Rolls Royce and Fuel Cells.

I’ve often said (look back through the archives if you wish) that in respect of climate change it is technology that will save us. There’s a huge amount of work going on to invent and engineer methods of electricity generation without the use of fossil fuels and this work is becoming mainstream, moving into the market place faster than people generally realise.

Take this announcement from Rolls Royce for example:

Rolls-Royce has been researching the environmentally-friendly technology since 1992, but it was only in January 2003 that the company stepped up its programme by forming a subsidiary, Rolls-Royce Fuel Cell Systems.

Earlier this year it teamed up with a consortium linked to the Singapore government to invest $100m (£55m) in a bid to commercialise the technology. Under the terms of the deal, the Singaporeans have put up 25 per cent of the money and will also contribute their expertise in ceramics, a key component of the fuel cell system.

Together, the partners aim to build a stationary power source that generates 1MW of electricity - enough to provide power for 200 households. The plan is to have a marketable product by 2008 and to sell it to utilities, hospitals, universities and industrial estates.
....

Rolls-Royce has exploited its knowledge of high-pressure, high-temperature technologies to design an electrical power system that integrates a solid oxide fuel cell - a cheaper version than current phosphoric acid and platinum systems - with a microturbine.

"The capability to design and integrate complex systems is the key," says Colin Berns, the subsidiary's chief operating officer. "Rolls-Royce brings that."

Nor are high temperatures anything special for the company. The temperature in the fuel cell will be a blazing 850 degrees centigrade, the same level as occurs in a car's catalytic converter, but this is still around 600 degrees cooler than the temperature of a Trent engine at full take-off speed. "To Rolls-Royce, it's not hot", grins Coltman.

The company's fuel cell system uses an inexpensive ceramic - similar to a plain bathroom tile - as its core element. In the pilot plant flat ceramic tubes go through various stages, including multiple screen printing and drying cycles.

This particular project is one I know about from the day job, I’ve had a number of discussions with the people running it (although they are not, as yet, customers. They might become so but only if they decide they want to get the operating temperature down to 750 0C, rather than the current 850. Boring technical reasons why they might or might not.).

The thing is that the fuel cell part of this is pretty well understood and there are any number of people making them. (It should also be noted that the UK is in the lead in a certain part of this market, the low temperature solid oxide fuel cell.)

What Rolls Royce are doing here that is unusual is the combination of the fuel cell with the micro-turbine (turbines being their core competence after all).

You can imagine that a fuel cell stack operating at 850 oC pumps out quite a bit of heat. A usual method of dealing with this is to construct combined heat and power (CHP) systems. This is, of course, only useful if you wish to have both electricity and heat in the same place at the same time. By using the turbine RR can convert the waste heat into further electricity.

(BTW, it’s not quite bathroom tile that is used, it’s stabilised zirconia, stabilised with yttria at present, perhaps with scandia in the future, thus my interest.)

Now this is only one example and there are another dozen I could reel off. The upcoming Grove Conference in London will no doubt have yet more announcements. But my point is this. That this particular technology is a lot lot closer to commercial take off than people seem to realise. The US Department of Energy set a target of $400 for the manufacturing cost of a particular unit of generating power (I think it was per KWh but that’s from memory, sorry) via SOFC and hoped to achieve it by 2010. It was reached earlier this year.

It’s all coming takers and the general public (and most especially our green friends) seem to realise.

It’s this sort of thing that makes me not worry about climate change. Yes, it is happening, yes, we are causing it, but the technologies to stop us doing so are in the works. Don’t Panic!

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