Message: 1
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 09:00:12 -0800 (PST)
From: AFV@afv.com (Alternate Fuel Vehicles)
Subject: Don't Bet On Fuel Cells, Manufacturer Says
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23568/story.htm
SWITZERLAND: January 26, 2004 (Reuters) DAVOS, Switzerland -
The producer of fuel cells that can recharge mobile phones and portable music players told industrialists and policymakers last week not to count on the power packs to solve the energy crisis. "Don't hold your breath on fuel cells. Every 10 years they say commercial deployment is only 10 years away. We're still not seeing any real fuel cells that can run, say, a car," said Robert Lifton, chief executive of Medis Technologies. He was participating in several discussions on energy at the World Economic Forum, an annual huddle of government officials, corporate executives and special interest groups.
Medis itself will not provide the solution either, because its Power Pack fuel cell will only power small portable devices, and cannot be used for bigger items such as computers or cars. "Our product doesn't scale," Lifton said, adding that the company's first working prototypes would be introduced in May. The company plans to put a $29.99 price tag on its fuel cell for portable consumer electronics, such as handsets, MP3 players and digital cameras. Each cartridge of fuel, which will power a cell phone for some 12 hours, will be priced at $1.50.
Its fuel cell should be among the very first commercial applications of an electrochemical process that was first discovered in the nineteenth century. A fuel cell converts the chemical energy of a fuel and oxidant to electrical energy.
RESEARCH PROGRAM
In the United States, fuel cells, and the hydrogen that is used in many models as a fuel, is seen as a solution to keep engines running, even when the world runs out of fossil fuels later this century. President Bush supported a $1.3 billion research program to develop such fuel cells.
Many Japanese companies are also working on fuel cells, with Toshiba claiming a prototype that powers a laptop. NEC has boasted about a record level of milliwatts it can generate per square centimeter of reaction surface. Franco-Italian chip maker STMicroelectronics is using chip-making technology to increase energy generation. Fuel cells are better for the environment than ordinary batteries, which contain heavy metals. Fuel cells only produce electricity, water, and in some cases heat. But Lifton said hydrogen fuel cells still had to overcome essential problems, such as excess heat and water generation. Governments should focus on energy preservation, and not hope that fuel cell technology will catch up with energy needs. He and others also pointed out that fuel cells could only be a solution to the upcoming energy crisis if the fuel, such as hydrogen, is generated with renewable energy sources. Hydrogen can either be generated by wind or solar energy, or by using fossil fuels such as gas. Companies like Shell Renewables, a unit of Royal Dutch, are talking to governments to emphasize that fuel cell technology should be combined with renewable energy.
Solar cells and wind mills generate only a fraction of the world's energy needs at the moment, less than one percent. Long-term scenario planning by Shell forecasts that in 30 to 40 years renewable energy will generate over one-third of all global energy requirements.
Story by Lucas van Grinsven
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
======================================
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:00:36 -0800 (PST)
From: AFV@afv.com (Alternate Fuel Vehicles)
Subject: World's Biggest Solar Power Station About To Open
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1028244.htm
Last Update: Tuesday, January 20, 2004. 12:00pm (AEDT)
World's biggest solar power station to open in Germany.
The world's biggest solar power station will be connected to the German electricity grid at the end of July near the eastern city of Leipzig, the firms involved in the project said.
Made up of 33,500 solar panels, the station at Espenhain will be able to generate about five megawatts, enough electricity for 1,800 homes, the Shell Solar and GEOSOL companies said.
They say the solar power station will save some 3,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
Germany is the world's second largest producer of solar energy behind Japan, according to the Environment Ministry. -- AFP
======================================
???`????,??,?`????`????,??,?
AFV News and Discussion
???`????,??,?`????`????,??,?
======================================
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:01:00 -0800 (PST)
From: AFV@afv.com (Alternate Fuel Vehicles)
Subject: UW Scientists Want To Mine The Moon For Energy
USA: MADISON, WI (AP) ? Two University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists
believe moon rocks contain all the energy the United States needs for the next millennium. The moon's surface is full of the energy source, helium-3, said Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at UW. "If we could land the space shuttle on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth, that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year," he said. President Bush's plan to create a permanent lunar base brings Kulcinski and others at the institute hope for their idea. Kulcinski said he does not know of any other institution that is working on helium-3 fusion. John Santarius, a professor at the Fusion Technology Institute, said helium-3 provides one million times more energy per pound than a ton of coal. Fusion of helium-3 does not produce greenhouse emissions, and mining it would do little environmental harm, Kulcinski said. "The moon doesn't have air or water <-[NASA is 99% certain the moon -does- have water: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980306.html ]. So, there won't be any of that kind of pollution," he said.
