Avalence II

After I met with Tom, the Chief Technical Officer, I went to see Debbie Moss and Steve Nagy, the principals in Avalence. Actually, Debbie came to find me, because Tom and I had been talking for an hour and forty-five minutes and folks were wondering what exactly happened to us for so long. We were back in the lunch room sitting down, both of us with pads of paper madly scribbling down figures to calculate the energy benefits for us. Actually, the benefits are rather limited. But, after talking with Steve and Debbie about the nature of technological development, we are still going to get one installed in our lobby.



The questions is: why?



The answer is not, believe it or not, to show what innovative thinkers we at Eco Building Tech are. Instead, it is the planting of a seed. One of the most significant acts we can accomplish as a company is to show the public what is possible. If we somehow can influence one or two folks to use a Hydrofiller for their own use, more funds will flow toward Avalence, either in the form of outright sales or development funds from private investors or governmental programs. Eventually, Avalence will develop something not in the Beta stage. Eventually, they will make a machine that turns water into fuel and fits in your basement and runs your house's entire energy needs from a fuel cell.



One might wonder why this machine then must sit in our show room. Good question. But I think we suffer from a syndrome called "the Jetsons syndrome." I just made that up, but it helps illustrate what I mean. The Jetsons syndrome is the popular belief that if we can imagine a new technology and someone can make a new technology, (household robots, for instance) then, poof, it will appear on our doorstep in ten years. Unfortunately, life and technology do not work like that. The missing ingredient in that equation is MONEY! Unless, Avalence gets sufficiently funded, they will no longer develop Hydrofillers. If they don't develop more Hydrofillers, and ones that are more efficient than the ones they have already developed, gas stations won't install Hydrofillers, because they will be too expensive. With no place to refuel, no one in their right mind would buy a hydrogen car, would they? (As an aside, in CA there are a nested bunch of hydrogen filling stations, and, guess what, more hydrogen cars are bought and sold in CA than anywhere else in the US.)



The point is public opinion about a technology makes or breaks a technology. Do you remember thirty five years ago, when computers were these huge boxes that spit out reams upon reams of paper will holes punched out? No one in their right mind would want one of those things in their house. It would be stupid, expensive, messy, and pointless. Today, almost everybody reading this has a home computer. Computers are now reasonably priced and an integral part of our culture. But back then, computer companies, such as IBM and Mac received funds and support from vague and mysterious sources, and it wasn't until many years down the line that they started to make money and Bill Gates became a household name.



However, between the time that those paper dots were all over the computer lab floor and now, someone had to say to someone else, "Check this out! We have this amazing machine that can take this data I'm punching in here," click, click, click, "and then it computes it all by itself and puts it out the answer over there. Just think, eventually every household will have one of these things!" I admit, I was one of those guys that looked at the computer geeky enthusiast and longed for the less intrusive slide rule version of geekdom. Time has shown me the error of my thinking.



So, the answer to the question above, "Why?," seems a lot clearer to me now. Someone has to be the geek enthusiast. Someone has to jump up and down with excitement over something others cannot yet see. This time around that may as well be me.

Innovators

I went to this building in Milford, CT, a grey industrial looking thing with tired blue trim. I'd heard about Avalence from my former partner, Steve, and he had come back from meeting with them hopping up and down with excitement. "These guys," bounce, bounce, "make fuel from water."

Debbie Moss, a principal in the company, she seemed extrememly pleasant and accomodating, so I honored my appointment which, as it turns out, was not to be with Debbie, but with Tom, the Chief Technical Officer. I walked in, introduced myself, "Miles Shapiro," and I was shown to a metal chair and a random set of old magazines.

I was told Tom would be with me shortly, and so he was. He took me through a room that had one of those lunch tables used in elementary schools in the South during the 1960's. The walls were grey. There was a water dispenser without water.

