Ballard's Fuel Cell system wins innovation award and fuels several large zero-emission electricity production plants

Ballard has been researching fuel cells for over 10 years and for a long time was focusing on fuel cell powered cars and busses.  It's nice to see them developing utility scale fuel cell systems because honestly that's the best place for fuel cells to be used, in stationary electricity production systems rather than mobile ones like on a car.

What they're describing is way cool - using hydrogen in a fuel cell to produce power, and then make secondary use of the heat produced in the fuel cell to generate steam or heat in buildings or industrial processes.

The only real concern is the source of the hydrogen to run the fuel cell.  Often hydrogen is extracted from natural gas using a steam reforming system.  Hydrogen extracted from a fossil fuel is hardly a good idea, right?  But that's what is often done.  In the three projects listed below the hydrogen source is identified in two:- "byproduct hydrogen" at a "bleach plant", and "steam reformation of biogas coming from a landfill" (e.g. methane).  Both of those are way cool hydrogen sources though in actuality I wonder about whether it's better to just burn the methane rather than go through the steam reformation to get hydrogen to run a fuel cell.

In any case the third project, at a First Energy power plant near Cleveland, it isn't so clear what the hydrogen source is.  Given that it's at a power plant there would be plenty of natural gas on hand to reform and extract the hydrogen.  Sigh.

 

 

Ballard CLEARgen(TM) Fuel Cell System Wins Innovation Award; Seen As Leader in DG Market

VANCOUVER, Oct. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Ballard Power Systems (TSX: BLD) (NASDAQ: BLDP) announced that it is the recipient of Frost & Sullivan's "2011 New Product Innovation Award" in the North American Stationary Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cell category for the Company's unique CLEARgen(TM) multi-megawatt distributed power generation system.

"This award recognizes Ballard's technological leadership and strong market position in the commercialization of PEM fuel cells for distributed energy generation," said Tomasz Kaminski, Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst. "Ballard's solution surpasses the competition in terms of fuel cell durability, product cost and load-following capability, all keys to commercially viable grid-scale solutions."

The New Product Innovation Award is presented to the company that has excelled relative to the following criteria: innovative elements of the product; leveraging leading edge technologies in the product; value added features/benefits of the product; increased customer ROI; and customer acquisition/penetration potential.

John Sheridan, Ballard President and CEO said, "With the CLEARgen(TM) system, our customers can produce clean, reliable power and reduce their demand for grid electricity. This can create significant cost savings, while simultaneously reducing customers' environmental footprint."

Powered by Ballard's proprietary FCgen(TM)-1300 proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, the CLEARgen(TM) system is a complete solution designed to generate clean energy from hydrogen. Modular 500 kilowatt (kW) PowerBanks are combined to produce multiple megawatts (MW's) of zero-emission electricity, with heat created by the system also providing the opportunity for hot water and space heating. The system can operate continuously to meet baseload power needs, or intermittently to provide peak power during times of high demand.

Ballard's early work with CLEARgen(TM) has led to a number of notable contracts, including:

• A 1MW CLEARgen(TM) system, the largest PEM fuel cell system in North America, has been installed at FirstEnergy Corp.'s Eastlake plant, near Cleveland, Ohio for use in a utility load management demonstration project.  FirstEnergy Corp. activates the hydrogen-fuelled generator during periods of peak demand, taking strain off the power grid and ensuring uninterrupted power to customers. Results during the first year of operation have been positive.
• Next year, K2 Pure Solutions will deploy a CLEARgen(TM) system at its bleach plant in Pittsburg, California. The system will convert by-product hydrogen into clean load-following electricity that will partially offset power demand at the state-of-the-art facility.
• Also in 2012, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc. will site a 1MW CLEARgen(TM) system at its sales and marketing headquarters in Torrance, California. The system will provide peak electrical power and heat to a number of locations on Toyota's multi-building campus, utilizing hydrogen produced by steam-reformation of renewable bio-gas generated at a landfill.

