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COPYRIGHT 2001 Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.
Fuel cells, the electricity source of the Space Age, got us to the moon. Now they're starting to turn up There on earth-powering police stations, electric bicycles, buses, and yes, even vacuum cleaners.
The precinct house of New York City's Central Park police, a sprawling, red-brick, utilitarian building; is 128 years old and looks its age. The city has been stingy about keeping up its precinct houses in recent years, and inside this one, the paint is peeling and the offices look positively Dickensian. But out in the parking lot, the energy revolution has arrived.
Sergeant Noel Mac Mahon, a friendly, clean-cut young policeman straight out of Central Casting, takes me out to see the future: the fuel cell system that keeps the computers running and the electric vehicles roiling at the Central Park NYPD. Its green-painted steel case, 19 feet long, 9 feet high, and 9 feet wide, looks like an oversized garden shed. It runs so quietly I can't hear it over the noise of passing traffic and a softball game going on in the park. But stacked inside are 256 graphite plates, laced with phosphoric acid, that produce electricity from hydrogen at a high rate of efficiency and with virtually no pollution. The unit generates 200 kilowatts, more than enough for the precinct's needs, as well as 900,000 BTUs of heat that will eventually be used to heat the building in winter and its water supply year-round.
Most people, if they've heard of fuel cells at all, think of them as something out of Star Trek--a space-age energy generation system that makes electricity out of nothing and costs the moon. And in fact, although fuel cells were invented in 1839, they were not significantly used until NASA put them to work in the 1960s, first on the Gemini orbital flights and then on the Apollo missions to the moon. They are still used on the space shuttles. It was only...
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