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 What started as the Fuel Cell Expo (FC Expo) has now grown into the Japan Renewable Energy Week, with six concurrent exhibitions filling the halls at Tokyo Big Sight. Alongside the FC Expo were the Intelligent Grid Expo, the Eco House and Building Expo, Photovoltaic (PV) Expo, PV System Expo and the Battery Japan Rechargeable Battery Expo. There is also a world class conference on renewable energy. Japan Renewable Energy Week attracts more than 100,000 professional visitors from around the Globe and is undoubtedly the premier event in the fuel cell calendar. This year the fuel cell exhibits were slightly reduced in number, but this was deceiving because of a significant number of National Pavilions. Canada, Finland, Fukuoka Prefecture, the USA, Taiwan, France, Germany, Kanawa Prefecture and Okaya City all had pavilions. The Japanese Domestic CHP Program continues to make headway under the auspices of the New Energy Coalition.
Two fuel cell technologies could be seen to be making headway, the solid oxide (SOFC) for domestic CHP and PEM for the latest fuel cell vehicles. Whilst PEM Systems running on natural gas give circa 37% efficiency fuel to electricity, the latest SOFC plants are now achieving 50% (Tokyo Gas) and both types achieve 85% efficiency including waste heat recovery.
PRACTICAL FUEL CELL VEHICLES
There were six vehicles for demonstration at the Japan Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Demonstration Project. My colleague, Dr Mike Rendall, and I drove the Honda FCV Clarity and the Toyota FCHV-adv electric vehicles. Both vehicles performed faultlessly in bitter northerly wind conditions, but the Honda had the edge on performance being a newer design.
FCV‟s have arrived as practical driving propositions - the Clarity gives 400km range on a 350bar hydrogen tank and can be refuelled in less than 5 minutes. The Japanese car industry estimates that these vehicles currently cost around £75,000 to manufacture and intend to halve this figure for market launch in 2015, due to economies of scale and simplified fuel cell architecture. Other vehicles available for demonstration were the Nissan X Trail FCV and the Mazda 5 Premacy FCV.
RELIABLE BALANCE OF PLANT
For those interested in balance of plant this show was an Aladdin‟s Cave. All the tier one suppliers showed their latest products. At last we can have pumps and blowers which are efficient and reliable for continuous duty operation. We are even beginning to see good quality hydrogen pumps such as the Agura units used on Ballard‟s fuel cell buses. There were also specialist steels and ceramics for high temperature fuel cell components.
DISTRIBUTED GENERATION AND STORAGE
The Smart Grid Expo was dominated by the big electrical names in Japan such as Toshiba, Hitachi, Fuji, NEC and Mitsubishi - all keen to provide solutions for grids with millions of consumers and distributed generating sources - as opposed to a few central ones. This involves forced commutation of the frequency sync signal and the ability to isolate zones to prevent islanding, with signalling for controlling power demand and measuring kilowatt flows.
Fuel cells will have a major role in distributed energy generation, either powered by natural gas or biogas. Hydrogen fuel cells will also have an important role in balancing the electrical load from intermittent renewable energy sources. The PV System Expo was about large scale solar systems - megawatt scale inverters, steerable mirror arrays and similar techniques. At last year‟s Expo the 2x1 metre 250 watt panel was the new standard. This year there were a thousand stands of PV solar, with a truly global spectrum of companies present. There were three main themes:
- System efficiency is being improved by developing panels that respond further into the infra red spectrum. This means that the best designs can have up to 30% conversion efficiency.
- Development of see-through solar panels – the panel looks like a green windscreen tint on a transparent sheet and the light goes all the way through.
- Development of flexible solar panels which permit lightweight and complex shapes to be constructed.
There is no doubt that solar power is expanding fast due to reductions in capital cost per watt. The Eco House and Building Expo was about efficient insulation, lighting, air conditioning, solar blinds and other techniques. The West Halls were entirely occupied by the Rechargeable Battery Expo, now in its second year.
The ground floor was dedicated to battery production equipment and the upper floor to the battery technologies themselves. There was a global presence but Lithium Ion was the dominant technology and Japanese/Chinese companies dominate this area of activity. One interesting growth area is the big improvement in the use of ultra-capacitors.
RELATED CONFERENCE
Overall it was a fantastic exhibition with a great deal to study. There was also an interesting conference. We were not able to attend all the concurrent presentations but Mike attended those on the subject of PEM and I attended those on solid oxide fuel cells. In the PEM area, the main theme at present is work to eliminate humidification and reduce platinum loading, in order to get stack costs lower in anticipation of the 2015 launch of fuel cell vehicles in Japan, Europe and the United States. The key to achieving this is to increase the stack temperature from 65ºC to 90º/100ºC.
All the car manufacturers have working fuel cell vehicles and, apart from stack cost, the other area of significance is cost reduction of the high pressure hydrogen storage system. Latest designs perform well across a wide envelope of environmental conditions, but there is more work to be done on self humidifying stacks in hot, dry conditions.
 SOLID OXIDE FUEL CELLS
The presentations on solid oxide fuel cells showed that there has been solid progress with both small domestic CHP units and large industrial systems. Ceramic Fuel Cells and the Japanese company, NGK, gave presentations on their recent experiences.
Adobe gave a very interesting paper on how a building energy management system significantly cuts electricity demand and costs at its headquarters in San Jose, California. The key is to synchronise the switching of the various loads to minimise overlap and reduce peak demand. Bloom Energy‟s 1.2 MW fuel cells provide approximately a third of the electricity requirements at Adobe‟s HQ.
In the big SOFC stakes, Rolls Royce is back on track with its 1Megawatt fuel cell in a container system which has been achieved by introducing a two-loop system to overcome problems with humidity control under hot humid conditions. Wartsila reported on its fuel cell activities, especially in ships in Finland and, last but not least, Mitsubishi gave a paper on a 400 Megawatt solid oxide fuel cell it is developing to replace steam turbine generating sets. It is interesting to note that their control scheme is a three-loop system. The first full scale working model is planned for 2020. If you want to attend next year‟s event, be sure and pack a comfortable pair of shoes – you will need them as there is a great deal to study and take in in just 3 days! |
