Good, and Bad, News on Smog : A Vancouver bus experiment is worth watching
A plan to help clean up Southern California’s air with electric cars is sputtering after just two years. The setback is cause for disappointment, but not despair.
Although observers lose a bit more faith in electric cars with every year that fails to yield real breakthroughs in battery design, they remain hopeful. For one thing, auto makers in the United States, Europe and Japan are chasing the elusive “perfect” battery harder than ever.
Another reason for hope is the fact that a fallback technology--the long-awaited fuel cell--will start road tests in a bus this autumn.
The fuel cell, developed by Ballard Power Systems Inc., in North Vancouver, Canada, will generate electric power by breaking down methanol in a silent chemical reaction, not by exploding fuel in a cylinder. Because nothing will burn, the fuel cell will not produce the pollutants that a standard engines does.
Some scientists, in fact, say fuel cells, not batteries, form the logical bridge between today’s internal combustion engines and fuels of the distant future, such as hydrogen.
The plan to give electric cars a try began with high hopes in 1989 as a joint venture of the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison Co. To prime the market, the utilities agreed to buy electric cars themselves, if that became necessary to guarantee an initial sale of 10,000 vehicles. A Swedish firm, CleanAir Transport, planned to build 30,000 of them a year by 1995.
CleanAir has two prototype electric cars but is now broke and unable to raise the $30 million or $40 million it needs to build production facilities. Edison has halted payments to CleanAir until the future is less murky. There is a 50-50 chance that CleanAir will never deliver any cars.
The history of the Canadian fuel cell for buses appears the reverse of the CleanAir saga.
Fuel cells powered by natural gas are a growing source of hot water and electricity in homes and other buildings. Ballard, which has been trimming both the size and cost of fuel cells for a decade, has produced a system that fits in buses. Cars may be next. And Hank Wedaa, chairman of the Southern California Air Quality Management District board, wants to see whether fuel cells could replace diesels on the region’s commuter train locomotives faster and cheaper than electrifying the lines.
So if the technology to eliminate smog still is not at hand, the search for it goes on--and the doors leading to possible solutions are anything but closed.
