Forbes has an article on a new combined heat and power fuel cell that apparently costs far less than competing devices - Redox Power Plans To Roll Out Dishwasher-Sized Fuel Cells That Cost 90% Less Than Currently Available Fuel Cells.

Redox says that it plans to bring to market a fuel cell that is about one-tenth the size and one-tenth the cost of currently commercial fuel cells by 2014. The breakthrough solid oxide fuel cell technology is the brainchild of Eric Wachsman, the director of the University of Maryland’s Energy Research Center. Redox says that it will provide safe, efficient, reliable, uninterrupted power, on–site and optionally off the grid, at a price competitive with current energy sources. ...

The first generation has a nameplate capacity of 25 kilowatts, which can power a gas station or small grocery store, and is roughly the size of a dishwasher. The system can run at an 80% efficiency when used to provide both heat and power.

With interest in fuel cells being given a big boost by the Bloom Box, the BBC has an article on Japanese efforts to sell cells to Europe - Japan aims its home fuel cells at Europe.

Following the success of a half-price subsidy for CO2-busting fuel-cell heat and energy generators for homes, Japan is now poised to ship its attention to supplying the UK and Germany with this hi-tech next-generation energy source.

With over 5,000 fuel cells providing heat and energy for conventional homes up and down Japan, the BBC has learnt that companies such as electronics giant Panasonic are in talks with EU governments about the possibility of bringing these proven energy and carbon-saving devices to market in Europe and elsewhere.

Panasonic has described the interest in its commercial fuel-cell project from the German, Korean and UK governments as "intense", and is confident that Japan, as the first to start commercial sales for homes last year, will be the forerunner in bringing the technology into common use.

Fuel cells - a technology that has been around for more than 100 years - convert fuels such as hydrogen and natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical reaction. The resultant heat generated also warms buildings in gas-boiler-sized boxes known as cogeneration fuel cells.

The idea is to generate all of the heating and hot water and the majority of the electricity needed by a typical UK home, without the need to be connected to the energy wasteful national grid.

Such efficient use of gas supplies can save the consumer around 25% of total energy costs, and reduce each home's CO2 emissions by up to 2.5 tonnes per annum, according to their makers.

They also claim customers can earn back the system's relatively high cost, running at present into thousands of pounds, within a few years through utility bill savings.

CBS's "Sixty Minutes" program has a look at cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy this weekend - The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?.

For the past year and a half, several large California corporations have been secretly using the “Bloom Box,” a potentially revolutionary fuel-cell system. Confirming this for the first time, several of the companies report this system is a more efficient, clean, and cost effective way to get electricity than off the power grid. Lesley Stahl and 60 MINUTES cameras get the first look inside the secretive California company, just days before the Bloom Energy official launch, scheduled for this Wednesday (24). Stahl’s report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES, Sunday Feb. 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

John Donahoe, CEO of E-bay, confirms Bloom Boxes were installed at his corporate campus nine months ago. The company says the boxes already saved them over $100,000 in electricity bills. “It’s been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do,” says Donahoe. The five boxes are able to produce five times as much electricity as the 3,248 solar panels that E-bay installed on its campus roofs, says the CEO. “The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” he tells Stahl. Google, FedEx, Staples and Wal-Mart are among the first 20clients Bloom is confirming.

Stahl is the first journalist to be allowed into the Bloom Energy lab and factory where they currently make one box a day. The boxes create electricity by a chemical process that utilizes oxygen and fuel, but involves no combustion. Bloom’s founder and CEO, K.R. Sridhar, insists all the materials in the box are cheap and available in abundance. Bloom says each large Box – which can power about 100 homes – currently sells for $700-800,000. They hope within five to 10 years to roll out a smaller home version for about $3,000 a unit.

