jrfranchi that doesn’t add anything at all. It’s an interesting method of dealing with carbon monoxide. IOW it’s a slight modification of existing fuel cell technology that increases efficiency. It still doesn’t run on plant material but rather fuels produced from plant material. In this case it was ethylene glycol (antifreeze) produced from corn grown specifically for the purpose. It would probably also work with other plant products such as ethanol, methane or even glucose. But it certainly doesn’t run on plant matter the way you seem to think it does.
This isn’t a fuel cell where you stick solid material like lawn clippings or even corn kernels in the hopper and away it goes. This is a fuel cell where you grow commercial quantities of corn, harvest it, truck it to a chemical plant, convert it into ethylene glycol, put the ethylene glycol in a tanker, take the tanker to thousands of houses and fill up the fuel cell from the tanker using a pure liquid fuel.
Because it depends on commercial quantities of agricultral material that needs to be chemically processed it suffers form all the problems I outlined above. We are going to have to cut down forests, dam rivers and burn fuels to power fertiliser and pesticide plants just to produce the fuel. Then we have to spend a lot of fuel transporting and processing the plant product into a usable fuel.
This is just an alternative to ethanol as a way to produce fuel from corn and sugarcane, and it suffers form all the same problems as ethanol. It’s not a means of producing electricty from solid plant waste. So your claim of 5-10 years to any fuel cell technology capable of produciing electricity from solid plant matter is still without foundation. We currently don’t even have experimental technology that is capable of that.
Your claim that the lawn clippings from an average yard would provide more than a few hours worth of eletricity each year are even more wildly speculative.