Hi All
I have been watching the development of fuel cells by Ceres for a while, but lost interest when details of the units started to appear .... looks like the rush to enter the market has skewed the product development towards what the gas suppliers (BG) actually see as the initial product requirement, that being a gas boiler with small complimentary generation capacity ....
What I am waiting for is the decision to decouple the technology from the gas heating unit and merging it with ASHP/GSHP, utilising the heat from the process to simply boost the heating circuit flow temperature .... from their early product description it looks like 2kWh of gas input provides 900Wh electricity and an equivalent heat output, the other 10% being efficiency loss, so a couple of cell stacks linked to a small heat pump could effective produce a 10kWp heat source (say 8kW HP+2kW thermal from the fuel cell), utilising only 4kW of gas, that's 250% efficiency, no wonder BG bought into strapping a standard condensing boiler to the cells ....
Cheers ....
