There's just one altenernative stock story today - according to Reuters, Plug Power's shares have risen 60% on news that its unit received an order from Wal-Mart Stores to provide fuel cells for use in fork trucks at one of the retailer's distribution centers. Plug Power said the GenDrive fuel cell to be provided by its unit, Cellex Power Products Inc, will power pallet trucks used at Wal-Mart's food distribution center in Washington Court House, Ohio.

Unless I've missed it, Plug Power's own website doesn't carry any information yet about this, less still about their GenDrive product for the small industrial vehicle market, which is what concerns us here. So here's a picture of a fuel cell driven fork truck from Proton to help you visualize it;


I'm anything but an expert of fork trucks, but a fuel cell version doesn't look any different to me. Fuel cells for fork trucks is actually an idea that quite a few companies have been looking at for a few years. Look at this pdf story of Hydrogenics from a couple of years ago.

Anyway, I won't bore you by saying again what everyone now knows - fuel cells aren't going to appear any time soon in your family car. But their potential in small niche markets is still untapped. And one of those markets has to be forklift trucks (another actually, is aircraft carriers). The bottom line is that the last thing you want - in our health and safety conscious world - is a build up of exhaust fumes in your indoor working environment. That's why clean-burning fork lift trucks make sense and I wouldn't mind going for a jog around a Walmart depot, perhaps racing a fork truck . . . !