On 6 October, Southern Company, Alabama Municipal Electric Authority (AMEA), FuelCell Energy (FCE) and Mercedes-Benz broke ground on a 250 kW fuel cell demo project in Alabama. This will trial a system using FCE’s Direct FuelCell stack in a ”Hot Module” plant developed by MTU, a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler. The natural-gas-fuelled Hot Module will supply a Mercedes-Benz production plant and is expected to be fully operational by spring 2001.

Meanwhile, FCE has formed an alliance with Enron North America to develop and market FCE products. Enron has already invested $5million in FCE, which is to issue warrants enabling Enron to purchase up to 1.3 million shares, contingent upon the sales of 55 MW of power generation from FCE.

FCE also recently announced that it had selected PPL EnergyPlus, a subsidiary of PPL Corp, as the first North American distributor of its fuel cell products for distributed generation.