Mannerisms

No names no pack drill, but we all know the distinguished Asian companies which have been announcing, regularly, that consumer fuel cells are about to be marketed.

It makes for nice headlines. Fuel cells will permit cellphones to run all week and the laptops to run all day.

The thing is these announcements, however, is that nothing actually happens.

Maybe the explanation for the announcements is that these big Asian companies are all fiercely competitive, and, when one of them says it’s about to have a fuel cell for a laptop or cellphone, then the others kick their R&D people into agreeing that they’ll produce one too.

But it’s not going to happen for a couple of years.

Stanford Research Institute spin-out Polyfuel, a maker of fuel cell membranes, apparently frustrated by the slow pace of development, decided to kick-start the commercialisation of fuel cells by developing one, and then presenting it to the industry as a reference design.

To get there, it had first to develop a suitable membrane which is a barrier to methanol but permeable to water, and then find a way of re-cycling the water which is a show-stopping by-product of methanol-based fuel cells.

Polyfuel did that, and demo-ed a working cell, and hopes to have a prototype and reference design by the end of the year.

“We think it will then take about twelve months to go from prototype and reference design to complete the technology transfer to our customers, and we expect it will take our customers another twelve months to get manufacturing up and running,” Jim Balcom, CEO of Polyfuel, told me.

So look for the all-day laptop and all-week cellphone in 2010, and be sceptical about announcements made before then.