£2.3m funding for Eco-Island hydrogen vehicle infrastructure
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The Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is to provide £2.3m of funding for hydrogen vehicle infrastructure as part of the Isle of Wight’s Eco-Island initiative.
Project leader ITM Power is to get £1.3m in order to supply its core hydrogen technology and work with the other partners to integrate it into the grid and power system.
The Eco-Island project aims to make the entire island carbon neutral and energy independent by 2020 based on a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and waste-to-energy generation.
Speaking to The Engineer in November last year when Eco-Island was unveiled, co-founder David Green said: ‘The big problem is about demand and supply balancing… trying to get to a point where you can take surplus generating capacity and store it, hold it and release it when you need it.’
Part of that solution will be to design, build, install and operate two grid-connected hydrogen refuelling platforms on the Isle of Wight, with 100kg/day and 15kg/day capacities, respectively for the operation of a fleet of hydrogen vehicles.
‘We’ve got a quarter of a megawatt of load that can be turned on and off in one second, which is everything that you need to be able to balance against intermittent renewable power,’ Dr Graham Cooley, ITM chief executive, told The Engineer in light of the most recent announcement.
Island innovation
To begin with there will be four hydrogen internal combustion engine vans bought by Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) (refuelled at 350 bar); four Hyundai hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (refuelled at 700 bar); an undisclosed number of fuel cell vehicles from Riversimple and Microcab of Coventry; and finally a Catamaran with a Honda outboard hydrogen combustion motor.
SSE is also providing the grid connection to the island’s renewables and IBM will develop a user interface to allow smartcard payments to the refuellers. On top of this, Cable & Wireless Worldwide will monitor the refuellers and vehicles with cloud-based data acquisition.
‘It’s a constant streaming of data so we know the state of the refuelling unit and also we know about the state of the vehicles,’ Cooley said.
ITM, which is listed on the AIM stock exchange, also announced that it has raised £5m through firm placing of new ordinary shares, which will allow it to further expand into other markets such as material handling and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Indeed, the company has recently completed a six-week trial at an M&S distribution centre in Bradford, where hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and on-site hydrogen production units were tested as a direct substitute for the existing battery-powered fleet.
‘It’s a turnkey solution for any retailer or logistic company; they can get from us a hydrogen refueller, they can get a forklift truck, all of the fuel cells, everything from ITM,’ said Cooley.
He also revealed some more details about the agreement with Boeing Research & Technology, announced earlier this year, to provide container electrolysis equipment as part of Boeing’s off-grid refuelling station for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
‘So UAVs for the civilians market: this new market that’s emerging for things such as police, ambulance, fire service, remote monitoring of assets — anything where you used to use a helicopter — you can now use an unmanned vehicle and stream back the video,’ Cooley said, adding that ITM also has contracts in place with EADS.
Readers' comments (2)
john | 24 Jul 2012 9:15 pm
‘We’ve got a quarter of a megawatt of load’ …. Sounds a lot until you look at efficiency’s.
(this from EV World) “It has often been said that a fuel cell is a very efficient energy converter, that its efficiency can “approach 83%”. This is actually quite true-in theory. However, when one considers all of the parasitic losses and ancillary subsystems necessary to make a practical fuel cell-powered vehicle, the real world efficiency plummets from 83% to something like 40% or lower-a number that is surprisingly close to the actual efficiency of some Diesels.
But there are a number of other systems that must be included in the overall efficiency analysis of a fuel cell-powered vehicle-the electronic inverter, motor, air compressor (fuel cells needs oxygen that must come from the air) and the energy needed to get the hydrogen fuel stored in the tank of the vehicle.
These subsystems have their own efficiency conversions that calculate out as follows: Inverter 90%, motor 90%, air compressor 80% and hydrogen storage (compressed gas) at about 85%. Multiplying these efficiencies by the earlier values given for the HHV and LHV efficiencies gives us something like 14%-28% and 24-34% respectively.”
Sooooo lets say 250kW for 12hrs = 3000kWh x 0.25 = 750 kWh on the road, we have 8 definite + an undisclosed number of fuel cell vehicles & a boat…say 20 total, that’s 37.5kWh each.
Don’t know how far that will go ??? BUT…..
£2.3m of funding to fuel 8 definite + an undisclosed number of fuel cell vehicles & a boat…say 20 units total, that’s only a mere £115,000 each….or am I missing something!!
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Steve C | 25 Jul 2012 10:30 am
Given that the Isle of Wight is fairly small, you can get an awful lot of Volts, Ampera's and Leaf's for £2.5m ! And as a bonus get real-time load balancing in small increments, with no central fuel plant or high pressure storage requirements.
Looks like a way of funneling TSB money into pockets that could easily afford the outlay as part of a marketing strategy.
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