The market penetration date for commercial utility fuel cells can now be anything from 2002 to 2005 depending on whether you are in marketing or engineering.
After visiting Arnhem for the inauguration of the 100 kW tubular SOFC demonstration unit, which has now been running faultlessly since November 1997 with over three months operation at higher than nominal output, and after attending the European Fuel Cell Group Spring Workshop on the following day, my best guess would be 2003, with solid oxide and molten carbonate modules of 250 kWe, without turbine systems, competing head to head.
These solid state systems, with the minimum of moving parts, will not represent the real technical or economic benefits of advanced fuel cell systems. They will not have efficiencies as high as modern coal fired plants. The main benefits come when high temperature fuel cells are used either to replace the combustors in a simple cycle gas turbine system, or more effectively as a topping cycle in a gas turbine combined cycle plant. The latter can show thermal efficiencies well over 70 per cent. Used in combined cycle, fuel utilisation can be in the 90's. None of these systems need external gas reformer units, and emissions are, to say the least, minimal with virtually no CO production.
Such fuel cells can consume gasified coal syngas equally as well as natural gas or LNG, but there is little economic incentive to do this. Fuel cells are more likely to be the last nail in the coffin for coal burning power generation in some countries.
The grounds for this lugubrious conclusion became increasingly evident at the recent London conference on the future of the UK gas industry. Run by the Institute of Economic Affairs, this event coincided with the completion of the liberalisation of the natural gas supply industry throughout the UK. Gas industry regulator Clare Spottiswoode was in sparkling form in response to the almost universal praise and congratulations from the entire assembly, amounting at times to something like canonisation. Trade and Industry Select Committee chairman Martin O'Neill came a close second for the plaudits in response to the reduction in gas prices for industrial consumers of more than a half, and an impressive range of price reductions for the residential consumer. But the barely credible EU gas directive was equally high on the agenda.
Peter Faross, Head of Unit DG XVII A1 of the European Commission, was the main apologist for this enterprising piece of legislation. He raised a few eyebrows when he maintained that the recent joint venture between Ruhrgas in Germany and the mighty Gazprom in Russia was agreed primarily to give the Russian giant access not only to German and Belgian networks, but especially to the UK market via the first European Interconnector. The need for a second interconnector has been precipitated by the observation that the price of natural gas in Europe would have to rise by a factor of four or five before coal could begin to compete with it as a power generation fuel in an open competitive power market.
Germany, like the UK, is destined to emerge from a largely expensive coal based energy economy in spite of desperate efforts by politicians and lobbyists to salvage what they can from the beleaguered coal industry, which has supported them so well in the past. But the strategies are different.
The UK. Labour Party, long beholden to the coal mining trade unions, and now in government, is, along with the electricity supply industry regulator, putting heavy pressure on privatised ex-CEGB generators National Power and PowerGen, described by Claire Spottiswoode as de facto monopolies, to unbundle large tranches of their mainly coal fired generating capacity in order to retain some vestige of a coal mining industry.
German power industry liberalisation is even more emasculated. Here use of system charges have been set so high that there is little chance of third party access to the local monopoly power utilities by independent generators needing to export power to distant customers. The result will be growth in distributed local generating facilities, particularly on the sites of large industrial plants and chemical engineering complexes – a development already happening on a substantial scale.
Here is a growing opportunity ripe for rapid fuel cell market penetration on a scale that should support the installation of mass production manufacturing facilities big enough to reduce unit costs to the highly competitive levels predicted for fuel cell generation packages. There is a real possibility that fuel cell power plants could spread rapidly at the expense of coal interests early in the next millennium.
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