Carbon Trust Gives £1m Boost to UK Fuel Cell Vehicle Development
21 Feb 2012
The UK’s Carbon Trust is providing £1 million funding to two fuel cell companies and two universities to help drive the development of fuel cell vehicles.
Runcorn-based ACAL Energy and Sheffield-based ITM Power will receive £500k to develop a new hybrid high-power, low-cost fuel cell design.
A project based at Imperial College London and University College London will get £500k to develop a fuel cell that could offer significant cost savings by using existing high-volume manufacturing techniques employed in the production of printed circuit boards. The costs of a fuel cell stack could be reduced by more than 20%. Imperial Innovations and UCL Business are collaborating with the project to assist commercialisation of the technology
The funding comes from the Carbon Trust’s Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge (PFCC) which was launched in 2009 to support the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s objectives to develop lower cost fuel cells and coincides with the recent launch of the Government’s UKH2Mobility project to ensure the UK is well positioned for the commercial roll-out of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
Dr Ben Graziano, Technology Commercialisation Manager at the Carbon Trust said that ‘fuel cell technology is now a great growth opportunity for the UK’ and ‘by 2017 British fuel cell technologies could be powering your car’.
The Carbon Trust is a not-for-profit company with the mission to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy, providing specialist support to business and the public sector to help cut carbon emissions, save energy and commercialise low carbon technologies.
For more information on the Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge click here.
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