Bloom Energy was the first clean energy start-up Kleiner-Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in. They currently invest in about 50 clean tech companies. Sridhar confirms the company has received over $400 million, making it one of the most expensive startups in history. The majority of that comes from Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who invested in Bloom, has high hopes. “The Bloom Box is intended to replace the [electric power] grid for its customer,” says Doerr. He thinks existing utility companies should not be threatened or have a problem with Bloom Energy. “The utility companies will see this as a solution. All they need to do is buy Bloom Boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity,” he says.

But there is another hurdle says Michael Kanellos, editor in chief of the Web site GreenTech Media. Even if Sridhar can mass produce his boxes and sell them cheaply enough, “The problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates that can probably do the same thing. They have fuel cell patents,” he tells Stahl.

Tonic reports that cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy is installing a 500KW configuration at eBay - eBay First To Demonstrate Bloom Fuel cells.

Following hard on Tonic's story on EEStor and a the wave of clean energy technologies about to break on the shores of global warming comes word that eBay is to get the largest installation to date of Bloom Energy's new fuel cell.

And we're not talking about a tiny demonstration project, of the sort we often read about; this is a gang of five commercial-grade cells turning out an impressive 500KW. That's a lot of output. It's no power station, but it's enough to run a neighborhood worth of homes.

Michael Kanellos, writing in greentechmedia, reports that the "City of San Jose has granted eBay permission to install five fuel cells from Bloom Energy that will generate up to 500 kilowatts of power." According to the San Jose Business Journal, eBay is "on a mission to reduce its overall carbon footprint by 15 percent by 2012 ... It’s using technology from the first green tech investment made by [venture capital firm] Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to do it."

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.

Technology Review has an article on new fuel cells that don't require platinum - A Catalyst for Cheaper Fuel Cells.

A new catalyst based on iron works as well as platinum-based catalysts for accelerating the chemical reactions inside hydrogen fuel cells. The finding could help make fuel cells for electric cars cheaper and more practical.

Fuel cell researchers have been looking for cheaper, more abundant alternatives to platinum, which costs between $1,000 and $2,000 an ounce and is mined almost exclusively in just two countries: South Africa and Russia. One promising catalyst that uses far less expensive materials--iron, nitrogen, and carbon--has long been known to promote the necessary reactions, but at rates that are far too slow to be practical.

Now researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Quebec have dramatically increased the performance of this type of iron-based catalyst. Their material produces 99 amps per cubic centimeter at 0.8 volts, a key measurement of catalytic activity. That is 35 times better than the best nonprecious metal catalyst so far, and close to the Department of Energy's goal for fuel-cell catalysts: 130 amps per cubic centimeter. It also matches the performance of typical platinum catalysts, says Jean-Pol Dodelet, a professor of energy, materials, and telecommunications at INRS who led the work.

The improvement, reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, is "quite surprising," says Radoslav Adzic, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, who also develops catalysts for fuel cells. The new material meets a benchmark for hydrogen fuel cells set five years ago that "we thought nobody would ever meet," adds Hubert Gasteiger, a visiting professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "For the very first time, a nonprecious metal catalyst makes sense."

One Bullroarer at TOD ANZ a week or two ago featured an article from the ABC on the possibility of mining low grade Australian platinum reserves to supply rising demand for catalytic converters and hydrogen fuel cells - World 'needs Australia's platinum to build cleaner cars'.

An Australian researcher has warned that the drive to put cleaner, hydrogen-fuelled cars on the road will stall unless new reserves of platinum are found. Platinum is one of the key components of catalytic converters, catalysing carbon monoxide from exhaust fumes. It is also a critical component of fuel cells for hydrogen-powered cars. However 80 per cent of the world's reserves come from just three mines.

John Mavrogenes says a team of geochemists from the Australian National University has identified new methods to detect platinum deposits. They are simulating the intense heat and pressure of the Earth's magma to discover whether platinum can be extracted from other minerals. "This work may help geologists find new reserves around the world in places that haven't been searched before," he said. Professor Mavrogenes says if the platinum price remains at its current high, Australia could mine lower-grade deposits. ...

