A visit to Siem
Reap in 2000, the second largest city in Cambodia, found one poorly
paved two lane roadway in the entire city but lots of cell phones. The
developing world skipped the expensive infrastructure cost to develop
land line based phone service and went directly to less capital intense
cell phone technology. Developing countries may follow a similar path
by deploying more distributed electric generation power to dramatically
reduce investment in electric transmission infrastructure. CRI expects
this trend, in part, to cause Bloom Energy to abandon plans to build a fuel cell manufacturing plant in Newark, DE.
India
suffers from major electric reliability issues with frequent blackouts
everywhere and with no electric access at all for 40% of the
population. This is a major barrier to economic growth as reported in
the Indian journal Business Today article “Companies concerned as
energy crisis threatens to hit growth”. India may need a four-fold
increase in electric generation capacity by 2025. We expect expanded
use of on-site generation to compensate for these reliability issues.
The most likely fuel is natural gas from new conventional fields being
developed off the coast of India near Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and from
land fill gas which is just starting to be utilized. This may open the
door for fuel cell generators using natural gas (recently declared a
renewable resource in Delaware for this application) as their feed
stock.
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