Recent Advances in Developments of Full Scale High Power PEMFC Backup Power Systems

Electricity demand over the world will rapidly increase in the next decades. In this regard power distribution and its quality are a major issue addressed today in industrialized regions and tomorrow in developing countries. Difficulties to maintain power to electrical equipment, more and more frequently used in industry, health, telecommunications and data centers for sensitive applications have indeed been identified as an important problem in different surveys or techno-economical studies. These difficulties are enhanced when the power grid is not reliable for many reasons among which:

• Delays in the network expansion in relation to the rising demand
• Absence of reliable network in many regions of the world
• High weather impaction on electrical power distribution
• Network architecture modification with a growing penetration of renewable sources

Many laws, guidelines, incentives and standards exist regarding securing vital equipment, especially for health. However these regulations greatly vary from one region to another and consequently the use of back-up systems is expanded to increase installed power and avoid cut-off power. In some cases, these regulations may also provide a significant incentive for the installation of non-polluting systems (with no greenhouse gases emission). The most frequently used solutions so far are based on inverters and batteries, sometimes coupled with diesel generators when important autonomy is required. The fuel cell solution could replace diesel solution as well as all or part of batteries, particularly in applications requiring high reliability, power and autonomies.

 Based on its specific researches on anaerobic PEM fuel cell systems, initially for submarine applications, HELION has done a lot of developments on stationary PEM fuel cell systems. These developments have led to the manufacture of several prototypes in a high power range (from 5 to 50 kWe). In this frame, a 30 kWe H₂/O₂ fuel cell back-up power system was installed by HELION in June 2006 in a customer headquarter building. Since that date, the system has been successfully tested in real environment and gives full satisfaction to the customer. Based on this experience, an autonomous containerized back-up fuel cell system, with a 25 to 80 kWe power range, is currently under manufacture. Using a proprietary hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell technology, the systems developed by HELION provided high performances:

• short start-up times leading to the reduction of battery or ultra-capacitors volume
• high reliability and availability
• large power range
• low emissions (using pure hydrogen and oxygen)
• noise-free
• high overall system efficiency

The installed equipments met the performance requirements of targeted applications. Anaerobic solutions are especially adapted to confined environments and extreme situations where no interaction between the system and its environment is possible. In this presentation, field experience results, such as stack and system performances, life duration, start-up ramp will be displayed as well as integrated technological innovations, in order to compete in performances and costs with conventional backup systems for access to markets.