The three major mines that produce platinum are in South Africa, Siberia and the United States. "If we go to more and more uses of platinum we're going to need more than they can produce," Professor Mavrogenes said. "Existing reserves would meet less than 20 per cent of the world's platinum demand if all cars went hydrogen."

The Hydrogen Economy

The dream of the hydrogen economy is one that has been around since the 1970's, and has been heavily hyped by sources ranging from Wired (as a key component to their long boom vision), the European Hydrogen Association and Jeremy Rifkin to George W Bush (who seemed primarily interested in supporting the gas and nuclear industries).

The term was originally coined by chemistry professor John Bockris (also an alchemist, cold fusion researcher and winner of the Ig Nobel prize).

The basic vision is that hydrogen is used to fuel vehicles containing hydrogen fuel cells, rather than internal combustion engines, creating no pollution other than water.



Global hydrogen production is currently derived from natural gas (48%), oil (30%), coal (18%) and electrolysis of water (4%). Given that hydrogen is currently largely derived from fossil fuels, the first obstacle facing the "hydrogen economy" dream is shifting away from these sources to extracting hydrogen from water.

Hydrogen is also used for producing ammonia and cracking heavier grades of oil, which means that peak oil and gas pose a number of problems to the hydrogen dream - the primary sources of present day hydrogen become less plentiful, and demand for hydrogen increases as we resort to heavier grades of oil (and coal to liquids) to keep the habit going.

Criticisms of the hydrogen economy

Critics of the hydrogen economy aren't hard to find, with frequently raised objections including:

* The use of natural gas (both from a global warming point of view and a depletion point of view)
* The inefficiency of electrolysis techniques in converting other forms of energy into hydrogen
* The difficulty of distributing and storing hydrogen
* The cost of setting up a hydrogen based infrastructure to replace the existing oil based infrastructure
* Safety concerns about storing hydrogen on board vehicles
* The cost and complexity of hydrogen fuel cells
* Availability of platinum for large scale use in fuel cells

Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute (pdf) argues that many of these objections are either myths or can be overcome.

Fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel and energy commentator Joe Romm (author of The Hype About Hydrogen) are probably the most frequently cited critics, arguing that the inefficiency of the hydrogen conversion process is wasteful and compares unfavourably to alternatives - specifically the "electron economy" where electricity is the energy carrier of choice.

Bossel says "In a sustainable energy future, electricity will become the prime energy carrier. We now have to focus our research on electricity storage, electric cars and the modernization of the existing electricity infrastructure".



The diagram above shows that both the efficiency of electrolysis and the efficiency of fuel cells are key factors in making hydrogen as a transport fuel less attractive than the electric transport option.

Peak Platinum

If we assumed that hydrogen fuel cells could be made significantly more efficient, and thus more competitive with the electric vehicle option, we still have the issue of the scarcity (and thus the cost) of platinum to deal with, as platinum is the material traditionally used as the catalyst in cells.



In 2005, South Africa was the top producer of platinum, accounting for around 80% of world production, followed by Russia and Canada. Significant deposits are also found in Zimbabwe, the United States and, as noted in the introduction, Australia. South Africa has been expanding production rapidly to take advantage of soaring prices - causing some controversy in affected townships.

When discussing rare metals, the subject of peak minerals is usually quick to arise. The idea has been covered at a number of venues in recent years - including The Oil Drum, New Scientist (with some good graphics here and here) and WorldChanging.

The New Scientist article estimated that there are 360 years of platinum reserves available if we continue to extract it at the current rate of production - however this drops to 15 years if predicted growth in demand is taken into account.

One analyst at Resource Investor has predicted that we may have already reached "peak platinum" production, though this seems to be predicated on the belief that production of hybrid and electric vehicles will remove the demand for both fuel cells and catalytic converters in future years, rather than a firm belief in supply constraints.

