Fuel cell will power the City of Vaasa

15 June 2006

Utilizing biogas as a fuel
Wärtsilä fuel cell unit to power the City of Vaasa

Finnish energy solutions provider Wärtsilä is under discussions to provide the City of Vaasa, in West-Finland, with a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) power unit of 50 kW in time for its 2008 Housing Fair. The unit will provide clean heat and power for 50 homes.

The unit, dubbed WFC50 by the Wärtsilä engineers, will use gas from an old landfill site to provide heat and power to Vaasa's electricity and distributed heat grid.

This will be the first time a solid oxide fuel cell will have been used in such an application in Finland, and as such it heralds an interesting time for fuel cell development.

Wärtsilä fuel cell WFC20 prototype with power of 5 kW.

Towards larger units

Today, units typically with power of 1 – 5 kW are designed to supply power and heat for individual homes. The size of the WFC50 would place it in the commercial, district and industrial customer range.

“We are now focusing on the 20 – 50 kW demonstration units. After this we will develop the technology towards 200-250 kW unit size. A unit of 250 kW could then be “repeated” for applications of around 1MW,” says Mr. Erkko Fontell, General Manager of Wärtsilä Fuel Cell Group.

"At present, we are working with a prototype of 20 kW power unit. The unit will be operated at Wärtsilä fuel cell laboratory in Finland during the rest of the year,” Fontell describes.

The SOFCs are best used in parallel with the grid to provide continuous heat and power (CHP) e.g. in large power plants and for industrial applications. When used in parallel with the grid, if the grid fails, the fuel cell can continue to supply power to critical operations.

Cost-competitiveness may be reached

The technology is in early demonstration phase where a low number of units are manufactured at high cost.

Fontell says that it would cost around USD10 - 20,000/kW to buy the technology, which is still far from the target level. To be competitive, a fuel cell would need to cost no more than USD 2,000-2,500/kW.

"Forecasts for 2015-2020 show the price falling to USD 1,000/kW, so the technology has potential to become competitive,” Fontell points out.

“But the cost development depends on both how the technology proceeds, and how fast the manufacturing volumes can be increased,” Fontell reminds.

Wärtsilä fuel cells in brief

Since 2000, Wärtsilä has developed fuel cell technology for distributed power generation, and is today among the world’s front-line pioneers of this technology. The driving force is that the fuel cell technology will be one of the most promising energy technologies for decentralized power generation in the future.

Wärtsilä is involved in extensive domestic co-operation with Finnish R&D institutions and potential equipment suppliers, and participates in international co-operation in Europe, USA and Japan.

System integration of the various technologies included in fuel cell systems is one of Wärtsilä’s expertise areas.

Special features of SOFC include:

*SOFC technology can operate in the temperature range of 650 - 800 °C, which allows the use of conventional materials in the balance of plant components.

*Since a fuel cell system has very few moving parts their service need will probably be considerably lower and system reliability higher when compared to conventional technologies.

*Planar SOFC products have the potential to reach a competitive cost level in mass production.

Schematic of the Wärtsilä SOFC system based on the use of natural gas. Extensive software has been developed to adapt a SOFC power unit into customer infrastructure.

*Since pure hydrogen is costly and available only in limited quantities, a number of other fuels have been used with SOFCs, such as methanol, natural gas, biogas, gasoline and even diesel oil and ethanol.

*In practice, the most potential fuels are natural gas, various biogases and low-sulphur diesel. In stationary applications natural gas is widely used and the reforming of natural gas is conventional technology.

When low-cost manufacturing of SOFC products is achieved, it will change our way of producing electricity and consuming energy.