Commercialization of the CLEARgen(TM) system is being supported by extending operating life and lowering product cost through a project funded by Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), an arm's-length, not-for-profit corporation created by the Government of Canada.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

About Ballard Power Systems

Ballard Power Systems (TSX: BLD) (NASDAQ: BLDP) provides clean energy fuel cell products enabling optimized power systems for a range of applications. Products are based on proprietary esencia(TM) technology, ensuring incomparable performance, durability and versatility. To learn more about Ballard, please visit www.ballard.com.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best-practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com.

SOURCE  Frost & Sullivan
CONTACT: Public Relations: Guy McAree, +1-604-412-7919, media@ballard.com; Investor Relations: Lori Rozali, +1-604-412-3195, investors@ballard.com
Web Site: http://www.frost.com

A look at home fuel cell units by ClearEdge Power

ClearEdge is publishing ads (via adsense) suggesting that before you consider solar or wind power systems, that one considers fuel cells. That piqued my curiosity and I'm taking a look. The thing about fuel cells is they, well, require a fuel. Solar or wind power systems do not require fuel, and derive power from innate characteristics of the universe like sunlight or wind. That means a user of a fuel cell has to pay money to someone who provides the fuel. On the other hand a user of a solar panel or wind turbine has to pay for that equipment, just proving that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Their claim is that the fuel cell system is more efficient than competing solar or wind power systems. I do believe that fuel cells make more sense in fixed installations rather than in vehicles.

ClearEdge5 is a combined heat and power (CHP) energy system based on fuel cell technology. It consists of three core components modularly designed for ease of installation and maintenance. The Fuel Processor converts natural gas into ultra-clean hydrogen through a catalytic process, as opposed to burning the natural gas, which dramatically reduces pollutants. Hence it would require natural gas service at ones house.

The thing is designed to interconnect with existing building electrical systems. Its designed so that if the grid goes down, it switches to a "grid sustaining" mode and to provide backup power keeping your lights on even if the neighbors lights are off.

They say the list price is less expensive than equivalent photovoltaic systems. For the same capital investment, the ClearEdge5 gives you 90 MWh of annual combined electricity and heat, compared to approximately 8MWh generated by a 5kW solar system.

Nowhere on the site do they discuss what happens to the parts of natural gas other than the hydrogen. That is the unit contains a reformer unit to strip hydrogen out of natural gas. The DoE page on natural gas reforming shows several methods. The chemical notation for natural gas, CH4, indicates it has one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms per molecule, and that all the separation methods causes creation of carbon monoxide (CO). Hence this sort of unit is "clean" only by some curious definition of "clean".

California utility to spread 'solar power plant' across rooftops

I've written about similar ideas before, namely that there is a lot of land area containing large warehouse-style buildings that have flat roofs. These buildings could then have roof-top solar panels. There is breaking news (links below) that Southern California Edison is launching a program to install solar panels on commercial rooftops

Quote:

The program calls for SCE to put enough solar photovoltaic panels on commercial buildings to turn out 250 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply about 162,000 homes....Once completed, the panels will take up 65,000,000 square feet of roofs in Southern California, or 2 square miles.

Quote:

The $875 million initiative also marks the first big move into so-called distributed energy by a major utility. Instead of building a centralized power station and the expensive transmission system needed to transmit electricity to the power grid, Edison will connect clusters of solar arrays into existing neighborhood circuits. A significant hurdle for the massive megawatt solar power plants planned for California’s Mojave Desert is the need in some cases to build multi billion-dollar transmission systems through environmentally sensitive lands to bring the electricity to coastal metropolises....Here’s how the solar roofs initiative will work: Edison will lease warehouse rooftop space from building owners. (The target area is the fast-growing “Inland Empire” of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.) The utility will contract for the installation of the arrays and will retain ownership of the solar systems. California regulators appear inclined to approve the project, which will be financed by a hike in utility rates.

Anybody who drives through modern industrial or office parks knows that there are vast expanses of rooftop space available. As I pointed out in my earlier posting on solar roof tops it's even easier to see this using maps.google.com or other online map services.

