HydroGen Corporation Announces Successful Start Up of Full-Scale Commercial Demonstration Fuel Cell Power Plant

HydroGen, a designer and manufacturer of multi-megawatt air-cooled phosphoric acid fuel cell (PAFC) systems, today announced that the company has successfully started up its full scale 400 kilowatt (kW) commercial demonstration PAFC plant, located at the chlor-alkali facility owned and operated by ASHTA Chemicals. The project has been supported in part by funds from the Ohio Department of Development, which provided a grant of US$1,250,000 to support design and construction of this plant.

The 400 kW PAFC plant was brought on line on April 26. The plant serves as a field prototype for the multi-megawatt fuel cell plants currently being developed by HydroGen for near term commercial deployment, and is designed to use by-product hydrogen produced by the ASHTA Chemicals facility to produce and feed electrical power back to the facility for its internal use. The start-up follows the successful design,engineering and construction of the fuel cell plant at the ASHTA site, and the manufacture, delivery, and installation of the 400 kW PAFC module. The plant will now be taken through a programme of testing and optimisation that will include tests of all start-up, operational, and shut-down modes at progressively higher power levels, followed by a reliability run to demonstrate system robustness under commercialoperating conditions.

Source: Fuel Cell Today