This morning, I was chatting with Mark Schiller from Proton about the scholarship winners. They had 500 applicants. The best 100 were divided among four judges. Each judge called the candidates and selected three as finalists. (I know that's 12, but they ended up with 10.)

Three weeks ago, the 10 finalists were asked to come to Long Beach with their families. One family had never flown before. Several families had never been to California before.

Once the travel arrangements were made, the judges met to pick the one winner. Each judge had gotten to know the finalists and the decision was going to be agonizing. Tom Sullivan told them that he would make the decision easy...they would all win. The judges were in tears.Only a handful of people knew what was going to happen, and they were sworn to secrecy.

On Monday night, the 10 finalists had dinner together. Afterwards, Mark asked a couple of them if they were sizing each other up. They admitted that no one thought he or she was the winner; that other students were more qualified.

When Rob Friedland announced that all 10 had won the $100,000 scholarship, the audience was on it's feet. What an incredibly generous contribution Tom Sullivan and Proton have made to these future engineers and scientists!

Stop by the CaFCP Booth #409 to pick up your prize!

• Tonia Van De Vyver
• Adam Steiger
• W. Jarvis
• Jong-Woo Park
• Morris Sandler

Lots of great prizes to choose from!

-Lisa

Governor Arnold Schwarzengger will be speaking at the National Hydrogen Assocation Conference & Exposition tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. We are currently walking through the expo hall with the governor's advance team to scope out what will fit within his agenda during the visit.

-Ben

What a inspiration it was to share the stage with leaders like Anthony Eggert, Tom Sullivan and Chevy FCV driver Neil Smith. And our future leaders, the Proton scholarship winners and H2 student design contest winners. As Tom said "Go Hydrogen!"

The session stated with Jeff Serfass giving CEC Commissioner Anthony Eggert an award for Meritorius Service. Anthony started his career with Ford's fuel cell program and worked several other jobs, including a stint at CaFCP. Anthony said that his grandpa introduced him to the idea of H2 when Anthony was 7. Grandpa, an economist, wondered why we couldn't tap the energy in plants, and that sparked Anthony's interest.

Catherine is the first speaker. We'll post her whole speech on the CaFCP website. (We're trying to record her voice with a new digital voice recorder.)

Tom Sullivan spoke next. Tom is the founder of Lumber Liquidators and owns CaFCP member Lumber Liquidators. His passion in new energy. He stumbled upon Proton, which was for sale, and bought it "after a day of due diligence." He learned about the chicken and egg, and decided to do something about it with the Lumber Liquidators real estate and the Proton technology. The result is SunHydro---an east coast network of stations using solar electrolysis. Check out www.sunhydro.com for a look at the station and the location map.

Tom introduced the 10 students who won the first Proton Hydrogen Scholarship. Go science and engineering students!!

Keynotes ended with an account from Neil Smith. He talked about his expereience as a Project Driveway driver and his three months with a Chevy fuel cell vehicle. (Brought back find memories of the one we had for a short while, too.)

Debi Smith, NHA's conference organizer, kicked off the grand opening. She was really complimentary about CaFCP's help with ride & drive, workshops, media support and ... of course...social networking. She also thanked the sponsors.

NHA's president Jeff Serfass gave an overview of the industry, stating that fuel cell and hydrogen company remain surprisingly strong in a tough industry. Even as people recognize that FCs and H2 play an important role in energy and environment goals, but we need government policies that reflect just that.

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster welcomed the crowd and talked about how important what we're doing is. He drives an battery EV and knows that electric is the future--fuel cell and battery.

Mike McGowen from Linde is the Chair of NHA. He finished the welcoming comments by highlighting technical progress--huge decrease in cost of fuel cells, meeting the cost per kg goal for hydrogen, range of FCVs, He told the audience, "We can put our children to bed at night knowing that we're making the world cleaner and safer." A really lovely thought!

Day 0, as we'd like to call it, went well. Great networking day for everyone in the hydrogen after a day of setting up and a wonderful reception put on by the National Hydrogen Association.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is public day. I expect to see a lot of enthuastic youth out tomorrow to learn and explore the opportunities hydrogen has to offer.

-Ben

Weel, it;s not quite what we planned. Lisa and I figured out how to repurpose some old materials to make a cool dry-erase column in the middle of the booth. It worked great in our storeroom at the office, not so great in the conference hall. As a last minute punt. we propped two of the dry erase panels up on easels.

Still, our booth as the clean spacious look we like. The reception is just starting and I'm heading out to take more pictures. Check out these the Ben loaded on Twitter. http://mobile.tweetphoto.com/20985487

Chris

Today in our meeting with CEP we learned that they will be building the first hydrogen station with underground gaseous storage in addition to the world's first "CO2 neutral" fuel station at the new Berlin International Airport. They will be offsetting the CO2 with hydrogen generated from wind. 

Jackie

We had a great meeting this afternoon with our German colleagues from the CEP. We learned about the test equipment they will build to meter H2 dispensed to customers. In California our Division of Measurement Standards is working on a similar project so that stations can sell H2 as a retail fuel. Our regular meetings at conferences like NHA help us "connect the dots" to move both our programs toward commercial market.

Catherine