Home Fuel Cell Generators?

[Loir]

Anyone know more about this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8563928.stm

Loir

[KenB]

Loir,

I didn't know about the Japanese activities - but a local company 10 miles down the road, Ceres Power,  are working on fuel cells for domestic CHP.

http://www.cerespower.com/ProductOverview/ResidentialCHP/



Ken

[charlieb]

Numerous companies are working on this - to the extent that most people think Stirling/Rankine Cycle micro_CHP will just be a stop gap to fuel cells. Electrical efficiency is much higher than most engine based systems, so payback and green-ness both better.      Japanese are nearest to fully commercial (with low temp PEM fc), but various European companies, including Ceres,  are also working on it (PEM and SOFC mostly). 

[Quakered]

Our own dear Rolls Royce say they produce the most efficient fuel cells.

Note, I refer to the real Rolls Royce that has nothing to do with the strange and rediculous cars produced by BMW with RR badges stuck on them!

[charlieb]

Rolls Royce are aiming at much larger scale (to compete with their standard CHP engines). If they can hit 50%+ electrical efficiency then they'll be better than the grid average and could change the game for distributed generation (even without 'waste' heat usa, which has proved difficult at most sites) - IF cheap and reliable.  SOFC micro-CHP would do the same thing (same big IF).

[zeus]

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 ....  

[Hastings]

Anyone know if fuel cell generators and storage, hydrogen, propane or whatever, are yet reaching feasibility for home use?

I like the idea of one to backup my new off-grid PV/wind/battery proposed system in place of a petrol/diesel generator.

[oliver90owner]

Ceres Power have a website with news updates, etc