Ceramic Fuel Cells: Small but powerful  

Robert Gottliebsen has an article at The Business Spectator on cogeneration / fuel cell company Ceramic Fuel Cells - Small but powerful.

Around the world enormous effort is being concentrated on generating energy more efficiently with lower carbon emissions. That work encompasses many generating techniques, but significant development expenditure is now being concentrated on decentralised power generation instead of the traditional centralised power generation facilities.

In Australia one of the leaders in power generation decentralisation is a fairly obscure company, Ceramic Fuel Cells.

I noticed about 18 months ago that Jeff Harding, who spearheaded the development of the global wind and hydro group, Pacific Hydro, ( before selling it to the industry superannuation funds), joined the board of Ceramic and became its chairman.

Ceramic has been developing CSIRO technology that produces small fuel cells that form the base of gas fired home generators.

Ceramic Fuel Cells’ technological breakthroughs have been obscured by the fact that the group lost tens of millions investing in global debt securities (Making up for lost capital, April 7). Those losses are now the subject of IMF funded court cases against the promoter. Ceramic Fuel Cells has developed a small $6,000 home generator that has an 85 per cent power/heat conversion rate. A normal large power station has a 40 per cent power conversion rate. Ceramic’s high conversion figures have fascinated a whole range of European and Japanese power utilities who can see that the units can slash greenhouse emissions and halve the amount of gas required to generate home/office electricity and heating. And as the energy is produced in the home or office there is no transmission waste, although surplus electricity can be sold back to the grid.

Ceramic is currently completing a European manufacturing facility. It can’t wait for the court case decision, so it has just raised $20 million with a placement at 5 cents a share. Original shareholders Woodside and Energex did not take up shares in the placement, so their percentage stake has been more than halved. But two major European funds, the Belgium based KBC Ecoclimate Change Fund and Deutsche bank’s New Energy Opportunity Fund each subscribed around $4.5 million and each now have about 12 per cent of Ceramic Fuel Cells.