Ms. Moreland: I cover the fuel cell, superconductor and geothermal sectors. Within the superconductor sector, I cover American Superconductor and Zenergy Power. In the geothermal, I cover Ormat Technologies, Magma and U.S. Geothermal (HTM). And then in the fuel cell, I cover FuelCell Energy, Ballard Power (BLDP) and Smart Fuel Cell (F3C.F). In addition, I cover Capstone Turbine (CPST), a microturbine company, and Quantum (QTWW), which is focused on the alternative automobile technologies.
TWST: Starting with the fuel cell companies, what do you think the rest of 2010 is going to look like for them, and what are the biggest growth drivers in that space?
Ms. Moreland: Obviously, the fuel cell players are pretty negatively impacted by the turn in the market. They couldn't get the financing that they were used to getting, and they really had to cut back and focus on what kind of products had a demand right now or in the near future. So we saw a lot of changes for those companies in the last year or two. Going forward, I expect them to just continue to focus on the markets and applications that already have a pretty strong following. So for the larger-temperature fuel cell companies, like FuelCell Energy, there is already a market there for on- and off-the-grid, dependable sources of power, so they have pretty significant sales. FuelCell Energy and another company called Bloom Energy entered the market, so there is a lot of interest there, because you can take these fuel cells that are the larger, higher temp that do not need to be fueled by pure hydrogen. Because of such a high temperature, you can put in natural gas, diesel and other hydrocarbon-rich fuels. So that's definitely been attractive for those companies in the markets they are trying to go into, because there is always a big hurdle in the fuel cell sector to figure out the issues of, "How do we get hydrogen? How do we store it? How do we distribute it?" So the market has responded favorably to fuel cells that circumnavigate the pure hydrogen issue.
For the smaller players, they are having a lot of successes now with the backup power in place of a battery, or to supplement battery, or diesel generators, such as a cell phone tower, which are required to have a certain amount of backup power in case of power outage. So there has been demand there. To get back to your question for 2010, I expect companies in the fuel cell sector just to keep focusing on the markets that they are having success in. They can't spread themselves too thin at this point.
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