200kw?

at home?

In 2003 I was quoted a figure of $5 US per watt (not kilowatt, per watt!) by the clever folks at the NAtional research council Institute for fuel cell innovation in Vancouver. Not that they had it there yet, but that was what their best estimate was if the technology would have been commercialized then. Ballard was awful darn close to having something for sale at that time...

My 5000watt Y2K emergency generator that I bought for $499 is a really expensive way to get electric, its capital costwas $0.10 per watt...

200kw = 200000*$5= $1,000,000

Maybe by now its down to $3 per watt...

I'd love to have 10 percent of your hobby budget.

I'd buy del the cat fancy feast tinned cat food every day.

milo " I must have a different idea about what a home is"

Ballard and their number one patron GM have been waiting in the wings with those damn fuel cells for going on two decades. Their stock is still just barley out of the penny stock bracket. Don't waste your time with those bozo's.

Back in the late 80's I took a ride in one of their concept fuel cell Blazer's. Four wheel 50 hp each direct drive electric motors fired up by a fairly large but workable fuel cell engine. The darn thing like to have taken my head off driving out of the barn onto the test track. Accelerated like a scalded cat! Engineer said it would never make it to the market because the electric drives were too quiet for Americans to ever feel it was sexy enough to put hard cash into.

I did not believe him then.. they had all the problems solved. Pure hydrogen - no conversion poisoning problem. Four wheel high torque DC motors - simple - low or no maintainance. Fiberglass reinforced 3600 PSI tanks under the after body (similar to proven CNG powered utility vehicles use now) - but now I get it. The hydrogen fuel cell is never going anywhere while marketing moguls do advanced research and find that noisy - smoggy - big bore behemoths will get mass sales hands down. Fuel cells and electric vehicles won't get cost effective until mass productions of scale make them cost competitive and the truth is all these technologies are assembled by hand as we speak. No way to be cost competitive - even if made in China. And worse - the big auto makes actually make their big profits from after market replacement parts and Electric Vehicles last 4 to 5 time longer than gas bangers with their complexities... so where is the incentive to build cars with 5 times less after market profits to be made?