Another analyst at the UK Department For Transport, looked at the platinum supply situation for fuel cell vehicles and concluded:

The above projections, coupled with the statements from Cawthorn (1999) about accessible platinum reserves in South Africa, suggest that platinum availability should not be a constraint to the introduction of hydrogen fuel cell cars. If South Africa alone can deliver up to 5% per year additional platinum supply between 2000 and 2050, this equates to an additional 13.6 million oz in 2030, 24.8 million oz in 2040 and 42.9 million oz in 2050, which is sufficient to meet demand under any of the scenarios considered.

However there are many important assumptions and uncertainties built into this model. For example, this additional South African platinum supply would be insufficient to meet worldwide platinum demand by 2040 under Scenario 2 (realistic penetration) if any one of the following alternative assumptions is made:

* South African supply can only be increased by 4% per annum instead of 5%.
* Jewellery demand grows at more than 2% per annum - it is currently assumed to remain constant but grew by an average of 6% per annum between 1994 and 2001.
* Fuel cell stacks require more than 0.3 oz of platinum per car in 2040 - it is currently assumed that only 0.2 oz will be required but this is a factor of 10 less than current stack technology.
* The demand for cars grows by more than 55% per decade - it is currently assumed to increase by 45% per decade based on USDOE projections.

The platinum loading for fuel cell stacks is an important factor in determining the commercial viability of fuel cell cars as well as determining potential platinum demand constraints. The price of platinum is not likely to be a constraint to the introduction of fuel cell vehicles if the expected reductions in platinum loadings are achieved. At current platinum prices and the target platinum loading of 0.2 oz per car, the platinum required for a single car would cost about $90 or $1.5/kW, compared to a cost target of $50/kW for the whole fuel cell engine.

In the wake of the New Scientist article, the Wall Street Journal noted that if the most dire predictions are true, recycling of rare metals will be the only way to manufacture some types of machinery. Hazel Prichard, a geologist at the University of Cardiff in the UK, is developing ways to extract platinum from the dust and grime of city streets - apparently, urban grit contains 1.5 parts per million of platinum.

Its worth noting the contrarian view of metals depletion, expressed by Herman Kahn in his book "The Next 200 Years", which points out that reserves data for minerals is often very dubious when there is sufficient known supply available to meet hundreds of years of demand - and that recycling can change the picture dramatically in any case.

Either way, the platinum supply concern may not be an insoluble problem, as recent reports from Japan claim Nisshinbo Industries and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a platinum-free, carbon-based catalyst for fuel cells which they hope to commercialise in 2009 (first for home use, later for use in vehicles). Their catalyst is made from nanospheres of carbon. While 10 times as much carbon is required compared to the platinum equivalent, the cost is one 10th of using platinum. Diahatsu also claims to have a platinum free catalyst, using cobalt or nickel.

Another platinum free alternative being pursued is being researched at Monash University, where chemist Bjorn Winther-Jensen is looking at layering an active conducting polymer onto Gore-tex to make a cheap catalyst.

Alternative Methods For Producing Hydrogen

The discussion following the Australian platinum supply article at TOD ANZ noted the recent, highly publicised, research into a new catalyst for electrolysis at room temperature using cobalt and phosphate which MIT modestly described as a
"'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution". The process also requires platinum, which seems to limit the potential for cheap and universal application of the technique.

The news was covered extensively pretty much everywhere - see Technology Review, Green Car Congress, The Guardian, The Press Association, Wired, Renewable Energy World, EE Times and Scientific American, with much of the coverage being heavy on hype and short on facts and accuracy.

Joules Burn at The Oil Drum was less impressed, cynically commenting on the story in Local Scientist Splits Water, Saves World, Gets On TV. Bruce Sterling didn't see what the big deal was either, and nor did Joe Romm, who was positively scathing about the news.



There are other schemes for generating hydrogen that don't require electrolysis, at various stages of maturity.

A group at the University of Birmingham in England is looking at using microbes to produce "biohydrogen" from waste, and claim their technology has an added bonus - leftover enzymes can be used to scavenge precious metals from spent automotive catalysts that can then be used to make fuel cells.

