Heliocentris Opens Young Minds to Fuel Cell Technology
by Christine Lepisto, Berlin on 05.21.06
Would you pay 136 euros to understand exactly how a fuel cell works? Okay, maybe not, but what if you were an eighth-grade science teacher and 136 euros got you a nifty teaching tool that made fuel cells understandable for your students? A qualified yes? You might want to talk with Heliocentris then, a Berlin firm specializing in fuel cell and hydrogen education, (whose business director, Robert Selle, says that, sadly, most German educational budgets aren’t open to such purchases - hint hint German education resource managers). Need more convincing? It’s not difficult to see why billions of currency units are being invested in fuel cell research and technology; clean, quite, renewable, there is the potential to completely change the way we think about power. I wouldn’t mind having one drive my laptop right now, for example. Heliocentris, however, believes that ultimate acceptance of fuel cells and other hydrogen products must come from the general public and that means education of the next generation of decision makers.
The good news is that Heliocentris has sold 20,000 model fuel cells to middle and secondary schools abroad (80 percent in Western Europe, North America and Japan with a growing number going to the middle east) and the trend is positive. From a purely practical perspective, this TreeHugger believes that, besides teaching the powers that move the universe, students shown the potential of fuel cells are opened to career opportunities in this field and that seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars (especially in Germany where environmental taxes are currently going, almost exclusively, to subsidize pensions).
via Handelsblatt (paper version) and ::Heliocentris