Article Reference: 

California utility to spread 'solar power plant' across rooftops

SoCal Edison makes $875M bet on solar

http://www.sce.com/PowerandEnvironment/renewables/Solar/

California utility to add 250 MW in solar cells

California Utility to Install Solar Panels

California utility to turn roofs into solar power plants

ProLogis Announces First U.S. Roof Lease to Southern California Edison for 2.2 Megawatt Solar Panel Installation

SCE files application for renewable energy program

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Vehicle-to-Grid is such a strange idea, why are people pursuing it?

"Vehicle-to-Grid" is a kind of reverse plug-in hybrid electric. The idea is some kind of poppycock wet dream that I don't understand the purpose its development. This idea comes around occasionally and involves some overly hyped breathless descriptions of the possibilities inherent in a car that has an onboard electricity generating plant. I've seen this idea applied to fuel cell cars and now to hybrid-electric cars.

PG&E Demonstrates Vehicle-to-Grid Technology and PG&E demonstrates first ever vehicle-to-grid charging and PG&E sees plug-in hybrids as potential profit centers discuss a recent showing by Pacific Gas and Electric of a modified Prius that has vehicle-to-grid capabilities. "The basic principle here is that electric cars charged at night while electricity is cheap can actually give some of that power back during the day when electricity costs more, and the owners of the vehicle that is giving that power back can get a credit towards the purchase of electricity when the car charges back up."

That's the idea .. that a hybrid electric car, or for that matter a fuel cell car, contains on board the car equipment capable of generating electricity. So why not, these people suggest, connect the car to the grid and use the onboard generator to generate electricity and sell it to the power company. And then the article suggests that time-of-use metering will allow the car owner to buy that electricity back in the evening when rates are cheaper.

Since the articles linked above are doing such a good job of portraying this as a positive thing, I want to list out some alternative points of view.

First is the cost and effort to load power into a car. For a hybrid car that means making a stop at a gasoline station, or for a fuel cell car it's a stop at a different kind of gas station. The use of the onboard generator means depleting that fuel, which then decreases the range of the car requiring the driver to make a stop at the gas station (of either kind) more frequently.

Second, time of use metering is rarely available to consumers. Instead consumers most often see flat electricity rates. The advantage accrues only when time of use metering is available.

Third, it's especially egregious to tie vehicle-to-grid to a gasoline burning vehicle. The goal is to reduce gasoline usage to zero, not to continue gasoline usage.

Fourth, a comprehensively installed vehicle-to-grid system means electrical intertie points at most or every parking spot in a parking lot. This would drastically increase the cost of building parking lots ... think, do you see power outlets installed in parking lots today? No. And we're not talking normal power outlets, but one capable of accepting power as well as sending power. This sounds like complexity, and would we trust average consumers to properly operate a power intertie system connected to their cars?

Solar power in the parking lot

Google Plants Solar Trees: What are Solar Trees? Well, think of the typical parking lot. Rows of parking slots for cars, and scattered around the lot are trees. The trees might be giving some benefit from shade, but what else? As much as I like trees, parking lots seem like an innapropriate place, because the trees aren't close enough together to form a forest, plus the parking lot blocks the rain from reaching their roots, etc.

Instead Google is launching a project to install solar panels in their parking lots. The panels are on structures that put the panels above the lots, providing shade, and capturing sunlight to make electricity. According to the article their parking lots (and some panels on rooftops) will provide enough space to provide 30 percent of the power requirements of Google's headquarters complex.

To give you an idea of how this would work, I invite you first to use maps.google.com to inspect some typical office complexes. Enter "N 1st St & W Montague Expy, San Jose, CA 95134 and click it to the hybrid map. This location is the heart of Silicon Valley but is typical of office complexes worldwide. What I want you to look at is the relative percentages of rooftop, building, and parking lots. There's a very high proportion of flat areas, either the parking lots or rooftops.

