"We wanted to put one in and see how well it worked," says Ed Lewis Sr., deputy director of the governor's Office of Energy Management and Conservation (OEMC) for the State of Colorado. "Essentially, we are demonstrating this fuel cell for the public and for the businesses of Colorado."

The Colorado OEMC is committed to demonstrating emerging energy technologies as a way of promoting future energy efficiency, a cleaner environment, and energy savings. "Through our demonstrations, these technologies are available for the public to see and learn about firsthand," says Megan Castle, public information officer of the OEMC. "Our aim is to showcase these technologies so that Coloradoans can decide if these are technologies they can use to improve their lives or businesses."

This fuel cell is not only the first one to be installed in a Colorado fire station, but it's the first one in the state that successfully powered any type of business facility. "There have been others in the state that have been used in labs or tried in different places," shares Lewis, "but they haven't panned out in a direct application where people are working in the building and getting some of their electricity or all of their hot water, like in this case."

For the 22 months this particular fuel cell has been running and supplying power, its performance has been nothing short of splendid. "It's exceeded our expectations in terms of reliability for this amount of time," says Lewis. "We didn't think it would last this long without a lot of repair work, and we thought we'd see more problems. But it's actually doing very well."

Waiting for the Right One
The OEMC had been following up on fuel cells for a few years before this installation. However, before it could actually demonstrate one, it had to wait until it found a fuel cell that was developed enough for such an exhibition. "We had to wait until enough work and tests had been done on them in the lab. And in some very early adopters applications we had to decide whether it was worthwhile to take them out in front of the public. We wanted it to last, at minimum, long enough to collect representative data," says Lewis.

So in the late winter/spring of 2001 the OEMC was confident the energy industry had reached this point and it put out a solicitation. It went to large utilities in large Colorado cities that had access to a site that was highly visible to the public. The winners of the solicitation were the City and County of Denver and Xcel Energy, the largest utility company in Colorado. Finding a fuel cell manufacturer whose product was ready to be tested and who was willing to warranty it in any way, however, proved to be a challenge. "At that point in time, most of the manufacturers were in a situation where they didn't know enough about the fuel cells themselves," Lewis says. Plug Power Inc. was the only manufacturer the OEMC talked to that was confident its technology would work, so the OEMC went with Plug Power's GenSys 5C unit.

"Plug Power already had a few fuel cells out there in limited trials," Lewis says. "And it was quite a few of them and they were doing rather well. So we expected their equipment to continue to operate in that manner." To install the fuel cell and coordinate the demonstration at the fire station, the OEMC worked in partnership with the City and County of Denver, Altair Energy, Xcel Energy, Alpha Technologies, and obviously the City and County of Denver Fire Station and Plug Power. The OEMC funded all of the purchase cost of the fuel cell itself while the other partners collectively contributed resources, expertise, assistance, and additional funding for the installation, operation, and maintenance of the system.

Steps Along the Way
Believing that a small commercial building was the best choice for maximizing the fuel cell's exposure to the public, the Washington Park Fire Station was chosen for a long-term demonstration. As a government building, the station is very visible to the public, and the fact that it's located right next to Washington Park—one of Colorado's busiest parks that attracts thousands of visitors a day—was just the icing on the cake.

Coming to this decision, however, wasn't an easy task. For one, each partner, depending on the kind of company or organization it was, had its own ideas as to what it wanted to accomplish with the fuel cell. "And because the fire station is right at the side of a park," says Brian Davenport, market engagement manager with Plug Power who acted as program manager on this project, "there was some concern about putting the system on the park, or between the fire station and the park, because it would be so near a green space. So we looked around the site to find the best spot and ended up putting it on the east side of the fire station, between the fire station and the street, in the fire station parking lot."

The next step was the permitting and approval process with the city and authorities in the area. This process was to ensure that the installation design was solid and safe, and wouldn't affect the fire station or its staff negatively in any way. "Since the city was intimately involved with this project, we went through all the electrical and mechanical city inspectors there," says Davenport. "We had to get approval for the siting of it, and that was in conjunction with the Parks and Recreation Department, the Fire Department, and the city officials. Then we had to submit a drawing package to the inspectors, which was reviewed by their planning review team." Since the hookups for this fuel cell were—in terms of the fluid and electrical systems—fairly standard, this phase of the process went rather smoothly.

After all the red tape was worked through, it was time to begin constructing the site. Since fuel cells have rarely been installed in facilities before, site preparation is almost always required. However, fuel cell preparation is not any different from what is necessary for the installation of any other major type of appliance. "Since fuel cells are new products," says Davenport, "we put this one in a location where there'd never been a piece of equipment before. We needed to run the piping and the conduit and put the foundation in place." When that was completed, Plug Power was ready to drop the system in place and turn it on.

