Anthony Doesburg: Battery of the future finally gets the hard cell

Tag: Consumer Battery

Fuel cells are an alternative energy source that have been getting attention since petrol prices went through the roof." That's what I wrote in this column two years ago. What's happened since?

Petrol prices haven't come down, that's for sure - 91 octane was $1.70 a litre in May 2006, compared with today's $1.90-plus. The world has also become much more conscious of the need to curb carbon emissions than even two years ago. But of fuel cells, very little news has been heard.

This month, however, the world leader in press releases about fuel cells, Toshiba, made another in a succession of predictions about when the technology would be commercially available. These proclamations go back several years.

In 2003, the company displayed a laptop computer powered by a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) at the German consumer electronics trade show CeBIT. They would be on the market by the following year, Toshiba said. They weren't. In 2005, a Toshiba DMFC prototype featured on the BBC News website, which said the company expected to commercialise them the next year. That deadline was missed as well.