We meandered through a brief hallway and headed left into what can only be described as a very large garage. There were these huge boxes, about the size of those boxes you used to see on "Let's Make a Deal," you know, the one's "behind where Carol Merrill is standing." Big. And each one of these boxes, some with an outside covering in blue plastic and others with grey metal coverings, had a regularly positioned cluster of metal cylinders, four feet long and no more than 4-5 inches in diameter. Out of the top end of each of the cylinders (it turns out the machine I was looking at had 24) two metal tubes, maybe 1/4 inch in diameter, poked out and led to black hoses that snaked in an arc somewhere into the machine. From below, one of those black tubes ran into the cylinder. Then it all goes into this big box like on the game show, and in the box are these scuba-looking tanks, only twice as long and thicker round and black. Of course there were a slew of buttons and electrical connections with color-coded wires and panels which opened up to stuff I wouldn't even bother trying to describe. Needless to add, I was in water a tad too deep for me to know what was really going on, but Tom was an extremely patient man, and more importantly, he liked to talk about what it was he was doing.

He explained to me that in those cylinders were essentially two compartments separated by a thin membrane. In one compartment went the anode and in the other went the diode-- as an aside, I don't exactly know what those things are-- and from the bottom in comes water. Simple H2O, but rather pure or else all the other junk that might be in the water would sit on the bottom of the cylinder and build up and eventually short the entire thing out. So in short, you run two ends of energy through the water, which they refer to as electrolysis, which is not the removal of unsightly hair, but can be translated into shocking the crap out of the water, and the water molecules break into Hydrogen and Oxygen. So one of those tubes heading out of the top of the cylinder is the Hydrogen line and the other one is the Oxygen line.

The big aqua lung containers in the machine store the Hydrogen. You then tap into the hydrogen and use it as fuel, just like you do when you use propane gas. Sounds fundamentally simple. Shock water, catch the two resultant gases. Use one as fuel. Sell the other to hospitals that need pure oxygen. I get it.

However, the truly compelling element was more along my line of thinking, and that is the cost of the thing. Each little coupling on top of the cylinder, so there were two per cylinder and twenty four cylinders, each one of those was five dollars. Each one of the black hoses, carbon filtered tubing, cost 50 dollars. So you have 240 dollars in couplings, 2400 in tubes, and you haven't even gotten to the idea of welding the metal stuff together and correctly situating the anode and cathode and membrane for each cylinder. No wonder those things cost $200,000. Thus, the remainder of my discussion with Tom was about honing the designs of these machines for maximum production of hydrogen and then being able to reproduce each design without all of the difficulties in building a prototype. The idea of mass production of these things was beyond the ken. Tom was hoping to make maybe thirty to fifty of these machines of various sizes and capacities in a single year, because now they can only produce around ten, and each one is a one off.

But the truth is, the one missing component is money... funding. And although these Avalence guys are amazingly innovative and perhaps have the final answer to the global warming crisis, they don't have sufficient funds to move forward quickly enough to warrant switching over to hydrogen fuel instead of petroleum. Car companies have designed prototypes for hydrogen run fuel cell cars, and in California, New York City, Washington, D.C. and a few other random outposts, some variant of Tom's machine sits in a gas station for hydrogen fueled cars to fill 'er up. But until enough people have enough of these cars, it won't be cost effective for gas stations to pay $200,000 for one of Tom's machines to only sell 3 pounds of hydrogen at 5000 pounds/square inch per car fill up. Now these cars with those three pounds will travel for 150 to 200 miles, probably as much as one would with a normal tank of gas, but the cost is no bonanza for the driver or the gas station owner, and therein lies the problem.

It is about money folks! That is what it will always be about. And we can sit around and rub our hands together in worry until we make them chapped and bloody, but the global warming issue is not going to go away until somebody makes green=greed. I understand that sounds surgical and without conscience or feeling, but that is the real world. And the real world is going to get warmer and warmer until we find a way to make that hydrogen gas car a bargain for John Q. Public and me and you. But, you know what? After meeting Tom, and to a similar extent Debbie and Steve Nagy, another principal in this company of innovators, I believe they are going to sit in that ugly garage building and tinker and adapt and change and fix and fuss and finally, they are going to make it cheaper to be green. So there is hope.