Solar panels in the parking lot would require a structure to be built, simply some poles and an open roofing, that can hold the panels safely above the cars. This is a simple engineering exercise to design. The tricky part would be orienting the panels for southward exposure, but again that's just engineering. Essentially this is a "carport" with the roof made by solar panels.

Google isn't designing this on their own, but is working with an engineering company Energy Innovations. I found this company but their site doesn't discuss the "Solar Tree" projects so I am not sure this is the right company.

Searching for "Solar Trees" I found the 'Solar Grove' project by Kyocera that provides a great picturing of the solar carport idea.

UPDATE December 20, 2006

TreeHugger: Google's Solar Trees Due To Bloom This Spring has more information including a link to the proper company.

Electrical energy storage for the home

Pumping power onto the grid from your basement: Discusses a new product that's meant to help shave off the peak energy demand on hot days.

The idea is to have a bank of batteries that are charged at night. This relies on time-of-use power metering (TOU) which charges the user different costs per kilowatt-hour depending on the current capacity on the power grid. Generally power demand is high during the day, and low at night. Under the principle of supply-demand economics it makes sense to charge more for electricity during the day (when demand is high) than is charged at night (when demand is low). So, essentially it's a power storage unit that does time shifting for electricity.

The product comes from Grid Point

They bill it as a kind of backup power supply. Generally this device keeps supplying power even if the power grid is shut down. The power grid can be shut down because it's overloaded due to the peak demand on hot days, or because a natural disaster has struck. As a backup power supply it's a heck of a lot cleaner than a diesel generator, because there's no exhaust.

One statement in the article stands out ...

Extremely high summer temperatures that tax the grid, such as those happening this summer in the U.S., are happening more frequently

Um, excuse me, but it is not the high temperature that taxes the grid. It's what people do because of the high temperature that's taxing the grid.

What typically happens because of the high temperatures is .. well .. people crank up the air conditioner, right? Is it the temperature that's causing the increase in electricity use? NO, it's the reaction of cranking up the air conditioner.

I discussed the effect here: Air Conditioning: "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable"

When we cool a building with an air conditioner, it's only making the problem worse. It's shifting heat outside, making the outside hotter. It's causing increased electricity use, making for more pollution and greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

There are alternatives. We have thousands of years of human experimentation with surviving hot weather that we can look to for alternatives. But with modern technology we're ignoring that history as if our ancestors were nothing but dumb ignorant savages. Sigh.

Grid Point

URL: 

Grid Point

Description: 

GridPoint ™ builds intelligent energy management (IEM) appliances to improve power reliability and enable power management for traditional and renewable energy users. GridPoint products automatically execute intelligent decisions to provide instant protection from power outages and manage energy efficiency for the home and business.

Unlike any other residential and light commercial energy technology, GridPoint appliances leverage advanced software to communicate with GridPoint’s network operations center. This unique capability enables the appliance to make intelligent decisions based on current data such as weather forecasts and time of use pricing. It also supports GridPoint’s online energy management portal, GridPoint CentralSM, to provide customers with information including traditional and renewable energy consumption, hours of backup power available, periods of peak usage and more.

GridPoint IEM products serve as an intelligent hub between the customer, the electric power grid and a renewable energy source. GridPoint meets the individual needs of customers and utilities, while providing an innovative platform to enhance the relationship between them. A large number of GridPoint products located in a utility’s service area allows the utility to draw upon power stored in GridPoint appliances, reducing peak demand costs, enhancing the reliability of the electric grid, and contributing to the emerging Smart Grid. Utilities can also offer cost savings through rebate and discounting programs.

GridPoint “plug-and-play” appliances seamlessly combine power electronics, high-capacity battery storage, and an advanced computer powered by an Intel ® Pentium®-based computer. The single cabinet design allows for easy installation, and the appliance’s network monitoring capabilities ensure maximum efficiency and early detection of maintenance needs. GridPoint products are sold through a network of premium home builders, utilities, retail chains and government entities as well as installers and contractors of electrical, home automation, security and renewable energy systems.