Day 3 of the Hannover Fair

Day 3

Kerry-Ann

“Innovation Alley” is the term we have given to one stretch of the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Group Exhibit. Starting at Antig the Alley goes all the way up to the booth for the Lucerne SOFC conference. This straight stretch of smaller booths is populated in the main with highly innovative SMEs which are here to promote their ideas and products. A quick count sees some 22 companies in the Alley with 4 providing systems, 9 component suppliers, 1 stack manufacturer, 5 testing and modelling companies and two which can only be described as none of the above.

Starting with Antig from Taiwan they have on display their fuel cell “blade” and their portable unit which starts shipping this year. As we covered their activities in depth earlier the year the Fuel Cell Expo we won’t go into them much here except to say – if their CEO ever ran out of ideas for the fuel cell industry (and us) we would all be in trouble! Maintaining that in general the industry has lost its ability to dream about what we really could achieve makes interesting thinking. Once it does start shipping its product then Antig will become one of only a large handful of companies globally that can truly say that are commercial.

Other companies in the Alley that stand out for me include Variex, Perma Pure, Ballard Materials and NDC.

Variex are another of the many supply chain companies that are reporting growth. These guys are happily reporting a near doubling in sales in Q1 of 2008 as opposed to the whole of 2007 with a projected 10 fold increase by year end. Impressive! The company produces compressors and blowers for the fuel cell industry and is now, that the product specs are there, is focusing on tooling, manufacturing and making sure the costs come down. When I spoke with them they even hinted at some forward procurement orders. Now that is good to hear.

Perma Pure represent another piece of the supply chain with its humidifier product. Only one of three companies that produce humidifiers that can deal with all qualities of hydrogen the company claim to operating in a sweet spot in terms of cost and quality and are now actively working with companies in the fuel cell forklift grouping. The company is bullish enough now about the fuel cell markets to project a x12 increase in revenue from the sales of hydrogen humidifiers in the next four to five years. Nice to know that people agree with us when we say that the next 5 years, maximum, should see a real growth period in the industry.

NDC is an interesting proposition and showcases exactly what the Alley is about, SME who are here to get people looking at what they can do. At Hannover the company is showcasing three of its products, two commendably compact PEM stacks at 2.5 and 15kW respectively and a mini ethanol fuelled, alkaline catalyst based passive fuel cell that is being initially targeted at the personal electronics industry. Known as EOS the units are the size and roughly double the depth of your average credit card but can, they claim, power a PDA type device for up to 12 hours. The beauty of the design is that spares can be carried in your wallet as easily as your AMEX card. Going forward the company is looking for partners to work with to further develop the EOS technology and continue to manufacture the stacks for increased market applications.

Finally from me and Innovation Alley was a short visit to Ballard Materials, a daughter company of Ballard Power Systems. These guys are the fair to launch their new product – a nonflexible, molded graphite diffusion layer. Sounds sensible considering the habit of flexible GDLs to sit in places they shouldn’t.

Other companies in the Alley include Horizon Fuel Cells, Bac2 and H2Economy

Jon

Footfall continues to be significant at this, the mid-point of the show. This is particularly marked up in ‘Innovation Alley’, which resembles something of a bazaar at times, especially since Horizon are doing good business in selling fuel cell toy cars on their stand. I caught up with Shanghai Pearl Hydrogen, an interesting company based out of China, who are marketing their range of fuel cell powered electric bikes in the UK under the name Pearl Hydrogen UK. The Mark 2 fuel cell bike is due to be launched in China in the next few weeks, and it won’t be long until they make it over to the UK. I got the chance to ride one of their fuel cell powered bikes in Cambridge earlier this year and got the feeling that this could make a massive contribution towards clean personal transportation not just in China but in cities around the world.

I had a chat with Nedstack, the modular PEM stack manufacturer. One thing that stood out was that their 5 kW stacks now come with a small CE certified sticker on them– a small point but a very important one in that codes and standards are finally catching up with the technology and easing the way for further consumer acceptance. The great beauty of the Nedstack units is that they are modular and any number of them can be put together depending on the power requirements of a particular application. For example, Nedstack units are currently being used in Mitsubishi Canter trucks, where 3 stacks provide 15 kW of power for the vehicle. At the other end of the scale, Nedstack’s modules are currently being used in parallel in a 1 MW PEM powerplant in the Netherlands. The possibilities are seemingly endless, and Nedstack are ramping up production to the order of thousands of units over the next couple of years. Another thing that was seemingly endless was the 26m long bendy bus that Nedstack showed me a picture of. This giant, capable of seating 120 passengers (and up to 300 with standing room) is being developed with 120 kW of Nedstack modules as a demo project in Amsterdam and should be launched in mid 2009. As ever, while this is an important demo project, it would be more encouraging if fleets of these buses, rather than one-offs, were being procured.

Unfortunately Nicks section on Day three has been lost due to the computer having a somewhat temperamental gremlin! More from Nick tomorrow.

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