General Electric announced plans to build a pilot plant near Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to develop and commercialize fuel cells based on advances the company’s Global Research team has made in ways to manufacture them at lower cost.
Fuel cells are made of layered anodes and cathodes and an electrolyte that together generate electric current by a chemical reaction rather than combustion.
GE’s breakthrough in manufacturing came from applying an additive thermal spray process used in manufacturing jet engines. Using that technique to deposit ceramic anodes and cathodes and a dense layer of solid oxide electrolyte in between allows GE to use stainless steel and bypass the use of more expensive materials such as platinum and rare earths that have long been a cost barrier to commercializing what is otherwise a very promising energy-generation technology.
Unlike other systems, the new fuel cell is using stainless steel in place of platinum and rare metals.“The cost challenges associated with the technology have stumped a lot of people for a long time,” says Johanna Wellington, advanced technology leader at GE Global Research and the head of GE’s fuel cell business. “But we made it work, and we made it work economically. It’s a game-changer.”
The new system’s power generation efficiency can reach an unprecedented 65 percent by combining the output of the chemical reaction with a Jenbacher engine burning the cell’s syngas waste. Overall efficiency can grow to 95% when the system is configured to capture waste heat produced by the process as well. The basic configuration of the system can generate between 1 to 10MW of power, GE said.
