Published: Fri, 10 Jul 2009
Description: (NECN) - The government may be planning cutbacks in funding for fuel cell technology. That may be good news for some New England companies. Boston Business Journal reporter Jackie Noblett has the story from the latest edition of Mass High Tech...
Automatically Generated Transcript (may not be 100% accurate)
" conference before his on my -- of the students store. The government may be planning cutbacks in funding for fuel cell technology that that might be good news for some New England company. Boston business journal reporter -- now it is now also contributing to mass high tech and she joins us from. Mass high tech with the story Jackie good to see you good to see you so tell us how big are these cuts and what exactly could they mean for Massachusetts firms."
" they're pretty significant -- if they DOE gets his when he asked our energy. It's spending on fuel cell technology development in 30. Would go be cut by about 101 million dollars down sixty million dollars that's pretty significant and what that means is. Basically a video we have supported a lot of development of fuel cells for. Basically transportation different types of vehicles and the deal -- that that's a little bit further off in terms of being able to commercialize it. Then name like so what they're going to take for the rest of them money and distributed to all sorts of different types of Mac applications. Like power generation portable power. And down military applications which is great for New England companies because that's what they really focus on. Mostly in this area. Tell us about some of the firms and how they could benefit. Yeah. Well the stimulus money is Carty effective one firm here in the record a new Vera. They receive some stimulus money. To deploy a fuel cells in -- claps as well as feel hydrogen fueling stations. Their other two other firms in the area that I talk to you for tonics. And acting and tricks and they do power systems. -- metrics does power systems basically used fuel cells in nineteen power systems. And dimension -- does portable power systems and making definitely benefit. From -- to smaller pool it's -- not much larger money that they can access and the state of Connecticut has already been focusing some of its stimulus dollars on fuel cell -- yes there's I'm very significant fuel cell technology cluster in Connecticut. That's 1600 jobs as of last year. Work out for fuel cell companies and they decided to allocate eight million dollars. Of their stimulus funding for energy. In two about it doesn't fuel cell deployments across the state which is very exciting now where are the opportunities. In the consumer market when it comes to fuel cell technology and -- I -- opportunity for. Consumer electronics is that the company called -- huge chance and they received some venture funding earlier this year -- a variety of local venture capitalists and what they wanna do is it's small fuel cells that might power anything from iPod. And portable dvd player and there's a great opportunity for that instead of different types of batteries that we usually news right now fuel cell funding and what it means for New England firms -- thanks for joining us thank you have a great weekend you too."