A Power Plant in Your Basement: Fuel Cell Micro-CHP
Picture your home equipped with its own miniature power plant, capable of producing heat and electricity simultaneously. Suppose that your personal power plant would be able to achieve CO2 savings of more than 50%, and would reduce the total amount of primary energy your household consumes by 35% (bringing down both your carbon footprint and your bills). Now imagine that your utility company paid you for supplying power to it, and not just the other way around.
That’s the proposition of BlueGEN, a Micro-CHP system developed by German-Italian company SOLIDpower. Micro-CHP – which stands for combined heat and power – is a form of distributed generation technology, providing residential and commercial consumers with the opportunity to generate the power and heat they need to meet their requirements locally, rather than in large centralised power plants.
Thinking Inside the Box
BlueGEN is roughly comparable in size and appearance to your average home boiler. Much like your home boiler, it also runs on natural gas; but with a difference. Where boilers burn gas in a heat exchange chamber to supply heated water for central heating systems, taps and showers, BlueGEN first converts the natural gas to hydrogen through a process of steam methane reformation. Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology is then utilised to react the hydrogen with oxygen, providing approximately 13,000 kWh of electricity per year, as well as a continuous supply of thermal energy. Though the additional heat produced by centralised power generation is likely to be wasted, the heat produced by BlueGEN can instead be used in just the same way as the heat produced by your boiler.
SOFC Micro-CHP systems impart other efficiencies too. For one, having power generation capacity located at the point of use prevents the loss of power through grid transmission and distribution networks (which can amount to anything from between 5 - 10%). The electrical efficiency of BlueGEN is also an impressive 60%, a level SOLIDpower’s Managing Director Andreas Ballhausen says is “unmatched anywhere in the world.” By comparison the electrical efficiency of conventional CHP units of the same size is between 12 & 24%, while the average electrical efficiency of a natural gas fired power plant today is 43%.
The Revolution Will Be Decentralised
Another advantage of Micro-CHP systems is that they can help to alleviate some of the strain placed upon the grid by the expansion of electrification in other areas, such as transport. As the energy needed to supply the system is delivered through the gas network, the total load placed on critical grid infrastructure is diminished. Localised power generation also helps to strengthen the grid’s resilience to power outages, cyberattacks and variations in supply from intermittent renewable power sources. The complementarity of Micro-CHP systems and the shift to renewable energy sources is enhanced by the technology's susceptibility to further decarbonisation through the substitution of Synthetic Natural Gas and Biogas for fossil methane.
As impressive as SOLIDpower’s offering may be, it is still early days for the company. Ballhausen tells us that they have so far installed around one thousand units in residential and commercial properties in Italy, Germany, Belgium and the UK. Although the timespans vary from country to country, Ballhausen estimates that each system will take between five to eight years to pay off the initial cost of purchase, depending on the rate of consumption and on local energy prices.
A Market of Millions
The savings rendered by Micro-CHP systems will also improve significantly as the economies of scale delivered by greater market penetration bring costs down. According to a study by the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking, a European public private partnership, the combined market for SOFC Micro-CHP systems in Germany, Italy, the UK and Poland may be in excess of 4 million units. SOLIDpower are in the process of building a new stack plant to tap this massive potential demand, which will have a final production capacity of 50MW/a when complete. They are also eyeing market opportunities as far afield as Korea, with an agreement between the company and the Korean utility firm KEPCO a promising first step.
At present, the fuel cell industry is to a certain degree dependent on government subsidies to turn a profit. However, Ballhausen is confident that his company’s rate of growth means that this state of affairs will not last for long. “With the new production plant we will be independent of subsidies very soon,” he tells us, “although we would like to see more countries support the technology.” In fact, the biggest obstacle SOLIDpower faces has nothing to do with production, or with the technology itself. “There is a bottleneck with the installer business”, Ballhausen complains. “Many installer companies are lacking young people willing to take the opportunity to learn this great job.”
Where next for SOFC?
BlueGEN may only be the start for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell technology. In October 2017, SOLIDpower initiated what they describe as a “game-changing” new project with Microsoft: to equip a data centre with on-site fuel cell power generation. With the volume of data on the world’s hard drives expected to grow to an astonishing 44 trillion gigabytes by the year 2020, SOLIDpower have chosen the right industry to work with.
Microsoft estimate that on site power generation using SOFCs could almost double the energy efficiency of their data centres, which would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings if implemented at scale. It will also improve reliability, eliminating the unfortunate tendency for data centre operators to rely on dirty diesel-powered back-up generators during periods when power supply is low. If the rest of the industry realises these benefits, the place of solid oxide fuel cell technology in the energy transition – and by extension, the gas networks that supply them – will look much more assured.
