Fuel cells...

I went looking for new info on fuel cells and spotted this. Then I read it. Ugh.

Maybe the errors don't matter to most people, but it was still pretty bad. The most innocent one was a sentence that said "Fuel cells produce electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen", Some fuel cells do, but the technology can be applied with other fuels too. H₂ is attractive because the emissions are nothing but water. It's not a real big deal, but it's misleading.

Then came this:

The automaker wants to tap the lucrative "premium power" market, such as data communications companies and hospitals that are willing to pay as much as $1,000 per kilowatt hour for reliable power.

Such power is interrupted an average of just more than three seconds a year, compared with an average of 8.76 hours a year for electricity provided to most residential and commercial customers who pay $1 a kilowatt hour.

That's premium power alright. A dime per kWH is about right, which is a tenth of the lower number they cited. Sheesh, at $1000/kWh I'd quit my day job, buy a treadmill and start generating power myself.

But there was something to be salvaged from the article - most people probably wouldn't remember the numbers anyway. It's good to see some progress, even if this isn't likely to pay off for a while.