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January 3, 2007
A Little Methanol Goes a Long Way with Laptop Fuel Cell
Over the holidays, TopTechNews.com and MobileCrunch reported on a new fuel cell technology by Samsung that might have a direct impact on the digital divide.
Essentially, what they've done is created a docking station for their laptops that is powered by methanol, which is both cheap and easy to produce. (So easy, in fact, that people often die from methanol-tainted homebrew alcohol.) The docking station gives a laptop to stay charged 40 hours a week for four weeks. That's an astonishingly long time, given how my current laptop battery won't even let me get through a single DVD movie. They expect to ship the docking station before the end of the year. Meanwhile, they're also working on a pint-sized version, quite literally - a miniature power source that requires the equivalent of a coffee cup's worth of methanol to power a laptop for a week.
Most of the news coverage I've seen so far about fuel cells has been in relationship to cars and foreign oil dependency, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear about Samsung's announcement. There's no mention how much the fuel sells will cost, but if they can get the price point down, it'll be interesting to see how it penetrates developing nations and other places with large communities of people who don't have access to reliable energy sources. Methanol fuel cells would help people who are off the grid to power their digital tools more reliably, and this could impact the adoption of mobile and portable Internet devices.
Meanwhile, the only by-product of the fuel cell is water. Now if Samsung could ensure that this water is safe to drink, talk about killing two birds with one stone.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at January 3, 2007 12:51 PM
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