Helium-3 is found in the top few feet of lunar soil. To access it, miners would shovel up the surface, bake it and isolate the gas, Santarius said.
Since 1985, Kulcinski, Santarius and others at UW have thought about the possibility of harnessing the energy of helium-3 through fusion, which combines atoms to create energy. Fission, which is the process used in nuclear reactors, splits atoms.
"We came at it from an energy standpoint," Kulcinski said. "We were looking for a long-term economical and safe form of energy." The researchers are still working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in. The team estimates the moon probably holds more than 1 million metric tons of helium-3 on its surface, more than enough energy to provite the nation with more than 1,000 years of electricity. "This is going to be hot," said George Miley, a professor of nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But Robert Bless, a retired UW astronomy professor, believes the nation should invest in fuel technologies on Earth. "We should be getting the people in Detroit to start designing vehicles that use less gas," he said. "We should be focusing our efforts here."
======================================
???`????,??,?`????`????,??,?
AFV News and Discussion
???`????,??,?`????`????,??,?
======================================
Message: 14
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 09:59:19 -0800 (PST)
From: AFV@afv.com (Alternate Fuel Vehicles)
Subject: Toyota Overtakes Ford
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23586/story.htm
JAPAN:
January 27, 2004 (Reuters) TOKYO/DETROIT - It's official: Japan's Toyota Motor Corp has unseated Ford Motor Co as the world's second-biggest auto maker. The long-anticipated switch came as the U.S. "Big Three" lost customers to Japan's top auto makers in their own backyard last year, and as Toyota drove aggressively into the red-hot Asian car market, a weak spot for U.S. makers.
Toyota is steadily marching toward its goal of grabbing 15 percent of the global car market some time in the next decade, from about 11 percent now. That share could put Toyota ahead of General Motors, which said it had 14.7 percent in 2003.
Toyota said yesterday its group - which includes truck maker Hino Motors and minicar maker Daihatsu Motor - sold 6.78 million vehicles last year, up 10 percent from 2002 as it boosted its presence in every major car market. That was 60,000 more than the 6.72 million vehicles sold by the family of Ford cars, which groups together the Blue Oval brand, Mercury, and luxury marques Lincoln, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin. While the new ranking marks a symbolic shift in the global auto industry's balance of power, analysts have long argued that rating auto makers by their sales volume is just that: symbolic. "The significance is similar to the change from the year 1999 to 2000," said Christopher Richter, auto analyst at HSBC Securities in Tokyo. "It's an event that people will reflect on, but there are more important differences," he said, naming the vast gap in market value as one of them.
SIZE ISN'T EVERYTHING
Indeed, at over $120 billion, Toyota's market capitalization - a measure of how much investors believe a company is worth - is more than four times that of Ford, and bigger than the combined stock values of Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler
By profitability, too, Toyota is way ahead of the pack. Its bottom-line profit came to around $7 billion last business year - by far the highest in the industry - and is expected to jump another 27 percent for the year to March 31, according to a survey of 21 brokerages by Reuters Research.
Meanwhile, Ford earned a net $495 million in 2003, returning to the black for the first time in three years. Analysts expect a fivefold increase in earnings this year. Ford has also been burdened by financial ills.
While its automotive business has $26 billion in cash, it also has billions in pension and health-care obligations, and its rating from Standard & Poor's stands one grade above "junk." Executives have committed to rolling out new products fast, but models already in the pipeline and due out over the next couple of years will cost more than the vehicles they replace, forcing Ford to scour its business for cost cuts.
In contrast, Toyota has a cash pile of $20 billion, enabling it to spend freely on the development of next-generation environmental and other technology which could give it an edge when and if governments introduce stricter regulations. It can always raise more money: S&P last week raised the outlook on Toyota's top-notch 'AAA' rating to stable.
LOSING SLEEP?
The new ranking will be seen as a loss of face by Ford, an American icon that has held the number-two spot behind crosstown rival GM for over 70 years - longer than Toyota has been in business. The milestone coincided with its centennial, no less.
Ford executives have publicly shrugged off the event, saying it had deliberately chosen to maximize profits instead of sales. "I'm not going to lose sleep over it," Chief Operating Officer Nick Scheele said when asked earlier this month about the possibility of being overtaken by the Japanese juggernaut. But he added: "I would wish we had the same opportunity in their home market that they have in ours. We were the market leader in Japan until we were kicked out in the early '30s... "Let's be honest about it. We can't sell in the Japanese market. They sell two million units in the Japanese market. Let's take that out and then see where we are."
