Fuel Cells…may bring home portable electricity!

A machine the size of an office copier could one day bring heat and light to thousands of homes in the West at locations so remote they're our of reach of electrical transmission lines.

Fuel cells, essentially batteries that do not go dead, run on oxygen and hydrogen and have the potential to replace wood stoves, noisy generators and kerosene lamps for those living off the grid.

Energy Northwest, a public power consortium of 13 utilities, is participating in a Bonneville Power Administration test of Bend-based IdaTech's fuel cells.

The Energy Northwest fuel cell has a steady-state capacity of three kilowatts and can handle peak loads of about 5 kilowatts – the power demand of an average home.

Fueled with methanol, it is supposed to last indefinitely, although that is still to be determined.

The first-generation fuel cell has had some reliability problems with automatic shutdowns, but "it's very close to being a very practical device," says Stan Davison, a resource development specialist for Energy Northwest.

The second generation of fuel cells from IdaTech, a subsidiary of Boise-based Idacorp, are expected to be ready for testing early next year, and BPA has said it will work with utilities to place some in homes.

At $25,000 each, these machines are not yet priced for most homeowners. However, the cost per unit is expected to drop eventually to the $5,000 to $7,000 range.

BPA, a federal power marketing agency in Portland, calls these experimental fuel cells "electricity in a box," a clean, "green" form of energy with potential for residential and small commercial use.

"BPA sees the future of generation will probably have a lot of distributed generation," says Tom Osborn, a mechanical engineer for the agency.

Survivalists and people with mountain homes are not the only likely customers. Fuel cells could provide backup power for farms, small businesses, and enterprises such as hospitals, which could be thrown into chaos without electricity.

In the power generation realm, Osborn compares the fuel cell's place to that of cellular telephones in telecommunications. While just about everyone has a land-line telephone, a lot of people use cell phones as well. In China, notably, he says, people who had lived for years without telephone lines to their homes went straight to cell service.

It may be the green aspect of fuel cells may attract some customers, even at 25 percent to 30 percent above big-generation rates.

The first fuel cell was built in 1839, but serious interest in it as an electricity generator began in the 1960's with NASA's Apollo space program.

Fuel cells will probably never be able to make electricity cheaper than large-scale projects and even nuclear power plants. In terms of capital investments, the fuel cell has an installed cost of $8,333 per kilowatt, compared with $3,500 per kilowatt at the Columbia Generating Station nuclear power plant and $600 per kilowatt at the most efficient combined-cycle combustion turbine plants.

Gravity hydroelectric projects are even cheaper because falling water is free.

Fuel cells could one-day help utilities minimize the installation of unsightly power lines should electricity demands stress the transmission capacity of the region.

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