The final hookups to the system and the actual process of turning it on is called the commissioning. "Part of commissioning phase is filling the unit up with fluids, doing hookups, and going through the startup procedure," elaborates Rick Holz, chief engineer of Altair Energy, which provided installation services. "Startup with this particular unit is fairly automatic. You have to do some initial safety checks, such as checking your gas pressures and fluid levels and such, and then with the software they've provided it easily goes into startup mode."

Of all the phases of installation, the purely technical ones—like site selection, preparation, startup, and commissioning—took the shortest amount of time, roughly six weeks total. Site selection and design review, however, took quite a bit longer. "Most of that time was just trying to get all the parties involved at one place at the same time," Holz notes.

A Primer on Fuel Cells
Even though fuel cells use fossil fuel, their valuable advantage is that they put out very low emissions. This is because they convert fuel to energy through an electromechanical (chemical) process as opposed to combusting fuel. A fuel cell converts the chemical energy from fuel directly into electricity and heat. This process breaks down into three stages: (1) A reformer takes the gas and reforms it, and what comes out is straight hydrogen; (2) the hydrogen goes into the fuel cell stack where a chemical process occurs that generates electricity; and (3) this electricity then goes into a converter that converts DC power to AC power to make it more adaptable for plugging into the wall.

The fire station's fuel cell is a 5-kW unit, which is approximately the average amount of peak demand for an average-sized house. As long as the grid is up and running and the fuel cell is operating at full capacity, the grid doesn't have to supply that amount of energy. The fuel cell runs at about 100 degrees, which is on the low side when compared to most fuel cells, and it supplies all the hot water for the fire station and about a third of the electricity.

There exist a variety of different fuel cells such as phosphoric acid fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells, proton exchange membrane fuel cells, and ceramic fuel cells. These different types are powered by propane, natural gas, biogas, and hydrogen, among other sources of power. Many are currently being used by a variety of businesses today. For instance, a credit card company in Omaha, NE, has been using phosphoric acid fuel cells for a few years now. Two are in use at Four Times Square in New York, and the military is also using them at various facilities, testing them out on such systems as power locomotives and tanks. Long Island Power has had over 100 fuel cells in use that were directly tied into its grid.

"The reason they use them is because they're very reliable and can back up the grid," Lewis says, "because if the grid goes down they could lose all kinds of information. There's a phosphoric acid fuel cell in the police station in Central Park, and when we had that big blackout last year in the northeast, it was up during the power outage and provided critical information to other stations in the New York area."

Fuel cells supply energy in several ways. One application is to supplement an existing grid and alleviate a percentage of the energy supplied by the grid. Fuel cells can also back up critical systems should a grid go down, or supply energy instead of a grid. Because the fire station's fuel cell supplements the grid—as opposed to working instead of it—the grid must be on for the fuel cell to operate. "The fuel cell is supplying some portion of energy, and whatever it can make, the grid does not supply that portion. If the fuel cell goes down and the grid begins operating at 100% for everything in the building, nobody notices anything different. The lights don't even flicker," Lewis says.

Reliability—Today and Tomorrow
"Over the 22 months it's been running," Lewis says, "we've had some downtimes. But in general it's running between 70% and 80% of the time, which is really quite good for a beta unit. There have even been several months where it's run at 100%. Eventually fuel cells should be so reliable that they'll be more reliable than the grid."

A typical electrical grid operates at what is called four 9's reliability, which means 0.9999% of the time. When fuel cells are fully developed and have reached their peak, however, they are projected to run at a reliability rate of seven 9s, meaning 0.9999999% of time.

One of the goals fuel cell designers are working toward is to find parts that last longer. For instance, the fuel cell stack in a proton exchange fuel cell is platinum-based. It's very expensive and can be easily damaged by contaminants produced during the reforming process, such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

"What happens with this fuel cell," begins Lewis, "is that you put in some kind of fuel. The first thing that fuel encounters is the fuel cell's reformer. The reformer strips off the hydrogen, which is what you use to make the electricity. The rest of the carbon and oxygen in there need to go somewhere, and they need to be kept away from the stack. So the carbon compounds are vented." However, the fuel cell stack is inevitably exposed to a small amount of the contaminants anyway, which wears it down over time.

