GM's Fuel Cell Plant Closes in Upstate NY (shocker!)

Politics on the Hudson ^ | 10/5/2012 | Joseph Spector

[Wurlitzer]

“Downtown Rochester, like Buffalo and other regional cities, are like museums of pre-WW2 American industry.”

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Oh yeah? Well in Buffalo we have hundreds of loud mouth, burlap wearing, makeup deficient, commie liberals who come out in defense of our unused grain elevators anytime somebody has an idea which might create a job at the expense of these concrete silos. /sarc

I love it when one of them are in ear shot and I’ll say, loud enough for them to hear, that I looked for all the people at the grain elevator souvenir shop but I could not locate it.

I refer to them as bird people as if you ever saw them you would now exactly what I mean.

[exDemMom]

I think you have the concept backwards. The point of fuel cells *is* to generate power directly from gaseous fuels, rather than store power like a lead or lithium battery. The problem is practicality and cost. Hydrogen is an ideally clean fuel, whose only catalytic byproduct is water. But, hydrogen gas would be impractical, dangerous and expensive as automobile fuel. Efforts to use hydrocarbon gaseous fuels have apparently not been as successful as hoped. I think contamination of the cells by those fuels is the problem, cutting their lifespan too short to be marketable.

At least in the 1990s, when fuel cells were supposed to be the next revolution, they sounded a lot like perpetual motion machines. No matter how they work, it will always take more energy to break the covalent bonds of hydrogen-containing compounds to get elemental hydrogen than can be retrieved by combining hydrogen with oxygen. For that reason, fuel cells do not generate power, but can only convert it.

[iacovatx]

In the general sense, Xerox, Kodak and IBM are related to Apple, Google, and Intel. Each of these is a private sector technology company and have microprocessor technology at the core of their main products. Xerox, Kodak and IBM are in the old-economy parts of the US and Apple, Google, and Intel are in the silicon valley world. With what has happened to HP in recent years, I wonder how long it will be until Apple and Google feel the strain of California taxes and regulations? IBM may have been more prominent in the past but being located in NYS could hasten the pressure on profits.

[iacovatx]

I’ll have to look for them the next time I pass through Buffalo. The image of “bird people” just demands that they be seen! Thanks for the comment and the chuckle.