Congratulations to the Baltimore Ravens who fended off a tremendous comeback run by the San Francisco 49ers to win the Super Bowl. The Ravens may not have been the only winners. The post half time delay brought about by a power outage may have been a victory, or at least an opportunity, for the fuel cell industry.
This is not the first time the power has gone out at an NFL game. It happened in December 2011 during a game in San Francisco. Aside from aggravating fans, such occurrences can have serious financial repercussions. What if someone in the stadium gets hurt stumbling around in the dark or because they were startled when the power went out? What if a lot of someone's get hurt? It can also cause people to change the channel. Remember at the time of the outage in this case, the game was looking like a blow out. It can also damage the brand of the NFL and the stadium sponsor. Bottom line; it hurts the bottom line.
The energy consumption of such a large and profitable entertainment venue is not likely to decrease any time soon. Maintaining power probably just moved up a few notches on the priority list. Of course stadiums have emergency generators for some lighting, but not enough to keep the game going and hold the attention of the viewing audience. In the event of a power loss from one source, ideally you want to go directly to full power from another source. This is where fuel cells could come in.
Why fuel cells? Well, because wind, solar, hydro, combustion and nuclear just aren't practical for a sports stadium. Why aren't they using them now? Because fuel cell technology still has some issues to deal with before they're practical; cost, service life and reliability among them. What a couple of embarrassing and perhaps costly events may do for the industry however, is to lower that cost barrier by making solving the problem a bit more valuable to the end user.
A stadium owner may not be willing to pay double for reliable, always on power, but they might go for 140% today, where it was only worth 120% yesterday. That means researchers and developers have a few more dollars to throw at the other issues. They don't have to bring the cost down as much to be competitive. Perhaps materials and systems that had been ruled out as too costly in the past can be ruled back in.
The incentive can be tremendous. If a team of researchers thought they were about 4 years away from a viable commercial product, then a change in parameters leads them to believe they're maybe 18 months away instead, the urgency increases exponentially. If your team is getting close, other teams are getting close. First one there with a reliable, affordable product gets the first big payday. Once someone demonstrate that there's a market for existing technology in which actual profits can be made rather than just research grants to win, the competition and innovation takes off as well.
Whether this event will trigger the above scenario, I don't know. I think it depends on how much the parties believe it cost them, if anything. It's not a question of whether or not they made boatloads of money. It's a question of whether they believe they left anything on the table, and how much.
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