Yet this, the only road-licensed hydrogen fuel cell car on Britain’s roads, is the evidence of a quiet energy revolution being led by a company with its roots in a small community project

Spurred by the particular problems of its remote location on the Shetland island of Unst, the Pure energy centre has solved one of green energy’s most pressing puzzles: how to store wind energy. It is believed to be the only company in the UK, and possibly Europe, which has worked out how to create fuel cells using renewable energy.

Hydrogen fuel cells have long been touted as green power because they create no carbon emissions when used. The problem has been that to create a hydrogen fuel cell you must use energy, and gas and electricity from traditional sources has been used to date, meaning that a fuel cell still has a reliance on fossil and nuclear fuel.

But for the first time in Britain, wind power is being used directly to create fuel cells and Pure’s Sandy Macaulay is the man who captured the wind. “We have this incredible wind resource,” he said. “The British average load factor of wind power [the proportion of time in which a turbine is operating at its peak] is 29%, and here we get 51%, which put us in the Guinness Book Of Records.”

The question for Shetlanders, though, is: what to do with the power? “We are not on the grid, and our own grid has a maximum demand of 50MW,” said Macaulay. “So we put 5MW into it, but we can’t put in any more without destabilising the system, so we had to find a way of storing the rest.”

Macaulay’s answer was to try to connect wind turbines directly to systems for creating hydrogen fuel cells without any recourse to gas, oil or the electricity grid for power. What had deterred others from such a seemingly natural next step in the green energy market had been the problems caused by the inter mittent nature of wind energy.

“We managed to make a system that takes a renewable energy input – it’s wind but it could be solar or marine – and produces hydrogen directly,” said Macaulay. “It goes down to 3KW and up to 15KW and it is not affected if it is switched on and off or if energy is available or not.”

The innovation could provide a lifeline to wind farm developers in the Highlands who have planning permission and funding in place but who are being told by the National Grid company that they must wait up to 10 years for a grid connection.

Pure’s fuel cell conversion offers them the opportunity to make their energy available stored in fuel cells. “It is no coincidence that the people who are looking at hydrogen fuel cells are people in peripheral areas,” said Macaulay.

The company has just received equity funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Community Energy Company of £300,000, in return for a 24% stake. Some 52% of the company is held by the community, while the remaining 24% is held by founders and staff.

Following a recent trade visit to Japan, Pure is in talks with Honda about using its system and possibly even Unst itself as a testbed for future fuel cell cars.

In the meantime, it has developed a sellable version of its technology, which comes in a 20-foot container, called a Hypod. “The market just now is public sector and communities: it is other demonstrator projects,” said Macaulay. “People just want to see that it works.”

The Hypod will allow anyone to plug renewable energy devices into it in order to turn the energy into hydrogen fuel cells. Previously scientists and researchers were concentrating on proving the viability of fuel cells, so used any power that came to hand.

Fuel cells have been criticised by green campaigners because of this use of fossil fuels, while researchers have struggled to make fuel cells work with renewable devices. Macaulay, though, said that the technology itself is not new, it is just the application that is novel. “This was first done in 1830. It is just electrolysis,” he said.

“The technology has been known for a long time but because there has been cheap and plentiful energy supplies, it hasn’t been used.” 

http://fuelcellsworks.com/