Content area
Full Text
1-MW fuel cell cogeneration project, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, California
Owner/operator: Alliance Chico Energy (an affiliate of Alliance Power Inc.)
Beer drinkers know and love Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.'s dedication to bottling premium beers, and that commitment has earned it numerous tasting awards. But it would also win awards on the basis of using clean, high-tech brewing technologies. Sierra Nevada has chosen to minimize its environment footprint by investing in a reuse/reduce/recycle beer-making process. The company has found a way to make its "closed-cycle brewery" a good corporate citizen without compromising bottom-line results.
The term "fuel cell" may have entered the public lexicon in 1995 when Tom Hanks--as Apollo 13 Commander James Lovell (the real quote: "Houston, we've had a problem")--guided the command module back to Earth after faulty wiring caused an oxygen tank explosion and the loss of two of the craft's three fuel cells. This "successful failure" of 1970 brought the astronauts home but failed to execute the mission--a moon landing.
Exactly one hundred years earlier, Jules Verne, the visionary science fiction writer, predicted that "water will one day be employed as a fuel." Verne, however, proposed using a large cannon, rather than rockets, to launch the space capsule that was the star of his book From the Earth to the Moon.
Ludwig Mond and Charles Langer have been credited with coining the term "fuel cell" a half-century later, although their experiments with using coal gas and air as the energy source didn't pan out. In the early 1960s, General Electric developed a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell for the Gemini and Apollo space flights that produced both power and water. Today, of course, high-efficiency fuel cell plants are sprouting like weeds and could actually overcome the unreasonable expectation placed on them: ushering in a new, worldwide energy economy based on hydrogen.
For the past 25 years, FuelCell Energy Inc. (FCE), based in Danbury, Conn., has been in the vanguard of companies seeking to make this revolutionary switch from fossil fuels feasible. What FCE is most known for is its development of molten-carbonate, internally reforming ("direct" energy converting) fuel cells (DFCs) capable of serving as efficient, simple, and cost-effective stationary power generation modules.
DFCs, which operate at about 1,200F, use alkali carbonates for...