News

Fuel Cell Platform targets Residential Users

December 08, 2015 by Jeff Shepard

Ceres Power Holdings plc announce its progress with the latest release of its V3 Steel Cell technology platform. This improves efficiency and power density to the point which enables Ceres to address high efficiency, power only applications for the commercial scale market, as well as significantly improving the economic case for the residential market. Ultimately the latest increase in performance enables Ceres to tap into a more significant part of the distributed generation market, which is predicted to be worth around $200 billion globally by 2020, of which approximately $40 billion is expected to come from fuel cell power systems.

For the residential market, Ceres has developed the Steel Gen platform, a 1kW class power system which uses the V3 technology, to achieve 50% net electrical efficiency in one of the most compact fuel cell system design available. This platform is now available to OEM partners, allowing fuel cell power systems running on natural gas and based on Ceres Power’s Steel Cell technology to achieve significant power only efficiencies in the home or business which are higher than the best state-of-the-art centralized generating plants and overall efficiency up to 90% when also capturing the heat.

For the commercial scale market which requires higher power applications, Ceres has developed a modular stack concept for the first time using the V3 technology which in initial testing has achieved 55% net electrical efficiency. This is hugely important as 50% is the tipping point when the technology becomes viable for commercial and light industrial scale applications.

The Steel Cell technology provides a superior alternative to diesel generator sets and gas engines, as it produces zero SOx and NOx emissions which will be key to ensuring cleaner cities, whilst also lowering CO2 and energy bills by around a third. The V3 technology is the result of extensive development and long term testing and validation at Ceres, which is part of its planned annual technology release process.

Phil Caldwell, Chief Executive of Ceres Power, commented: “Our strategy is simple: to make our Steel Cell technology the platform for a range of distributed power generation products for every home and business. We have already seen high levels of early stage interest in higher power products from US, Korea and Japan. Having achieved this latest technical advance, we now expect to announce progress on a number of new partnerships in the near future.”