So the goal of fuel cell designers is to find cheaper, less sensitive materials to use for the fuel stack to create more economically feasible fuel cells. The ultimate goal, however, is to create more models that run on hydrogen only. Fuel cells that do this produce only clean water and heat as byproducts. "There are a lot of parts that still need to be redesigned to last longer and be more miniaturized," says Lewis. "But eventually, if we can find a way to make hydrogen cheaply, we won't even have to worry about the reformer anymore."

And Economically Speaking …
Of the money contributed by the OEMC for the fire station fuel cell, none came from the state. Instead it was supplied by federal sources, mostly by the US Department of Energy. "The OEMC uses that money to help people understand and realize the value of energy efficiency, energy conservation, and new emerging energy technologies so as to help offset energy costs and lessen the use of petroleum fuels," says Lewis.

When the GenSys fuel cell was purchased, it cost $70,000 with a warranty of approximately $25,000. Purchased for testing and public exposure purposes, it was not intended to be a money-saver for the fire station. "You can go out and buy a reciprocating engine–based generator to back up your facility and that will cost you about $1.00 a watt," says Lewis. "This fuel cell right now, if you look at what we paid for a 5-kilowatt unit, was at that point in time $14.00 per watt. Now it's down to roughly $10.00 a watt or so compared to solar, which would cost you about $6.00 to $11.00 a watt installed, and windmill, which would cost you $3.25 a watt." Prices for fuel cells, however, have been steadily decreasing each year.

So people are using fuel cells now for non-economical reasons. Because they're so new, many people are interested in learning more about how and why they are on the cutting edge of distributed energy equipment. Then there are those who see alternative fuel systems as part of their long-term plan and vision, and they want to see how well they incorporate into their own current structure. In a sense, fuel cells now are largely an investment in potential.

A Smooth Ride
Both Plug Power's and OEMC's technical crews were very pleased with how smoothly the installation process went. They faced no major problems and no surprises, and problems they did come across were no more difficult than would be normally expected in any equipment installation or remodel. "We had a couple of gas leaks and water leaks, things like that," says Plug Power's Davenport, "but they were just a matter of some people not having tightened down some things. They had nothing to do with the fuel cell itself."

The biggest challenge faced throughout the entire process was the fact that many people involved in the installation were not familiar with what a fuel cell is. And for good reason—there aren't many out there. But once people were educated, the installation process was, in the words of Davenport, "a breeze."

As far as risks to the user are concerned, there aren't any more with a fuel cell than there are with other major appliances, such as a water heater or furnace. "There's a basic set of risks that come with each appliance," says Davenport, "but there are no special characteristics of a fuel cell that bring any unique risks. In fact, they may even be safer than some of the other appliances because they're not combusting the gas—it's a chemical reaction. And the combustion has certain risks that an electrochemical process doesn't."

So what kind of impact did the installation have on the fire station? "It didn't affect the functioning of our business," says Lieutenant Phil Champagne, public information officer for the Denver Fire Department. "They worked very well with us. There was some impact, but it was no more than if they were doing a remodeling project. They cut a lot of pipes, and it was a little bit of an inconvenience, but they were very gracious and it worked out well. The whole process took about eight to ten weeks."

"Any interruptions were minimal," concurs Altair Energy's Holz. "And they were standard. The station was probably without hot water for an hour or so—they don't use hot water continuously anyway—so they probably didn't even notice it."

With the fuel cell in place, there is no noticeable difference in the fire station's current operations either. Besides the fact that it can be seen sitting outside the station, and that at times it has a very low hum produced by a fan (which is not even as loud as an air conditioner), the system is more or less transparent to the employees. "And that's the way it's designed to be," Davenport says, "so the end user doesn't really care where the power is coming from, as long as they have power."

A Bright Future
Because fuel cells are a new technology that people aren't used to yet, there's a long list of issues that need to be touched on each time one is installed. Many electricians and mechanical engineers aren't even familiar with fuel cells yet, and they need to understand what they are and how they work before they can install one. "It's not like looking at a refrigerator where they know the ins and outs of it," says Cynthia Mahoney White, the public relations and marketing spokesperson at Plug Power. "This is brand new technology. Because people aren't yet aware of fuel cells, installation teams need a certain amount of prep work before people can be comfortable and understand that it's safe installation."

"With the fuel cell industry being so young and new," says Davenport, "every time we go into a project we're dealing with new people who haven't really dealt with a fuel cell before. We're at the point in the industry now where the people who are installing these systems are really trying to push this technology, so there's a kind of excitement and enthusiasm with the kinds of organizations involved. And it's just exciting to be a part of it."

Los Angeles-based journalist AMY SORKIN specializes in marketing communications.

DE - January/February 2005