fuel cell

Hong Kong has limited land, and researchers have checked how much of the city can be powered if most of its water reservoirs were to be fully or partially covered with floating PV systems. At best, full coverage can supply more than 15% of the city’s total demand, and more than 60% of the residential demand.

Scientists in India have designed a system that uses PV panels, a proton-exchange membrane fuel cell, battery storage, and a supercapacitor. It also relies on an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system-based MPPT that reportedly achieves an efficiency of 98.7%.

After a global flurry of green hydrogen announcements, fuel cell company insolvencies, and a sharp market reassessment, solar developers are questioning near-term green hydrogen demand. pv magazine’s Carrie Hampel takes a look at the international landscape.

Panasonic has launched a solar-powered hydrogen fuel cell project at its factory in Cardiff, Wales, with the microwave assembly now operating on renewable energy.

HyWatts has developed the Powerplant-in-a-Box system, a reversible high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell that can also work as an electrolyzer, ensuring energy supply anywhere and anytime.

Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation has backed a hydrogen fuel cell developer $7 million to support an innovative form of technology using silicon-based bipolar plates.

A German research team has compared the economic performance of an offgrid PV-electrolyser-fuel cell system with that of a standalone solar-plus-storage counterpart in a building in Niger. Its analysis showed that decentralized PV-driven hydrogen could achieve considerable lower levelized cost of energy and levelized cost of storage than the PV-battery system, with these values reaching €0.12 ($13.1)/kWh and €0.35/kWh, respectively.

An Australian-made, 10 kW renewable hydrogen generator has been installed 120 km east of Melbourne, as part of a pilot project to provide backup to telecom towers disabled by outages.

Conceived by a Dutch research group, the proposed system is intended to store surplus renewable electricity via hydrogen generation and battery storage, with the latter being used only when hydrogen generation is not immediately available. Despite its high initial costs, the system can reportedly offer stable operation.

New research from Sweden suggests that low platinum fuel cells for hydrogen vehicles, when scaled up for the same number of cells, may achieve similar or higher efficiencies compared to commercial fuel cells. Their modeling is expected to act as a bridge between material science research and vehicle implementation.