a night to remember” with first class ambience. The EDTA team had persuaded Southern California Edison and Toyota to sponsor an evening on the Queen Mary. At 6:45 p.m. buses were at the three conference hotels to move us all over. I was surprised to be sitting next to Ken Stewart, whom I mentioned earlier; though Stewart began his career as an engineer he enjoys market development. We were discussing the relative market caps of the automotive companies in the Business Week article as we reached the top deck of the QM. There, the view was magnificent and the air was clear. As Stewart expanded on the subject of the EV1 or Impact, we were joined by the most famous of its originators, Paul MacCready, the present chairman of Aerovironment (www.aerovironment.com).

MacCready had enjoyed his visit to the conference and had been particularly impressed by the progress on Li-ion. He was of the view that if progress continued there, it may become a dominant technology and might perhaps gain a larger niche than the vehicle fuel cell.

Later in the evening I joined Electrovaya’s CEO, Sankar Das Gupta, who described some of the interesting steps his company had taken on the way to Li-ion. There is no wonder that Toyota has developed an in-house Li-ion battery. The original GM EV1 battery weighed in at 395Kg. If, say, we can reach 200Wh/kg, this would give a stunning 94kWh and potentially quadruple the original range. Bear in mind this is a system where self-discharge is low, as Toyota emphasized in their Li-ion presentation. Gupta told me a lot of fleets and individuals had shown interest in purchasing a comfortable ZEV with a reasonable range. As a result, Electrovaya is seriously looking at how to commercialize the Maya 100 at the earliest opportunity.

The air was still clear when I walked back to the hotel with Ken Fielding, CEO of Delta Q Technologies Corp. (www.delta-q.com). Working with key industry OEMs, Delta-Q has launched their first product, an advanced high efficiency battery charger, and is shipping in volume.

On Wednesday morning I met John Lutz of UQM Technologies (www.uqm.com) just as he was leaving. Their unique brushless DC systems had been in many of the demonstration vehicles available for the Ride N Drive program, including a hybrid electric Chevrolet Suburban and a Mercury Sable developed by the University of California at Davis, both of which are powered by UQM propulsion systems. Several fuel cell vehicles are powered by Ballard fuel cell engines that incorporate a UQM air compressor drive motor, including the Daimler Chrysler F-CELL, the Honda FCX, and the Ford Focus FCHV.