Land Yachts and Fuel Cells

Written on April 19, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl

This weekend we’re attending something grandly called The Rally, a gathering of several thousand RVers and wanna-be RVers. Superficially, living and traveling in a recreational vehicle (RV) sounds like something from a by-gone, more wasteful age — a large RV might get only five or six miles per gallon of gas — but many “full timers” or people who actually live in their RVs most if not all the time are very conscious of their carbon footprints, and want do their part to minimize their enviromental impact.

Before I get too far into this subject, I need to post a bias alert: My husband and I live and travel in our largish RV (38-feet long) eight or nine months of the year. This lifestyle is the root of one possible interpretation of the title for this blog, “New Media on the Go”. We use new media quite literally “on the go”.

So, to get back to The Rally, one of the main attractions of this event is its tradeshow aspect. There are hundreds of vendors represented here, indoors and out. One of the first booths I stopped to see belongs to a company called Protonex. Their product is something that uses technology I didn’t know was available commercially yet, but which most of us have heard about: fuel cells. The device they are showing at The Rally is a 12-volt, 20-amp generator that runs on methanol. About the size of a microwave oven, it is much smaller than the conventional gas-operated generator that came with our RV, and it is much quieter. The unit in their booth includes a cooling fan, which may have been creating most of the sound it emits. I had to step close to it to hear it at all. There was no obnoxious smell, no noticable exhaust fumes. In fact, they were running it indoors, so it must not have dangerous emissions (or they have an exhaust vent that wasn’t apparent from the front of the booth).

According to their website, “Methanol is an alcohol and is typically produced from natural gas. It has a long, stable shelf life and produces ultra low emissions when used in Protonex systems.” The site says their devices will run on other fuels as well, but this is the one they foresee using in the RV market. More about that in a future article.

I have to admit I’m pretty ignorant about fuel cells, but I plan to research this hitherto blue-sky green tech (blue-green tech?) and report my findings in this blog. Mike McCarthy, Protonex VP for Commercial Business Development, promised me an interview, and along with some independent fact-finding I hope to reduce my own ignorance, and possibly bring you a new datum or two as well. Stay tuned.

Posted in Alternative fuels, Mobility, Power supplies