An Australian energy company treated like a freaky science project at home has won a German government award for the most innovative company to invest in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia this year.
At its new production facility in Heinsberg, Germany, the company, Ceramic Fuel Cells, was producing “a key technology of the future”, said Petra Wassner, managing director of NRW.INVEST, the state’s economic development agency.
The big news is Ceramic’s BlueGen fuel cell device.
Roughly the size of a dishwasher, the device uses solid oxide fuel cell technology to convert natural gas into electricity and heat.
It generally produces more than enough electricity to power the average household — unless it is summer and you’re constantly running the air-conditioner — and enough heat to produce a tank of hot water daily.
The Victorian-based company was praised for investing 9.5 million euros (AU$14.16 million) in the facility, creating 80 new jobs and contributing “to a more efficient and cleaner energy supply in North Rhine-Westphalia”, Wassner told the award ceremony in Dusseldorf earlier this week.
But Ceramic Fuel hasn’t attracted nearly as much excitement in Australia, forcing the company to go global to survive.
“We are really big news here,” Ceramic chief executive Brendan Dow told AAP from Germany.
“[In Australia] we are treated like a science project.
“It’s really quite frustrating.”
In Germany, utility companies supply the device free of charge to households, who then pay for the natural gas they use.
Dow likens the arrangement to a mobile phone contract, where the consumer receives a free hand set and pays for their calls.
“BlueGen is an enabler of the utilities to be able to bill you for heat and power,” he said.
The household can then make back some money by selling any excess power to the grid.
If widely implemented, the system could save governments cash as well, reducing the need for billions of dollars in infrastructure.
That in turn would mean cheaper electricity for consumers, Dow said.
“About two-thirds of your electricity bill is actually due to transmission and distribution costs…[the] cost to the government of actually putting in poles and wires and enough infrastructure to deliver the power from the central power station.”
The other benefit of generating power from your own home is efficiency.
When electricity is generated in central power stations, the power and heat are lost on the way to your home.
Generating electricity at home, means the power and heat are delivered directly, rather than travelling through wires.
And then there’s the environmental benefit. All this cheap and efficient electricity is being produced with less carbon emissions.
If all of Australia’s electricity was produced via BlueGen, Australia would have the world’s lowest carbon emissions, rather than being the world’s worst emitter per unit of electricity, Dow said.
“The current emissions from the Australian grid is a little under one tonne of CO2 for every megawatt hour that’s produced,” he said.
“Our unit produces about 340kg or about one third of the emissions of the current grid.”
Dow says the other strength of BlueGen is reliability, unlike solar or wind power which are subject to uncontrollable factors.
“BlueGen operates all the time, day and night, regardless of wind or wave or sun conditions,” he said.
“Renewables are useful, but they can’t be the only solution.”
A report released last month by the CSIRO, commissioned by Ceramic Fuel Cells, found BlueGen produces “fewer greenhouse emissions than the use of current grid electricity in Victoria and NSW”.
Unlike solar and wind power, BlueGen runs on natural gas, which isn’t renewable, and that’s why the Federal Government hasn’t snapped it up as an answer to climate change.
The answer, according to John Bell from the Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, is both renewables and fuel cell technology.
“Fuel cells are a terrific source of energy which is much more efficient in terms of electricity production for the amount of carbon dioxide produced,” Professor Bell said.
The technology is great, but there are two main problems, he said.
“It still does produce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions, so it’s not going to get us all the way toward our emissions reduction target, and the second issue is it still uses natural gas.
“There is a finite supply of natural gas and it is much less than coal.
“[Fuel cell technology] doesn’t necessarily address the overall long-term energy supply issue.”
But according to Dow, it’s still early days for BlueGen technology, and in the future it will be run on renewable fuels.
“The technology will run on ethanol, it will run on biodiesel,” he said.
In Australia, utility companies are slowly testing the water when it comes to BlueGen.
Energy Australia has had the device installed in its showcase sustainability home in Newington, Sydney, while the Victorian Government and Origin Energy have installed the devices in showcase homes in Melbourne.
These are baby steps compared to the leaps being made in Europe, which is why Ceramic Fuels is operating in Germany.
“Energy prices here [in Germany] reflect the real cost of generating electricity … and the government is supportive so they’ve put in place a feed-in tariff,” Dow said.
The units are available in Australia but will be expensive to purchase.
Utility companies are also not obliged to purchase excess electricity, although the Victorian Government is looking into including the device in its feed-in tariff scheme.
“I’m frustrated as an Aussie that we don’t have more success in Australia,” Dow said.
“Our smallest utility partner here in Germany is bigger than AGL, bigger than Origin.
“The big guys are spending money.”
