It’s a clear day in Silicon Valley. We’re on Sun Microsystems (SUNW) sprawling corporate campus. Why is the air around us literally humming? That’s the sound of electrons, as they pulse through five main megawatt-level transformers — truck-sized gray boxes of copper wire.
As we discussed in Part 1 of this double issue, the membranes and rare-earth catalysts currently at hand push the small-and-cool fuel cell inexorably toward the fringe, toward the very small and the very cool. For now, the proton-exchange membranes (PEMs) are too imperfect, and the catalysts they depend on are too expensive, to be…
Sure, the fuel cell is a Powercosm technology. But whose cell? The long winding fuel cell trail leads us to the edges of the technology curves, and to the least-hyped units.
From the outside, the off-white cabinet looks much like Power Ones’s DC silicon power plant or Capstone’s microturbine. Inside is the kinetic-energy equivalent of a Mack truck rolling at 50 mph: two 600-pound steel flywheels, stacked vertically, and spinning silently in a vacuum at 7,700 rpm.
A jet engine to power a dot.com? Yes. It looks like a top-of-the-line refrigerator, and runs about as quietly.
The room literally hums with power. We are standing in Liebert’s fully operational Nines demonstration facility in Delaware, Ohio. Its floor is crowded with innocuous gray cabinets. Each one occupies just three square yards of floor space, and stand just slightly taller than a refrigerator
