Power play over fuel cells

Government and industry have joined forces in California to thrust stationary fuel cells into the public eye and on to the grid

Shortly after a wave of power cuts rolled through California in 2000, Scott Samuelsen, an engineering professor at the University of California in Irvine, and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Centre, started getting frantic telephone calls from all round the state. Business owners, heads of school districts and county representatives wanted to know how they could cut crippling electricity bills (which had in some cases shot up by nearly 60% in six months) or sidestep scheduled blackouts which were costing some companies millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Dr Samuelsen might have suggested conservation or—if things got really desperate—buying colossal diesel generators to keep the lights on during the outages. But his callers were not interested in yesterday's solutions. They wanted something new and pressed the engineering professor for an answer. Could the latest breed of large-scale stationary fuel cells, they asked, solve their energy problems once and for all? Fuel cells use hydrogen from various fossil fuels to drive an electro-chemical reaction that produces electricity, with water as the sole by-product.

As the blackouts continued into early 2001, Dr Samuelsen logged nearly 1,000 calls from organisations interested in installing stationary fuel cells at their sites—in business parks, universities, hotels, schools, high-rise office blocks, apartment buildings or shopping malls. At the time, most stationary fuel-cell manufacturers were working on prototypes and demonstration systems. Few were capable of mass- producing fuel cells for widespread electricity generation.

In June 2001, Dr Samuelsen and a group of state representatives formed the California Stationary Fuel Cell Collaborative. Their goal: to encourage fuel-cell manufacturers to speed up developments. The incentive offered: a $400m pledge from the California Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority (now known simply as the California Power Authority, or CPA for short) to invest in stationary fuel cells, aggregating purchases on behalf of all government agencies and integrating the technology into the state's power grid.

David Freeman, CPA's chairman and a former energy adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is out to make California a national showcase of stationary fuel-cell technology. To do this, CPA is putting up the money not only to buy the latest equipment but also to build modern factories for mass-producing the next generation of equipment. But if fuel cells are to compete with other forms of power generation, Mr Freeman insists that manufacturers must trim costs and boost reliability. In short, their price-performance ratio has to get a lot closer to that of a conventional turbine plant.

A group of 18 state and federal agencies is now pooling resources, money and brainpower to hasten the commercialisation of stationary fuel cells. Their support led to the publication in January of CPA's first “bidder's list”, a register of 15 fuel-cell firms—including Plug Power, Siemens Westinghouse, and FuelCell Energy—that will be asked to draw up formal proposals to install stationary fuel cells throughout California. CPA will then award its first round of contracts later this spring.

With continued funding over the next three years, Alan Lloyd, chairman of the California Air Resources Board (and a co-chairman of the collaborative with Dr Samuelsen), expects fuel cells to be generating at least 500 megawatts of power across the state. That may be only a tiny fraction of California's 50,000- megawatt appetite. But it is a “giant first step” for the fuel-cell industry, says Dr Lloyd, and one that could persuade other states to join in.

Before that can happen, however, stationary fuel-cell manufacturers must make their plants a lot cheaper, smaller and more robust. At Plug Power, fuel-cell engineers are moving in that direction with a PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cell designed to work with an uninterruptible supply of fuel. Like other fuel cells, PEMs rely on hydrogen, which has to be extracted from fossil fuels or water. Plug Power's fuel cells include a “reformer” to separate hydrogen from natural gas. Right now, Plug Power is developing a five-kilowatt system that eliminates the reformer and cuts the cost and overall size of its PEM cells.

Scott Wilshire, a director at Plug Power, says that Los Angeles is one of the few cities in America that have installed hydrogen pipelines to service various oil refineries and chemical plants. These could be tapped to feed Plug Power's new hydrogen-fuelled PEMs. A series of compact PEM plants could be located at a refinery or along the pipeline, siphoning hydrogen to deliver five kilowatts while recycling heat to warm buildings.

At Siemens Westinghouse, fuel-cell engineers want to shrink their stationary plants as well. The company builds solid oxide fuel cells which, operating near 1,000°C, extract both hydrogen and carbon monoxide from natural gas internally, spurring the electro-chemical reaction without the need for an expensive and inefficient external reformer. Raymond George, the head of stationary fuel-cell technology at Siemens, talks of a fully self-contained solid oxide fuel-cell plant that could deliver 500 kilowatts of power, but still remain small enough to be transported on a truck. If a particular site needs more power, several fuel cells could be daisy-chained into a mini-grid system. But first, he says, there are valves, meters, piping, external fuel reformers, an electrical inverter for converting direct current to alternating current, and a myriad other add-ons that have to be incorporated into the overall unit.

Within ten years, proponents expect “distributed generation”—which locates smaller plants closer to demand, rather than piping electricity hundreds of miles from turbine-based power stations—to handle up to 20% of California's energy needs. Even with new, clean-burning microturbines, photovoltaics and wind power taking on some of that load, it is still asking for a lot from stationary fuel cells. A good deal of public support will be needed, says Dr Samuelsen, if the goal is to be achieved. The tough part, he says, is showing off the benefits of stationary fuel cells. That they have no plumes of smoke, no turning parts, no 700-foot high dams, and no noise to upset people is bound to go unnoticed.