Wapcar automotive news – Toyota Motor North America (Toyota) is working with the US Department of Energy (NREL) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE) to build, install, and evaluate a fuel cell (MW) production system ) 1-megawatt proton exchange membrane (PEM) at NREL’s Flatirons Campus in Arvada, Colorado.
This 3-year $6.5 million partnership is funded in part by DOE’s Office of Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology in the Office of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency and supports the vision look at the DOE’s H2 in a wide range of economic and diverse applications industries.
The 1 MW fuel cell system integrates multiple Toyota fuel cell modules into a larger system to provide static reactive power. Through a previous collaboration, NREL demonstrated the use of an automotive fuel cell system to deliver carbon-free energy to a data center. The new system is much larger in scale, generates about 15 times more power and is capable of generating both direct current and alternating current.
Toyota has leveraged its more than 25 years of fuel cell development experience to design a 1MW system, expanding the intensive market for light fuel cell electric vehicles. Toyota is supplying the fuel cell modules and working with the system integrator, Telios, to design, balance the system and build the system for delivery to NREL. Toyota has developed an integrated control system to manage the operation of the fuel cell modules in order to maximize the efficiency and life of the system. The system has a simple design to be a direct replacement for conventional generators.
To achieve carbon neutrality, we all need to explore new uses of zero-emission technology, including how this technology will integrate with other systems, which project with NREL will identify, said Christopher Yang, who worked as Group Vice President, in charge of Business Development, Fuel Cell Solutions of Toyota. The application of our modules in deployments of this magnitude demonstrates the scalability of Toyota’s fuel cell technology, whether it is a single fuel cell module for a passenger vehicle. or multiple combined systems to power heavy equipment.
NREL researchers will push the operating boundaries of fuel cell system design to identify performance limitations and degradation over time, generating data valuable in the world real to support future application development. Research and development will also include evaluating the system’s performance when integrated with energy storage and renewable energy generation systems, such as solar and wind.
Mr. Daniel Leighton, P.Eng, NREL Research Fellow and Principal Investigator of the project, said that he and his team will study the scaling up of PEM fuel cell systems for static electricity generation to understand the performance, endurance and system integration challenges. This fuel cell generator system also creates new megawatt-scale fuel cell research capabilities at NREL.
The fuel cell generator is part of the Research Advanced Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) megawatt-scale hydrogen system being designed and operated at NREL’s Flatirons campus. The flexible system – consisting of a 1.25 MW PEM electrolyzer, a 600 kg hydrogen storage system and a 1 MW fuel cell generator – provides a platform to demonstrate direct production of renewable hydrogen, energy storage power generation, power generation and grid integration at the megawatt scale.
The fuel cell generator system will be installed this summer and the complete system will be commissioned later in 2022.
