Commercial buildings and power plant fuel cells

Commercial buildings and power plant fuel cells... 

Two molten carbonate fuel cell demonstration plants have been started up in California (one in Santa Clara and one at the Miramar Naval Station, near San Diego). And developers of other technologies (e.g., solid oxide fuel cell power plants) are confidently talking about commercialization within a few years after 2000. In mid 1999, Siemens-Westinghouse was busy gearing up to build four 250-kW solid oxide fuel cell demonstration plants, two in Europe and two in the United States.7... 

Hydrogen gas fuel and air (O2) are fed to anode and cathode Pt catalyst powder layers, respectively. The Pt catalysts is Teflon-bonded to porous carbon sheets to form gas-diffusion electrodes, with a catalyst loading of about 1.0 mg/cm. The Pt anode and cathode are separated by a thin inert porous matrix that is filled with concentrated phosphoric acid. The cell operates at 200°C (to improve the electrode kinetics), with a cell voltage of about 0.67 V at a current density of 0.150 A/cm. Most voltage losses occur at the air cathode. The hydrogen gas must be pure because sulfur and carbon monoxide poison the Pt anode catalyst. This type of fuel cell is commercially available today, with more than 200 systems installed all over the world in hospitals, hotels, office buildings, and utility power plants. 

This third type of stationary fuel cell application is split into two main sections (1) power to non-residential, commercial, buildings to provide electricity, and in many cases heat. This can be anything from an office block or convenience store and (2) distributed generation (DG) power plants providing electricity for the electricity distribution network. 

---