News

Ceramic Fuel Cells Achieves Further European Safety Approval

July 17, 2006 by Jeff Shepard

Ceramic Fuel Cells Ltd. (CFCL) announced that it has been awarded European "CE" safety approval for NetGen™, its fully integrated pre-commercial m-CHP system. The conferral of the CE marking ("Conformité Européene") approval will ensure that the units can be deployed in Europe. The tests of the NetGen™ unit were conducted by an independent company – The Netherlands-based Kiwa Gastec Certification, Europe's market leader for testing and certification of gas related products. This follows the first "CE" approval awarded to CFCL in 2005 for its Combined Heat and Power 2 ("CHP2") field trial unit.

The NetGen™ system was first launched at the Grove Fuel Cell Symposium in London in October 2005 and is CFCL's next generation unit after CHP2, providing a number of benefits over its predecessor including tighter integration, fewer components and a marked reduction in size and system cost. CFCL recently announced that it had hit a major milestone by signing a contract with EWE, the fifth-largest German multi-service energy company to supply ten NetGen™ units for field trials and product development as part of a collaborative project to develop commercial-ready m-CHP products for the European market.

Brendan Dow, Chief Executive Officer, commented: "The 'CE' approval for the NetGen™ unit is significant as it overcomes a key regulatory hurdle and proves that CFCL can meet the stringent safety conditions required to sell CHP products throughout Europe. Meeting these requirements is an important step that shows we're moving out of the lab and delivering real products into the market. Following the contract with EWE, we will be looking at further opportunities with other European utilities for deploying our pre-commercial units in product development trials."