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www.us-tech.com


Tech-Op-ed December, 2012


SOUNDING OFF


By Walter Salm Editor


It Can’t Happen Here A


s I write this, many thousands of people are homeless, having lost their homes to the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, and the death toll has passed 130. Many other thousands of homes that were spared are still without


electricity. The deaths were mostly people who thought they were invincible and tried to ride out the storm. Many of our favorite haunts along the Jersey Shore have disappeared,


swept away by the most destructive storm to hit the Northeast in anyone’s memory. We sold our house at the Jersey Shore nine years ago, to go on the road as full-time RVers. Family members and friends still there are largely okay, although they were forced to live without electricity for quite a while. New York City, although hit hard, managed to survive. Enormous


amounts of water have now been pumped out of tunnels, subway lines and basements, and most of the city once again has electric power. Two New York City hospitals had to evacuate patients to other hospitals because their emer- gency generators failed. Then, the emergency generators at Bellevue Hospi- tal also quit, forcing an evacuation of the 300 patients who had not already left that institution. There had been 725 patients when the hurricane first hit. The generators were on the 13th floor, well above the flood waters. But they were fed by fuel pumps in the basement which were soon submerged un- der flood waters and then they shorted out. Bucket brigades were formed to carry fuel containers up 13 flights of stairs to keep the generators running, while patients were evacuated. Like Julius Caesar’s ambition, emergency generators should be made of sterner stuff. They are certainly of little use if they fail during an emergency. Part of the problem here is that no one ever anticipated an emergency of


this magnitude. If a citywide blackout occurred, the hospital generators would take over and run for the duration of the power outage. They always did in the past, so they were thought to be very reliable. But emergency Diesel generators can be very balky, especially if they are not given a test run under load at least once a week. And conditions during the hurricane were far from ordinary. It’s high time that hospitals look more seriously into a far more reliable


source of emergency power — the fuel cell generator. Commercially available fuel cell systems are powering banking centers, hospitals, and other essential services worldwide, and have proven their reliability after years of on-the-job performance. Yes, they’re very pricey, but there are incentives from the Fed- eral and many state governments. The idea is not to just use it during emer- gencies, but make it a full-time partner, furnishing power and heat to the hos- pital. A 400 kilowatt unit from UTC costs over $2 million, but provides con- tinuous, clean electric power while generating 1.7 million Btu per hour of us- able heat byproduct. This heat can be used for space heating, hot water and for driving an absorption chiller to provide cooling. This greatly increases the fuel cell’s overall efficiency. Putting that fuel cell power unit on Bellevue Hospital’s 13th floor would


have kept the hospital running — just as though its Diesels were still run- ning. Ordinary natural gas line pressure would have fed the unit, without worries about shorted out fuel pumps in the basement. Yes, they’re pricey, but there is a definite return on investment; the elec-


tricity and heat byproduct is far cheaper than an equivalent purchase from the power utility, and there are some subsidies available to help offset the original equipment cost. The unit doesn’t have to power the whole hospital, just 400kW worth, and then take over as an emergency source during power outages, providing for life support systems, some of the elevators, and other emergency needs, just as the Diesel unit would do when working. In a typical installation for St. Helena Hospital, a 181 bed community


hospital in Napa Valley, California, the fuel cell plant delivers 60 percent of the hospital’s needs, and meets 50 percent of its space heating and domestic hot water requirements. The use of the fuel cell eliminates more than 530 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Planting a few trees around the unit will take care of the small amount of carbon dioxide byproduct. Hospitals don’t always have the option of evacuating patients to other


institutions. Even in New York City, this patient transfer process was diffi- cult at best. One of the costly lessons learned from Sandy was that the Northeast was


woefully ill-prepared for a storm of this magnitude. We’ve been seeing weath- er disaster movies for years, but felt safe in the knowledge that they were fic- tion, but based on some unpleasant truths: the weather is changing, global warming does exist, the icecaps are melting, causing the oceans to rise. With apologies to Sinclair Lewis, we can’t go on saying, “It can’t happen here.”


PUBLISHER’S NOTE


By Jacob Fattal Publisher


a comfortable, if not overwhelming number of visitors. We have often heard the truism from exhibitors: “It’s not the number of people, but the quality of the contacts.” One sign of the times is the number of exhibitors who sell ma- jor equipment right off the show floor. Kudos certainly are deserved by SMTAI and electronica for the success


Trade Shows Do it All N


of those two shows. Electronica was particularly exhausting — covering a very large area in several exhibit halls in Munich — as well as being highly successful. Looking forward to the new year, we’ll be shuttling between Cal- ifornia shows — first the large combo Electronics West/MDM et al in Ana- heim (Feb. 12-14), then the following week, IPC’s APEX in San Diego (Feb. 19-21). We’re planning to present our readers with. U.S. Tech’s biggest issue ever for bonus distribution at those two trade shows. As always, the issue will also appear on our website and in its digital edition for readers with iPADs, iPhones, and Android phones. With retailers already in high gear with holiday sales and specials and


an early “Black Friday”, the consumer electronics industry is looking for a huge uptick. Christmas is usually the time of year that US retailers look to get their businesses back “in the black”, hence the name “Black Friday”. Bar- gain hunters will queue up as much as 12 hours before stores open their doors, looking to snap up those door-buster bargains that are being offered at ridiculously low prices. The timing is just right. January sees the inevitable circus of the Con-


sumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which shows off the technology that consumers will be buying during 2013. Then, right after that, come the man- ufacturing trade shows in February. These shows have been growing, and will point the way for a new growth spurt in electronics manufacturing, particularly for products made in U.S.A. as onshoring con- tinues its relentless push. What it all means is that 2013 will be a banner year in our industry. r


ow that most of the yearend trade shows are history, we can breath a sigh of relief and think about just how great all these shows were. Even the smallest shows have seen an infusion of new exhibitors and


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