Toshiba
Jeff Simmons is Senior Vice President at Toshiba.
This year, DistribuTECH International had a theme of "Experience the Energy Movement," with thirteen educational tracks and a massive exposition floor holding over five hundred booths. The PUF team met up with innovators making a difference with emerging technologies useful to the grid space.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: What's the main mission of Toshiba in North America today?
Jeff Simmons: In Toshiba, historically we've focused on large-scale power generation, and within the business that I focus on, it's large-scale power generation steam turbines. However, now we're transitioning that into a view of the energy space.
For that reason, we're taking advantage of a number of products that Toshiba has had development plants for and has been developing for many years. An example is our fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells are a product that fits that space well.
We've been in the fuel cell business for forty-five years, all in Japan. We are in the process of translating that into the U.S. markets. We're focused on establishing some U.S.-based manufacturing and fabrication to localize the supply chain and avoid some of the supply chain challenges everybody is experiencing currently.
PUF: Fuel cells have been around for a while, is now their time?