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82 VVVVVVVVVVV The path to commercial terrestrial fuel cell power was far longer and more convoluted than even the more clear-eyed of its early champions might have guessed. Only in the early 10s did a model—the PC-25, a phosphoric acid fuel cell (PAFC)—appear on the market. Its provenance can be traced back to the height the Cold War in the early 160s, a period when Pratt & Whitney first entered the fuel cell field, ostensibly to develop a commercial terrestrial variant. Instead, the company became wholly absorbed in the aerospace fuel cell project, one governed by the technopolitical imperative of performance at any price, where patient engineering research was sacrificed for hasty empiricism made possible by generous infusions of federal cash. With the moon project nearing fruition, the company switched focus to the PAFC, a technology knowledgeable observers expected to be the first terrestrial fuel cell to market. But Pratt & Whitney’s fuel cell division had enormous difficulty adapting to the realities of the post–Space Race era, not least because the chief desideratum for the phosphoric acid system was cost-effectiveness. Notoriously difficult to achieve in fuel cell systems, it was an especially tall order in a period when the federal government was curtailing its involvement in the field. As a result, Pratt & Whitney and its parent United Aircraft Corporation (UAC; renamed the United Technologies Corporation in 175) regarded its own terrestrial hydrocarbon fuel cell program with an odd ambivalence during its formative years in the late 160s and early 170s. Why, then, did the company persist with this long, costly technological gestation? The answer lies in the complex relationship between Pratt & Whitney/UAC and a succession of federal fuel cell sponsors. Utterly dependent on government patronage, as truncated and inconsistent as this was over the years, the company ’s fuel cell division sought to parlay its considerable experience in the field 4 Dawn of the Commercial Fuel Cell The natural gas fuel cell would allow every straight gas utility company to provide a competitive service with every straight electric utility company in the nation. —Robert H. Willis, president of the Connecticut Natural Gas Corporation, 1971 DAWN OF THE COMMERCIAL FUEL CELL 83 into commercial domination. But there was only a small market for PAFC technology in the late 160s and early 170s, and the federal government was not among those groups interested in it. Consequently, Pratt & Whitney/UAC regarded the government as a dangerously capricious force that had distorted the free play of the market, giving rise to a product nobody wanted. There was an element of truth to this, one that raised the question of precisely what role the space program had played in advancing fuel cell technology. But the company was too smitten with the dream of electrochemical energy conversion to abandon it. To be sure, several factors worked in its favor. In a period convulsed by great change—economic and political turmoil, shifting cultural values, and evolving federal energy and industrial priorities—Pratt & Whitney/UAC was able to invest its PAFC with political multivalence. Like all fuel cells, this power source could be scaled according to demand and produced no noxious emissions, unlike traditional thermal plants, or radioactive waste, unlike nuclear plants. Owing to its resistance to carbon dioxide, the device was also capable of using cheap carbonaceous fuels cleanly and efficiently, at least in principle. By appealing to certain or all of these qualities as circumstances warranted, Pratt & Whitney/UAC was able to extract investment from a series of patrons, recalling the experience of the Bacon cell program. Such interpretive flexibility helped make Pratt & Whitney/UAC’s PAFC program survivable. As the federal government withdrew from the fuel cell field in the late 160s, the company took advantage of challenges facing utilities in uncertain times. It first enlisted natural gas companies, which hoped to use fuel cell power to compensate for the vagaries of the natural gas market by allowing them to diversify into the electricity sector. For their part, electric utilities were initially attracted by the possibility of using the phosphoric acid fuel cell as a means of incrementally meeting demand at a time of rising energy costs. But it was the move by gas utilities that convinced electric companies to join in what became something of a race in electrochemical energy conversion technology. Throughout this period, PAFC partisans of all stripes emphasized the fact that the technology was virtually emissions-free...

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