Fuel cells: Future or fantasy? Part one

For the last 35 years, which is as long as I’ve been writing about them, hydrogen fuel cells have been just around the corner, or as one journalist said, ‘they were a decade away twenty years ago…’

It’s easy to scoff, but he’s right. When I attended my first fuel cell presentation, a proposal for an experimental truck/tank engine in the late Eighties, it was ‘just over the horizon,’ according to one engineer. In 1994, when I witnessed the Mercedes-Benz Necar 1, a Bremen van filled with hydrogen fuel cells and wire, stagger round a car park in Ulm Germany, it was ‘just ten years away.’