Mr. Piccioni: I follow Ballard Power Systems (BLDP). To its credit, Ballard has been re-engineering itself away from being an alternative energy company into being a real company, a reliable company. I think that shows my bias right there. Most alternative energy companies are about recycling taxpayers' money and not really about viable business models or any hope of viable business models.
TWST: How have the problems in the auto industry impacted Ballard and others in
the same industry?
Mr. Piccioni: Well, you see there's a perfect case in point. When I picked up
coverage of Ballard, every other fuel cell company on the planet was a play on
the hydrogen economy. Our Initiation of Coverage Report basically said, "Okay,
this whole hydrogen economy thing, it's never going to happen." We demonstrated
that issues associated with the physics of hydrogen meant it would never make
sense from an environmental or economic or energy self-sufficiency perspective
ever to use hydrogen for vehicles. Obviously at the time, the company was not
exactly receptive to that idea. But over the ensuing few years, they have since
disassociated themselves from the hydrogen economy. At the time their major
shareholders were Ford (F) and Daimler-Chrysler (DAI), who were also busy
investing in hydrogen economy. And they shaved off that part of their business
and sold it to them. They still do some services and sell some products to that
former business of theirs, but basically in terms of Ballard's products and
everything, it has completely disassociated itself from the auto industry. So
this is good, given what's going on in the auto industry. There are two obvious
positives from this move: One is the financial predicament, which you would
argue is likely to make more adventurous spending a little bit less likely, or
at least I would argue that. Of course, I don't really care because there's not
going to be a hydrogen economy. And then secondly, most of the focus right now
for advanced automotive technology is in battery-powered vehicles or the battery
hybrid sort of thing. And even if you believed in the hydrogen economy, that
would push it much further into the future and redirect R&D spending dollars.
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