GM unveils fuel-cell technology -- Fuel Cell Scientific

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	Larry Burns, General Motors vice president for research and development, unveiled in Traverse City, Mich. Tuesday a stationary generator based on the company's automotive fuel-cell technology.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. Aug. 7 — General Motors Corp. on Tuesday unveiled a stationary power generator that could be used to provide energy for homes and businesses. The generator would use the same fuel cell technology automakers are developing in hopes of producing pollution-free vehicles.

“IT WOULD HELP the situation in California. It could be used to power the White House,” Larry Burns, GM vice president of research and development and planning, said Tuesday.
The generator GM is testing extracts hydrogen from either natural gas, methane or gasoline. The hydrogen then is mixed with oxygen from the air and the fuel cell converts it to electricity.
Burns said natural gas is ideal for home applications of the stationary units since many homes already are hooked up to natural gas service and an infrastructure of pipelines delivering the fuel now exists.
The company envisions dozens of homes or businesses being powered by one fuel cell generator, which also could be used to recharge the batteries of electric vehicles.

Burns said the units could produce and store hydrogen that may be used during peak power periods to generate electricity.
“It changes the game,” said David Cole, director of the Center for Automotive Research. “It makes sense for the next step in the technology to be power generation.”

Cole said the key would be to make the units cost-effective. GM said it does not yet have a price or a timetable for making the stationary units available.
Other automakers say they are not interested in developing the same technology.
“We’re a car company, we’re not interested in producing stationary units,” Ford spokeswoman Robin Schultz said.
“We’d rather use it to develop fuel cell vehicles,” said Carol Honeycutt, a spokeswoman for the Chrysler Group of DaimlerChrysler AG.
GM also announced a major step in the development of fuel cell-powered vehicles with the unveiling of the first gasoline fuel processor for fuel cell propulsion.
The Gen III processor, mounted on a Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck, extracts hydrogen from gasoline, creating electric power much the same as the stationary units, with the added benefit of powering a vehicle.
GM claims the Gen III, when combined with the fuel cell stack, has the potential to obtain 40 percent overall energy efficiency — about 50 percent more efficient than a conventional internal combustion engine. It is considered an incremental step in the technology since gasoline-fed fuel cell vehicles are not pollution-free, as are fuel cell vehicles fed with pure hydrogen.
“A fuel cell S-10 is great, but they’ve spent so much time telling Congress they can’t raise fuel efficiency, and now, today they’re saying they can,” Ann Mesnikoff, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club in Washington, said.
GM says it will begin driving demonstrations of the gasoline-fed fuel cell powered pickup truck early next year, but they would not be widely available until “mid-decade.”