What is Intelligence?

Sorry for the short hiatus, but I got hung up last Tuesday with our president's press conference. Problem was, here I am talking from the 'Fuel Cell Intelligence' point of view, and he seemed to totally redefine the meaning of the word. 'Intelligence' particularly in regard to the latest foreign intelligence assessment regarding the state of Iran's nuclear program, immediately became 'not intelligence', or just plain 'wrong'. Although there might have been misunderestimating going on, his pronouncement did cause me to rethink the term, putting it in a new subjective light, perhaps freeing me from reliance on all facts in the reporting on 'intelligence'.

Let me comment on some minor fuel cell announcements the past week that fit into this category:

1. Medis received permission for its 'fuel cell' multi-battery charger to be carried on commercial airplanes. This is not so significant FC industry news, because the Medis disposable package is not a fuel cell by definition.

2. Italian (with intense Japanese backing) catalyst innovator Acta is riding on the success of its product's ability to reform hydrogen out of ammonia, reporting the smell is the only remaining problem. Admittedly, ammonia is a liquid and as such a much easier fuel to transport or store than hydrogen, but it is manufactured by combining some of the 79% of the atmosphere that is nitrogen with manufactured hydrogen. That is, one of the major uses for industrial hydrogen which the hydrogen energy industry has to compete is the production of ammonia, mainly used for fertilizer. Therefore it seems that in the long run, or even the short run, methanol, ethanol, or hydrogen stored and transported through novel methods now being perfected have much more of a future as fuels for fuel cells than ammonia. I may be wrong on this, but, if so, talk to me.

3. Finally, FC news maker Hydra first reported a Latin American distributor of gypsum wall board had been sign to sell its residential CHP fuel cell in that region. Although I did not call Frank Neukomm, the holding company CEO, again - he was very forthcoming last spring - this deal seems to be quite a reach for me. I don't think the distributor, whom I could not find through google or any industry listings, has trained with Dr. Mike Binder or Logan Energy in the not so easy installation of fuel cell CHP systems. And although Hydra then announced a second residential system sale to a customer in Florida, the excerpt from its 10-K disclosure statement on December 5 states that the company has had no (0) (zero) revenue thus far, and will have trouble surviving past the end of the calendar year. But I sure love those press releases!

Time to get back to the old intelligence - like FuelCell Energy's reported (its reports have always been 100% above board) sale of two 2.4 MW DFCs to POSCO in Korea, continuing to embarrassingly outpace its 'subsidy approved' potential 68 MW worth of business involving the State of Connecticut's Project 100, with most individual projects bogged down in bureaucracy.