Nippon Oil and Ebara Ballard Corp. (Tokyo, Japan), a joint venture between EBARA Corp. (Tokyo, Japan) and Ballard Power Systems Inc. (Vancouver, BC), jointly announced that they have started field testing a 1 kW household-use, proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEFC) system that uses coil oil as a fuel. In this first-ever test, the companies have installed testing equipment in a total of nine homes (four houses and five collective housing units.
The previous tests showed that the PEFC system achieves power generation efficiency more than 33 percent higher and overall efficiency more than 86 percent higher than the initial targets. The system is made in such a way that it can operate at -10 °C. Nippon Oil and Ebara Ballard are aiming to commercialize the system in fiscal 2006 by improving power-generation efficiency and heat-recovery efficiency, and strengthening their collaborative product development capability.