Another biotechnology based approach to hydrogen generation is being pursued at the University of Queensland and Berkeley University, in this case using algae.



So Is Hydrogen Worth Pursuing At All ?

Whether or not the MIT discovery, or any of the other alternatives, really does lead to cheap, abundant hydrogen seems open for debate for the time being.

If we assume for a moment that it is possible to generate hydrogen on a large scale in a reasonably cost effective manner, the issues around distribution, storage and fuel cells still remain - particularly when comparing a hydrogen fueled transport system to one using electric cars.

The car industry, apart from BMW and Honda, seems to have pretty much given up on using hydrogen for vehicles, but enthusiasm remains for using fuel cells in some niche applications where problems are minimised, such as buses, which are refueled at a central location and have fewer concerns about weight and storage size.

Another niche where distributed hydrogen generation may be applicable is cogeneration (CHP) at home, something Jamais Cascio noted in his comment on the MIT announcement. Japan would seem a likely candidate for proving this on a large scale given that they seem to be the most enthusiastic about using hydrogen at home.



The other likely candidate for using hydrogen is energy storage in renewable energy generation - though perhaps not for home scale PV the way Nocera has been suggesting. An Australian company called WHL (previously Wind Hydrogen) has been looking at building wind farms which store excess energy in the form of hydrogen and use it to generate power later, when the wind isn't blowing. The Lolland Hydrogen Community in Denmark has been experimenting with a similar concept, as has a ship called the Hydrogen Challenger.

Melbourne based company Solar Systems is also looking to combine hydrogen energy storage with a solar power plant, using excess heat to improve the efficiency of electrolysis.

Tyler Hamilton at Clean Break has a post about a US based Solid Oxide Fuel Cell developer called Acumentrics which is talking about selling a $5,200 fuel cell in Europe by 2010 (see this for more on home scale cogeneration).

Interesting story in the Boston Globe about Westwood, Mass.-based Acumentrics, a maker of solid-oxide fuel cells. The article states the the company is working with Italian heating products firm Merloni TermoSanitari to develop a commercial household version of its fuel cell, which would hit the European market by 2010 and cost around $5,200.

Solid oxide fuel cells run much hotter than the PEM-based cells that companies such as Ballard Power have developed. This makes SOFCs a poor option for transportation, but great for fixed applications where a relatively clean fuel like natural gas can be used on site -- i.e. someone's basement -- to produce electricity, heat and hot water. The company's CEO is quoted as saying he expects the product to be certified for a 10-year lifespan and that the payback from energy savings in Europe, where energy prices are quite higher, will be about three years. Cracking the North American market will be harder, but the company remains hopeful, citing the fact it has in recent years increased the fuel cell's output 120-fold, cut costs 90 per cent and reduced the size by 80 per cent.

Acumentrics acquired last year the assets of Fuel Cell Technologies Ltd. in Kingston, Ontario, which became Acumentrics Canada Ltd. and is focused on R&D for the company. That office is working on the use of ammonia and paint fumes as a fuel for the Acumentrics fuel cell.

Of course, Acumentrics isn't the only player in this game. The secretive Bloom Energy, a well-funded venture backed by Kleiner Perkins, is also pursuing the SOFC market with a technology first developed for the NASA Mars program. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Bloom has 200 employees and is ramping up fast. It claims to be twice as efficient and have 100 per cent less emissions than conventional energy generation technologies. Curious.

Unlike fuel cells for cars, one can clearly see a path of commercialization for SOFC systems and their eventual use in homes.

The Engineer-Poet recently had a post on The Cogeneration Stopgap at the Oil Drum, which looked at how the combination of cogeneration (generating combined heat and power - CHP - using natural gas) and heat pumps could be used to heat North American homes much more efficiently and extend the life of North America's dwindling natural gas reserves for a period of time while houses are retrofitted to make them more energy efficient and natural gas use is replaced with electricity. The only example of cogeneration technology touched on in the article was from Climate Energy, whose CHP unit is made by Honda.

