Power from thin air – why Europe is warming to fuel-cell revolution

Date: 12/02/04

WHEN a massive blackout plunged New York into darkness last summer, a small oasis of light still shimmered in the middle of Manhattan.

It was neither a makeshift set for TV's Sex in the City, nor was it a clandestine emergency command centre run by the US government.

It was something far more exciting.

The lights were still on in a Central Park police station because they were powered by fuel cells, independent of the main electricity grid that had suddenly shut down across several US states and in Canada.

During renovations to the historic park's electricity system, the city had opted to install a fuel cell power plant at the police station instead of ripping up the grounds to lay new power lines or providing noisy generators.

Using a variety of fuels, including methane and natural gas, such plants also run a waste-water treatment installation in Germany, a brewery in Japan and a postal centre in Alaska. Made by US engineering giant United Technologies Corporation (UTC), they provide just a few examples of fuel cells in action.

Most experts agree that, given enough time, money and political goodwill, the technical limitations of current fuel cells can be overcome to enable them to run everything from cars and planes to laptop computers and mobile phones.

The "batteries" that run on hydrogen (see panel, right) could also be used to heat homes or to store electricity generated by wind turbines that would otherwise have gone to waste. A fuel-cell submarine has been sold in Germany, and plans are even afoot to insert fuel cells into the human body - to power heart pacemakers.

UTC has been selling large static fuel cells to provide back-up power for hospitals for years, cashing in on expertise that helped power NASA's Apollo programme and space-shuttle missions.

Yet when Darcy Nicolle, the company's EU lobbyist, first tried talking to Brussels officials about fuel cells, he met with blank stares.

"When I started doing this three years ago, hardly anyone in the Commission knew what a fuel cell was," he said, adding that while some research was by then being funded by the EU executive, fuel cells were not yet on many people's radar screens.

"We've definitely moved way beyond that now."

These days, everyone from George W. Bush to Romano Prodi is talking about fuel cells and the "hydrogen economy".

After the US president pledged a massive federal funding boost to get fuel-cell cars onto America's highways in his annual "State of the Union" address in January 2003, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly could not get enough of them.

"It was like a bolt of electricity going through the Commission," recalls Nicolle.

Though it is ironic that fuel cells were partly put on the global political map by a Texas "oil man", policymakers are not just backing fuel cells to make the planet greener by reducing CO2 emissions from the conventional combustion engine.

They are doing so because they feel they have no other choice.

"Europe's oil import dependency is set to grow from around 50% today to 70% or more in 2025," Commission President Prodi told the inaugural meeting of the "European Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform" last month. "Current trends are clearly unsustainable. We have to act now in order to change them."

Prodi is passionate about fuel cells. He is the friendly face of the EU's commitment to boosting hydrogen and fuel-cell research, starting with the 35-member task force of industrialists that he convened to point the way to a coherent strategy in the sector.

Their first meeting in January, which follows a report presented to the Commission by a group of experts last Spring, focused on transportation, a key target area. The Commission has proposed that, by 2020, 5% of EU road transport fuels could be based on hydrogen.

But many manufacturers of fuel-cell components feel the emphasis should move away from transport and research towards getting stationary applications to market (see interview, page 18).

They claim that the Commission is missing the big picture by failing to support visionary ideas in this area: homes could conceivably be powered in the same way as the Central Park police station, with compact fuel-cell stacks filling our cars while we sleep. But perhaps this is because it is easier to focus on transport at present.

Unsurprisingly, as Nicolle bluntly puts it, "the big energy companies are not all that interested in fuel cells".

That's because they would give consumers a new - and almost always cheaper - choice. "Instead of having a huge central grid, you could have a town with 10,000 fuel cells in it," Nicolle explained.

Woking, for instance, appears to be heading in this direction. An eco-minded town 25 miles south-west of London, it is the site of the UK's first fuel cell combined heat and power station. The system, which is publicly operated but privately owned, has slashed the town's CO2 emissions by 20%, Nicolle said.

It has also saved consumers a lot, because some "60% of costs are transmission and collection fees" in national centralized electricity supply systems which fall largely by the wayside "if you have your own private wire", he added. And there is also less waste, because about 10% of electricity can be lost "before it even reaches the customers" in the traditional electricity grid. But the Commission has taken a kind of "renewables first, fuel cells second" approach, Nicolle laments, when it should be looking at simultaneously promoting a mix of options, as technologies exist to combine fuel cells with wind and solar power to maximize energy efficiency.

"The EU can't get money for fuel cells because it's not [defined as] a renewable energy," he said. "What they should be saying is 'we'll give money for wind and solar and fuel cells'."

In part, he added, it is a mindset problem. The Commission's transport and energy directorate-general (DG TREN), for instance, is "very old-fashioned in its ways of looking at industrial policy", he claimed. This includes taking into account the concerns of big energy companies, which lobbied hard last year to tone down the capacity of users of stationary fuel cells, from households to hospitals, to hook them up to national power grids to offload unwanted power - an issue that was under discussion in a directive approved by MEPs and member states last December.

The directive promoted "cogeneration", or combined heat and power, a process that converts a single fuel source - fossil fuels, or industrial or agricultural waste - into heat and electricity.

This is just one example of an opportunity to provide the appropriate "regulatory framework" to get fuel cells out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Still another problem is posed by the ill-conceived notion - often displayed for political reasons at both EU and member state level - that all components for fuel-cell systems must be made "under one roof".

"There's been a tendency in the Commission to say 'what we really want is a European fuel-cell company'," Nicolle said.

"It's like saying you want a purely European car, when all the parts are really made all over the place.

"What you should be thinking about is creating a really good fuel-cell market."

Despite their US roots, companies including UTC and ExxonMobil have plants all over Europe, and claim they are eager to take part in European fuel-cell efforts.

But Lisa O'Donoghue, EU affairs manager for GM Europe, said Commission officials have really woken up to the possibilities of fuel cells in the past two to three years.

"There are a lot of people who really know what they're doing now," she said, adding that DG Enterprise has been getting more involved alongside DG TREN and DG Research.

"But they could talk more among themselves," she suggested, to promote more intertwined strategies - particularly as a set of global codes and standards for fuel cells are at present being hammered out at international level.

Nicolle said that even if the EU lacks an optimal regulatory framework for fuel cells, the level of political commitment has increased substantially within the past year.

But he also warned that it's still anyone's guess whether this momentum, stemming from Prodi and Commissioners Philippe Busquin, research, and Loyola de Palacio, energy and transport, will be maintained when a new Commission team comes to town in November.

"It's a big question - are we now at the height of political interest?"

Even if such high-level pledges have been made, he added, "the nitty-gritty still needs to be carried out".

Article explores why fuel-cell technology development and research is no longer just a fashionable alternative for policymakers.