Japanese records on car ownership from those days are scrappy, but the country had fewer than 150,000 cars, trucks and buses in the early part of that decade. Ford assembled 15,000 vehicles in Japan in 1935, before the military regime ousted U.S. companies out of the country. The Blue Oval brand sold a third of that last year. Japan's car makers have come a long way since then. Toyota President Fujio Cho has called Detroit's "Big Three" a "presence beyond the clouds in the sky," saying the auto maker had no intention of overtaking anybody in Detroit. But with Toyota's track record, GM executives will surely be keeping one eye on the rear-view mirror.
Story by Chang-Ran Kim and Justin Hyde
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
======================================
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 15
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 09:59:44 -0800 (PST)
From: AFV@afv.com (Alternate Fuel Vehicles)
Subject: Solar Power Industry Slowed By Pricey Silicon
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23585/story.htm
GERMANY: January 27, 2004 (Reuters)
BURGHAUSEN, Germany - The solar industry is exploring new ways to produce silicon needed for photovoltaic cells as high oil prices spark a renewed search for alternative energy sources. The cells, used in solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity, are made of semiconducting materials - the same basic materials used to make microprocessor chips for computers. Direct applications range from powering small devices like pocket calculators and watches to lighting and heating homes, and some 60 percent of solar power produced is used to provide power to national electric grids.
Found in quartz and sand, silicon is the second-most abundant element on Earth after oxygen. But processing the material is complex and expensive. Soaring oil prices and competition for silicon from computer chipmakers have prompted a race to develop new ways of producing solar-grade silicon material more cheaply. As chipmakers enjoy a recovery in their industry, the price of high-purity silicon - as cheap as $6 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) during the semi-conductor slump - has leaped tenfold. But the purity of silicon needed for solar is not as high as that needed for microchips, and it is this market that companies such as Germany's Wacker Chemie want to exploit.
Wacker, 51 percent owned by the Wacker family and 49 percent by French-German drugmaker Aventis, believes it is ahead of the game with a process it has developed for solar-grade silicon at its main plant in Burghausen on the German-Austrian border. "Of course some competitors may say it's not worth our while, but we have given a real commitment that we will invest specifically for pv (photovoltaic cells)," Ewald Schindlbeck, polysilicons director at Wacker Chemie, told Reuters.
Among other companies in the race are Joint Solar Silicon, a joint venture between Degussa and Deutsche Solar, and U.S. company Hemlock - a joint venture between Japan's Shin-Etsu and Mitsubishi and Dow Corning of the United States. Norwegian metals company Elkem, the world's biggest producer of impure silicon, also says it has found a new refining method and has said it plans to make an announcement in January.
TOUGH COMPETITION
Power can be produced from traditional fossil fuels about four or five times more cheaply than solar. Just a fraction of 1 percent of the world's electricity consumption is currently generated with solar power, which is heavily subsidized to allow it to compete. As the cost of silicon accounts for some 40 percent of the price of a solar installation, Michel Viaut, general secretary of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association lobby group, says an affordable supply is the only way of giving the solar industry a chance to compete. Wacker thinks it has the answer. It says its new method can produce purified silicon of a high enough grade for the solar industry one-third more cheaply than the traditional, so-called "Siemens" process - and be ready to go into commercial production in 2006. The traditional process involves reacting a hazardous liquid form of silicon, trichlorosilane, with hydrochloric acid at temperatures of more than 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit to create ingots of pure silicon around silicon rods. It is a stop-start process that has to be halted to allow cooling and harvesting of the ingots, which are then crushed and cleaned.
NEW METHOD
Wacker's method uses milled silicon seed particles on a so-called "fludized bed" instead of silicon rods, giving a larger surface area for the reactions to occur and producing a continuous flow of silicon granules with no need for further cleaning. The company says once it ramps up production from its current pilot projects it will be able to give long-term supply guarantees to the solar industry at around $32 a kilogram. Wacker believes solar-cell makers would tolerate this price for the quality it says it can provide, and the EPIA's Viaut cautiously agrees that the price is in a realistic range.
He would certainly welcome any help for an industry still in its formative years.
"It's a very sensitive and still a very young sector," Viaut said. "Any little thing can make a huge difference to us."
(Additional reporting by Lucas van Grinsven in Amsterdam) Story by Georgina Prodhan
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
======================================
A personal quest to promote the use of wind energy and hydrogen technology in the Great Lakes area of the United States. The Great Lakes area is in a unique position to become an energy exporting region through these and other renewable energy technologies. *Update 2014: Just do it everywhere - Dan*
No comments:
Post a Comment