An Australian company working in this area called Ceramic Fuel Cells were in the news recently after landing a $240 million deal with Dutch energy company Nuon to supply 50,000 CHP units by 2014. The company still needs to meet a number of commercial requirements set by Nuon - in particular improving the durability of the cells from two years to four.

The company is hoping that production will begin by June 2009 in a new €12.4 million factory in Heinsberg, Germany, which aims to produce 10,000 2 kW units per year. The cells are expected to emit 60% less carbon dioxide than traditional combustion generators. The company is also partnering with Britain's Powergen, Germany's EWE and Gaz de France.

Ceramic Fuel Cells

Ceramic's fuel cells have been under development for several years, listing on the ASX in 2004 and the AIM shortly after. The company specialises in solid oxide fuel cells, which convert natural gas (and presumably biogas) into power and heat without burning the fuel. The cells convert about 50 per cent of the energy in the fuel to electricity - traditional gas-fired power stations manage around 30 per cent - with another 35 per cent of the potential energy captured as heat from the catalytic process.

The company doesn't have any plans to market units in Australia in the foreseeable future, preferring to concentrate on the European market due to higher energy prices, specific CHP rebates in Germany, feed-in tariffs and possible carbon credits for trading on the EU emissions trading scheme (set up under the Kyoto protocol).

CHP in Britain

Reuters reported that boilers containing Ceramic's units could be sold in Britain in 2010 if utility company Powergen orders units this year. The article estimates that fuel cell units for home units will be priced between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds and that larger units priced at over 3,000 pounds will be operated by utility companies. The same report goes on to speculate that because utilities will save so much money by producing electricity using CHP (which they believe is twice as efficient as centralised generation and sending power through the grid), that they expect utilities will eventually start giving next-generation boilers to customers for free, with the units having a 4-5 year payback period.

Powergen has also previously looked at a different micro-CHP approach using Stirling Engines attached to water boilers. I can't tell what happened to this plan, though the company is assume was the prospective supplier - Disenco - is still marketing a CHP product (although full production isn't due to begin until this year, which may explain the absence of progress).

Another British CHP company called Ceres Power received an order for 37,500 units from British Gas owner Centrica in January, for delivery from 2011. These units are smaller but cheaper than Ceramic's units. Carbon Commentary have looked at this unit and claimed the main challenge facing CHP vendors in the UK is a the lack of feed-in tariffs - which would presumably affect Ceramic as much as Ceres.

Bloom Energy

Another company that has received a lot of attention in the fuel cell market is US company Bloom Energy, who are also developing solid oxide fuel cells (though there is some legal argument underway about who actually developed the technology in this case). Bloom Energy

The company is investigating using natural gas and ethanol as fuel for the cells, and most reports speculate the cells will be able to generate 100 kw of power (the company's web site says absolutely nothing). One report from Business 2.0 claims the company is aiming to sell units for around US$10,000.

Bloom is backed by a number of high profile investors, including the omnipresent Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, and has raised US$100 million in funding. According to Vinod Khosla, the company is currently building a "massive" facility in Mumbai, India.



One possible application for Bloom's fuel cells is in data centres, with the cells used to eliminate the need for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS's) and thus (in some cases) the need for additional disaster recovery (DR) facilities.

Japan

Japan has also seen trials of hydrogen fuel cells for CHP, with the hydrogen coming from reformed natural gas. The cells are leased for 1 million yen (US$9,500) for a 10-year period from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Toyota, Honda and Toshiba are all also working on fuel cells, usually as part of efforts to develop fuel cell vehicles.

The Japanese Government is spending 2.4 billion yen (US$310 million) per year on fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes (25% of Japanese households) to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.



The Air Car

One last note - a commenter on the "Air Car" articles noted that MDI's main business seems to be a variable-fuel stationary power supply, so presumably they could be a vendor in this market at some point as well.