A micro-CHP (combined heat and power) unit that runs on hydrogen converted from natural gas and is powered by a fuel cell supplied by heating company Baxi is part of a field test involving 100 such units, mainly in Germany and the UK. It will be installed next to a four-bedroom house on a new development, owned by Berwickshire Housing Association, and will supply most of the heat and electricity needed for its residents over a 12-month trial period.
“The way energy is being delivered to the home is changing radically,” says Ian Stares, Baxi’s business development director. “There is an increasing demand for more environmentally friendly [methods] and microgeneration from units such as the home energy centre represents an excellent way of meeting these demands.”
Government-supported housing may be the best place to test such technologies, he adds, because they “can take a 50-year view of their stock, which gives them an interest in long-term energy savings and efficiency.”
The micro-CHP unit was developed at a Baxi subsidiary, European Fuel Cell of Hamburg, Germany, and generates 1.5kW of electricity and 18kW of thermal output. This covers about 75 per cent of the electricity used by a typical domestic residence and 100 per cent of its heating.
The installation at Eyemouth is the work of a consortium of organisations, keen to investigate future forms of supplying heat and power into homes. It is led by Sigen, an Aberdeen-based company, which develops fuel cells, and also includes Baxi, Scottish Enterprise, the government development body, and Berwickshire Housing Association (BHA).
“As responsible landlords, we try to future-proof our tenants against rising energy costs,” says Alastair Brown, BHA’s director of operations. He describes the Eyemouth house as a “level four” project. The association already has “level three” houses, which use solar power to provide up to 70 per cent of their electricity needs. Soon, it hopes to start work on a “level five” house, which would seek to provide all of its energy needs from a combination of solar power and hydrogen produced by separating water into its constituent parts – hydrogen and oxygen – through electrolysis.
“I believe this will be the house of the future,” Brown says, noting that the US is already investing heavily in “the hydrogen economy”.
He acknowledges that it is still difficult to calculate the cost savings for individual householders, but he hopes the UK will eventually move to a system of “net” metering – as already happens in parts of Germany – where houses only pay for the difference between what they contribute to, and use from, the electricity grid.
Stares says that, if the test trials go well, home energy centres for individual homes would go into production by 2010 to 2012. By 2011, adds Melanie Hay, senior executive in Scottish Enterprise’s energy team, the fuel cell and hydrogen technologies sector is expected to be worth $46bn.