Geoffrey Ballard

Founder, Ballard Power Systems

You work in the military for ten years, and you’re an engineer. When did you realize that you had to cut out on your own and try to change the world?

We had an oil crisis in the United States in 1973 - the OPEC Crisis. The United States Government began to look for energy self-sufficiency. And they invited or seconded about fifty of us to Washington. Our job was to look at the possibility of energy self-sufficiency for the United States. Oil is a finite resource. It was a growing number of automobiles on the road, the growing dependence we had on oil, the crisis said that we in North America are dependent on foreign oil and you began to realize that the real reason you need the oil was the internal combustion engine and what you really needed to do was get that off the streets.

So you decide to cut out and buy a motel in Arizona and start a company to pioneer new sources of energy?

I started looking for money and I found people and I explained the future of replacing the internal combustion engine, and I said it’s a long haul, the gestation periods are huge, um, but, if you ever hit it, you know, you’ve got lots of money, and you’ve put down a few thousand bucks, you could have made millions.

But it does seem like such a long shot…

Oh! Of course it is – it’s a complete long shot. There’s no there’s no probability it’s just that – some of us feel we have to try. And there – there are people in the world they just feel they have to try.

The first thing Ballard tried to do was a rechargeable lithium battery for cars. But ten years of hard labor proved fruitless. Ballard was determined to find another way. That other way turned out to be the fuel cell.

The Fuel Cell, very simply, takes a fuel called hydrogen, and it takes oxygen from the air, it makes electricity and water and it does it below the boiling point of water. So it’s low temperature. The Internal Combustion Engine is high-temperature. Your pollution comes from the fact that you’re burning at these high temperatures. The fuel Cell in the hydrogen economy is much bigger than the automobile. It could become the major conversion device for every piece of equipment you could possibly think of. Including major power generating stations. The fuel cell and the hydrogen economy mean just that -a total elimination of the need to burn fossil fuels.

If it’s so simple, and they knew about it in 1965 at NASA, why does it take a guy in a motel in Arizona to really start taking this technology seriously?

At Ballard, we got a feel for fuel cells. We took a bunch of very bright guys, and we didn’t make them predict what had to happen. They just started playing. They tried things. They didn’t have to be right every time. Failure is just a mechanism of learning.

Do you remember that first moment that the fuelcell suddenly worked?

They put this membrane into a test cell, and it melted the cables. It produced so much electricity the copper cables melted. And they knew they’d produced a powerhouse. They reproduced it, of course that’s the real clue in engineering and science – it’s not doing it once, being able to do it again.

They had developed a cheap scalable fuel cell. Now it was time to develop a way to mass-produce it. With his concept now proven, Ballard attracted venture capitalists and more government subsidies.

It was the Daimler Benz Company and the Ford Motor company who finally put Ballard on the map. In 1997, they invested over one billion dollars in Ballard Power. Jeffrey Ballard had been vindicated, the Fuel Cell had gone mainstream. But for him, that was only half the battle. He’s already making new, some would even say bigger plans to usher in the age of Hydrogen.

In 1999, Ballard and his partner Paul Howard started a company called General Hydrogen. Which is dedicated to accelerating the spread of the hydrogen economy. Ballard believes that the only way for fuel cells to become viable is to have the Hydrogen Gas available at a local pump. And that’s just what his next dream is all about.

I want the fuel to be hydrogen. You can’t sell you an automobile if you can’t go down to the corner station buy fuel for it. The other hand you can’t expect an international oil company to go and put in billions or millions of uh, hydrogen dispensing units in its gas stations if there’s not cars to come in and use them.

So for all the clear benefits of hydrogen, there’s still a major problem. It would be enormously expensive to produce an infrastructure to deliver that to the consumer, so while the Ballard fuel cell is moving forward, the dream of a hydrogen economy still has some large technical and environmental hurdles to overcome.

When you think about the characteristics of innovation, what are the most important characteristics you need to preserver as an innovator?

Well you just said it. Perseverance.

It’s not genius.

No. It can’t be. Because – I know my own limitations and I know my IQ’s nowhere near the genius level.